Paperhouse

Paperhouse (1988) is Bernard Rose's dark fantasy, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Eleven-year-old Anna is stuck in bed with a fever. Out of boredom she sketches a lonely house in her school notebook — and the moment she falls asleep, she finds herself standing inside that drawing, where every line she adds reshapes the world.

At the window of the drawn house is a boy named Marc, who cannot walk. Anna wants to help him, so she pencils in a staircase, a road, small comforts — but the drawing doesn't always obey. When she gets angry or scared, the dream curdles into nightmare: a storm rolls in, a dark figure of her father appears, the house seals shut. The boundary between her waking illness and her sleeping world thins, and she realizes her sketches may be touching a real life.

Rose, who later made Candyman, directed this as his feature debut, adapting Catherine Storr's novel Marianne Dreams. Charlotte Burke plays Anna, with Glenne Headly as her mother. It's a rare horror built on a child's logic and dread rather than gore — the fear comes from the simple idea that a drawing can breathe. Stream Paperhouse (1988) online on iFILM.