The Best Killer Doll Movies

The Horror genre is the best genre, it turns out, and one of the best things about is how many different types of movies fall under the umbrella. There’s ghosts, monsters, vampires, any number of creatures, really, and all these movies have their own rules, but then there’s religious horror, found footage, slasher films, torture porn, evil cult movies, evil child movies and more. The list is long, and Subgenres of the Damned will be a deep dive into one specific branch of the Horror tree.

So, why are dolls scary? They’re the most innocuous of things on the surface, smaller representations of people, or even animals, and they’re intended for children. One of the first connections we make in life might well be to our toys, or even one specific toy. They are, quite literally, made for child’s play. And yet, they’re awful, and everyone knows it. There’s been a century of movies to remind us. So consider this article an investigation into not only the history of the Killer Doll movie, but an interrogation of why. Why do these thing get at us? We could just kick them, so why do they keep creeping us out?

ORIGINS

We’ve always had dolls. Ancient civilizations crafted them out of driftwood (I would imagine), and every anthropologic exhibit you’ve ever seen at a museum has some dolls, reinforcing the idea that these long gone people were, essentially, just like us. They are effigies, tiny representations of people, but absent that spark of life. Blanks, open to whatever we project on them. The irrational fear of dolls is pediophobia (which of course makes someone sexually attracted to dolls a pediophile, and how’s that for a disturbing root word!), but that’s a rare diagnosable affliction. I think rather than finding dolls ‘scary’, most people are more likely to find them ‘creepy’. Which is to say, unsettling in a less definable way. Anyone can beat up a doll, especially a normal, inanimate one. But there remains something uncanny about that lifeless visage, something withholding. It seems to say ‘As far as you know, I’m just a doll.’ Our mind notes that something’s wrong, and instinctively raises its guard, like with the speaking infants of Baby Geniuses, or the plastic-faced Tom Hanks child of Polar Express. That kind of uncanny.

That said, the Killer Doll in Hollywood doesn’t exactly have the most auspicious beginnings. There’s no bedrock representation of the trope from which all others spring. There’s some odd bits and ends in older films, usually a ventriloquist dummy, as in Erich Von Stroheim’s The Great Gabbo (I haven’t seen it) or the Ealing Studios anthology horror film Dead of Night. But for our purposes, I don’t think anything sums it up as succinctly as Living Doll (1959), a fifth season episode of one of best providers of bedrock horror concepts, Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone. It’s not often seen on Best Of lists, but it’s a real corker, still frightening today. The killer doll is Talky Tina, one of those plastic-faced girl dolls for girls, with a voice box and creepy little eyes that wink. She takes an immediate dislike to Telly Savalas, the boorish stepfather who doesn’t approve of dolls and also seems to just generally resent having to put up with any child at all, and as soon as he’s alone with Tina, and the voice box croaks ‘My name’s Talky Tina, and I don’t think I like you!’ the writing is on the wall. It’s Zone doing its thing, and it contains just about every important aspect of the Killer Doll film in a scant twenty five minutes. It’s free on Netflix, well worth it.

But let’s return to the ventriloquist doll. This is probably where it all begins in earnest. One presumes that during the days of vaudeville, everyone noticed that hey, if it weren’t for the stage and audience and the one-liners, these little wood fuckers, with their toothy grins and spinning eyes, would be pretty disturbing! And so you see them early on, popping up occasionally as threatening effigies in the films mentioned above, and on TV. They’re still viewed as children’s entertainment, to be sure. But there’s every reason to believe Howdy Doody scared as many kids as he entertained, because the ventriloquist dummy continued its roll into being sinister, appearing as villains in children’s shows and Batman comics (Arnold Wesker the Ventriloquist and his doll Scarface) all through the 20th century. The apotheosis may well be as the icon for RL Stine’s Goosebumps franchise, Slappy the Dummy, who appears in countless books, TV shows and both the recent films.

(left to right) Fats, Sir Anthony Hopkins

The genius hook of the ventriloquist dummy is that you can really have it both ways. Either the dummy is an evil entity unto itself, as with Slappy, who can commit all sorts of gruesome acts and then effectively play possum, or it’s an extension of the ventriloquist’s own psychosis, a second, invariably evil, personality. Both are valid horror premises, and you can play with the ambiguity for as long as you like. Probably the best attempt to really explore this would be Richard Attenborough’s Magic (1978), starring Anthony Hopkins as a disturbed puppeteer (and his alter ego Fats the dummy). It’s a bit of a Psycho rip off, to be sure, and whatever notoriety it possesses in 2020 is most likely due to a lack of definitive films on the subject of killer ventriloquist dummies (the majority of killer dummies tend to appear on TV - there’s even another Twilight Zone on this specific subject). But it fills the void, and once you get through the rocky opening, which posits Hopkins and his dummy doing desperate card tricks in a stand-up setting would be a surefire national sensation, Magic calms down and offers some terrifically creepy sequences, all of which feature the unsettling visage of Fats, completely blank yet full of menace, watching passively from the shadows. Magic never wants you to really consider a supernatural explanation for what’s going on - it’s all Hopkins, for sure - but when it comes to implied malice in a blank doll’s face, you get all you could want. Hopkins apparently found the doll so creepy that he called the producer in the middle of the night, demanding the thing be removed from his home while he slept. It’s a real movie besides, with a solid supporting cast, and offers a number of ponderous questions along the way (Ann-Margaret, you went topless for this film?) Also of note, here’s a mind-destroying clip of Gary Oldman cosplaying Fats the Dummy.

But Killer Dolls were right on the cusp of hitting the big time.

THE BIG TIME

The 80s, age of He-Man and materialism, were fertile ground for killer toys of all kinds. The first big one, roaring out of the gate, is Poltergeist in 1982, featuring this clown son of a bitch. Only one of several manifestations of the Evil tormenting the Freeling household, this clown toy’s probably the best, and the most prodigious haunter of child’s nightmares. Excellent design helps, of course, as well as a tremendous bit of direction spread over two scenes. Not to rehash the whole director thing, but this bit in particular feels like a incredibly apt combination of the styles of both director Tobe Hooper and producer Steven Spielberg, combining the former’s stark terror with the latter’s achingly honest depiction of suburban childhood. This clown went on to headline the entire advertising campaign for the ill-advised remake, although the new design simply didn’t pack the punch.

But enough beating around the bush, let’s talk Child’s Play.

Released in 1988, it introduced the world to franchise icon Chucky, who remains the most famous killer doll in cinema, give or take Annabelle and a recency bias. Chucky was the brainchild of Don Mancini, who has been involved with every iteration of this franchise up until the 2019 remake, and shepherded to the screen by Poltergeist producer Don Kirschner and director Todd Holland. Mancini has cited Talky Tina as his main inspiration for the film, but his original pitch was something very different than what we ended up with. Rather than the serial killer with voodoo magic high concept, it was supposed to be playing much more in Magic’s field, with the doll becoming a sentient avatar of its child owner’s seething id, targeting anyone who crossed him, from the schoolyard bully to the dentist to, ultimately, the boy’s mother. Over the course of preproduction, it morphed wildly into what we know today.

And that would be Chucky, the foul-mouthed little moppet voiced by great character actor Brad Dourif, a riff on the then-popular Cabbage Patch Kids dolls, possessed by the soul of serial murderer and voodoo practitioner Charles Lee Ray. Clearly inspired by the wave of 80s horror icons (especially the wisecrack-heavy latter day Freddy Krueger), Chucky ended up joining their ranks with a quickness, and within three years there were two sequels. And even with the obvious debt it owes to Freddy, Jason and the like, Chucky ends up feeling the most like a real character of the bunch, due in large part to Dourif’s enthusiastic foulness and a characterization that allows the little psycho moments of untidy human emotion (mostly rage, but still). And it must be said, the audio-animatronic effects that bring Chucky to life, while quaint now, were ground-breaking at the time. Animate killer dolls was something of a new wrinkle in the 80s, and Chucky gave us one for the ages.

Speaking of animate killer dolls, there’s one more cited inspiration for Child’s Play that deserves special mention. That would be the Zuni fetish doll from the 1975 TV movie Trilogy of Terror, a three part anthology of scary stories, all starring scream queen Karen Black. The first two are forgettable, but the third one is excellent, a contained twenty minute sequence where this incredibly designed doll chases Black around her apartment, and like Chucky after him, the effect bringing the doll to life are still impressive as hell. The combination of design and filmmaking has made Trilogy of Terror, which would never have survived otherwise, into a low-key genre classic, and a key inspiration for stories of this type. The original doll used in the film just set a record at auction, going for over 200,000 US dollars this last December. Not all of that recognition, it must be noted, is positive though. Just looking at thing, and your immediate thought in 2020 is ‘that’s scary, and also pretty racist?’ Indeed, the intersection of Race and Horror is fascinating, worthy of its own article, but for our purposes, the Zuni fetish doll is emblematic of a tendency to portray mythic and/or aboriginal religions as black magic, with a closer association to evil forces (see also Child’s Play’s voodoo). And, you know, how it looks like a racist caricature. This has ended up being another way Trilogy of Terror has become an inspiration, leading to sequences in both Tales From the Hood films that clap back, featuring tiny little dolls depicting blackness taking revenge for systemic and/or specific racism. The first film’s the one you want, in that regard. Those in turn lead to Full Moon Feature’s staggering Ooga Booga, the trailer for which must be seen to be believed.

Which brings us to Full Moon Features, or more accurately, to Charles Band. Band is one of the foremost producer of horror shlock in America, operating through several production banners, the most prominent of which is Full Moon. Band was reportedly in the mix to produce Child’s Play, back in the day, and while that deal did not go through, he clearly loved the whole killer dolls idea, because he made a bunch of his own anyway, and in fact bracketed Child’s Play with two films on the subject, Dolls (1987) and Puppet Master (1989). Dolls is actually great, a deep dive into the contrasting tones of dark whimsy, from the director of Re-Animator and a great many other horror classics, Stuart Gordon. It’s got a mysterious toymaker, a shadowy old mansion full of homemade dolls, and a handful of obnoxious jerks that we can’t wait to see get theirs. It feels like an R-rated Roald Dahl film, and deserves to be seen.

Puppet Master is ostensibly similar in terms of plot, character and design, but for whatever reason, it became a juggernaut franchise for Full Moon Features (the original was their first produced film), and has as of now spawned fourteen entries. Swerving back and forth in time and changing continuity whenever they please, the films are mammoth hits, in the world of direct-to-video horror, and feature a motley roster of fan favorite killer dolls, such as Blade, Leech Woman, and Pinhead. They’re all pretty damn out there too, with way more stories involving Nazis than you’d ever imagine. Sometimes the puppets fight the Nazis, sometimes they are the Nazis. It’s all very confusing, though any given entry is probably enough to fuck up a kid who sees it at the wrong age. And this is hardly Full Moon’s only entry in the subgenre either. They’ve also got the Demonic Toys and Dollman franchises going on, although Dollman doesn’t really count, as he’s just a doll-sized alien man. But he fights the Demonic Toys and/or Puppet Master critters often enough that it doesn’t matter.

Before moving on, I did want to make special mention of films that are tangentially related to the Killer Doll movies. That would be films featuring Killer Toys, Killer Automatons, or especially Killer Mannequins. They’re aren’t quite enough to make up their own subgenre, I suppose, especially because they traffic in the exact same qualities of the Killer Doll films, that uncanny lifelessness in something intended to evoke life. Hell, even the beloved Toy Story franchise invites troubling existential questions about God, consciousness and eternity, and if you’re committed to it, you can certainly ruin them for yourself by poking at the subtext with a stick. The Killer Mannequin wrinkle is particularly unsettling, because there’s often a sexual component to it. A mannequin is like a doll, but adult and nude, which makes it ideal for exploring stunted sexuality, possible the ration d’être for the entire Slasher genre. Films of this specific breed, like Maniac, Tourist Trap (Charles Band again) or even The Stepford Wives generally bridge several subgenres, so there’s always room to revisit them, but I would like to draw special attention to Pin, a completely nuts psychological thriller wherein the titular Pin is a life-size medical doll with see-through plastic skin. A small boy gets his sexual development wires crossed with this thing, and it becomes a skin-crawly Freudian incest nightmare. Also, Better Call Saul’s Jonathan Banks plays Pin’s voice. It’s an absolutely unreal film.

THE MODERN AGE

So, the genre exploded in the 80s, and the sequels to the big successes continued throughout the 90s. Scary dolls became an inherent aspect of Horror, so much so that you’ll see them liberally sprinkled throughout movies ostensibly focused on other genre tropes (the expansive room of creepy dolls in the Hammer Woman in Black film comes to mind, a major set-piece in a gothic ghost tale). But the subgenre was about to find its next superstar. And the man behind that superstar, the puppeteer, you might say, is without question James Wan. Something of a Horror movie wunderkind, he’s responsible for most of the biggest successes in Horror for the las twenty years, and also made a few gigantic hits that people love, Furious 7 and Aquaman. But first, he made the original Saw. Mostly regarded now as the vanguard of the Torture Porn movement, you may recall that even though these movies are about a serial killer, they’ve got a goddamn scary doll front and center, Billy the Puppet. He doesn’t even do anything, he just rides out on a little bike to deliver messages, stuff like that. But there he is, adorning your various Saw posters, even more of an icon than PigMask in a cloak. Wan then took that puppet energy into Dead Silence, a very committed Killer Doll film, going back to the creepy roots of the subgenre and focusing on the inherent dread summoned by ventriloquism, especially in the modern world, 100 years removed from vaudeville’s heyday. Dead Silence is still underseen, and represents an explicit bridge between Billy and the doll that Wan would soon foist upon the world. But first he made the two Insidious films, which certainly aren’t above scaring you with toys, either.

But the huge one is, of course, The Conjuring. Opening with a bang, the first thing that happens in the film is we hear the story of Annabelle, the possessed doll that would become an icon. This opening is immediately effective, in no small part due to an absolute bang up design job on the creative team’s part - Annabelle looks so immediately fucking evil that it seems impossible it’s anything but Satan himself, much more effective cinema than the Raggedy Ann doll that inspired it - but Wan’s the real architect behind it’s greatness. That opening is so good is spawns two separate franchises, or its own Conjure-verse, however you want to look at it. Annabelle is on all the posters, and becomes the face of the dominant Horror franchise for years to come, so it’s easy to forget sometimes that The Conjuring isn’t about her at all, but rather a haunted house/witch’s ghost/Catholic thing. No matter, as she would go on to star in three films of her own, two of which are actually quite good. What’s most notable about Annabelle is that unlike Chucky and his immediate imitators, she takes killer dolls back to their roots, not unlike Billy and Dead Silence before her, and returns to that blank affect, taking on whatever you project on to it. In lesser hands, this creates a flat film, as shown in the first solo attempt, but they get it figured out by parts 2 and 3, both of which are as effective at creeping you out with dolls as you could want. They light the box office on fire, is the main point, so killer dolls are back.

So much, in fact, that they brought Chucky back as a result. Not only did the main continuity of Child’s Play get a shot in the arm, enough for Don Mancini to get two more films cranked out (the first of which, Curse of Chucky, is crazily enough a high water mark for the series), but also we got to see them give a full reboot a shot, with last year’s Mark Hamill-led attempt. This likely joins the pile with recent remakes of Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street, one offs that didn’t quite ignite the zeitgeist as hoped, and change from a voodoo serial killer to a needy Artificial Intelligence doesn’t really improve anything, but it’s out there! You can watch it! There’s even a Chucky TV show on the way, and God knows how that works, but it’s Don Mancini, using the original continuity. Also worth a mention is The Boy, which does some very fun stuff with the old psycho puppeteer/living puppet dichotomy, until the sequel undermines it.

There’s tons, more than I can really mention in one long article. There’s the dolls with human intestines in Amicus’s Asylum, or any number of scary teddy bears, such as in The Pit. Joe Dante of Gremlins has made two killer doll films for children, the goofy Small Soldiers and the less goofy The Hole. Stephen King’s taken a stab at it a few times, as in short stories Chattery Teeth and Battleground, or a tremendously weird sequence in the cocaine nightmare The Tommyknockers. So, just like Telly Savalas in Living Doll, we can try to throw them out in the trash, but they are here to stay. So we better not piss them off!