Paperhouse (1988)

I really liked this movie. I chose to watch it after asking ChatGPT to list movies with a similar vibe to Boys in the Trees (2016) and then I used a random number to select - first I rejected The Hunger after 10 minutes (too creepy/surrealist for this moment), then on second flip I landed on Paperhouse.

Drawings from reality affecting dreams. I love it. Then dream stuff turning out to reflect actual reality. Exactly the spooky vibe I was looking for and reminds me of Boys in the Trees (not that I was looking for something exactly like it (more just wanted similar spooky cozy vibes), but it did align well).

Need to think a bit about what the takeaway/message/point of this movie is / what it's about. It's not exactly clear cut.
...
Some ideas flooding my mind.

• Self awareness. The things you say and do affect other people, not just yourself. At the start of the movie, Anna does some things that hurt people -- makes the girl in class fall, lies to her mother about her fainting, says hurtful things to her mother, and (later on) is rude and dismissive to her father. Then throughout the movie, she sees her drawings become real in her dreams. They are her creations, what she is putting out into the world. They mean something. She creates good things, things to make Mark's dream-life better. She gets frustrated and scratches up the drawing, and it has consequences in the dream, and she sees that she has brought potential harm to her new friend Mark (as well as making the dream scarier or higher stakes for herself). Even from the very beginning where she drew Mark and her father's faces as, respectively, sad and "insane-looking" -- her pencil is un-erasable. She cannot take back what she's put into the world. She has to face up to it, and deal with the consequences. But also it's a lesson to be more careful, more intentional, in the future. I believe that through her drawing and dream experiences, she has learned these lessons, and they reflect into her real life. She apologizes to her father for the way she was acting. She shows love and affection to her mother. In the final scene, she is more loving and appreciative of her family than ever, and she also seems more confident in herself and her actions (though, she still is a bit impulsive in the end).

It's kind of tantalizing to me that Anna never met Mark in the real world. I was hoping it would happen but it didn't. But we at least did have evidence that Mark really was the doctor's other patient, because Anna knew things about him that the nurse confirmed were true. It would have been interesting to see what would happen if Anna met Mark. Maybe he wouldn't have know her. Or maybe he would have. Or maybe he was in a coma or something and that's why the dream was the only 'real' world to him.