Dolls & Horror: Rivals of Terror, #8

By Steve Hutchison

Bisques, fetish dolls, plush, ventriloquist dummies, voodoo dolls, worry dolls; dolls come in various shapes and forms. They are a major archetype of horror movies. In this book, film critic Steve Hutchison reviews and ranks 50 of the best horror movies featuring dolls ever released. How many have you seen?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Hutchison
• Release date: Jun 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393182627

Steve Hutchison

Artist, developer and entrepreneur in film, video games and communications Steve Hutchison co-founded Shade.ca Art and Code in 1999, then Terror.ca and its French equivalent Terreur.ca in 2000. With his background as an artist and integrator, Steve worked on such games as Capcom's Street Fighter, PopCap's Bejeweled, Tetris, Bandai/Namco's Pac-Man and Mattel's Skip-Bo & Phase 10 as a localization manager, 2-D artist and usability expert. Having acquired skills in gamification, he invented a unique horror movie review system that is filterable, searchable and sortable by moods, genres, subgenres and antagonists. Horror movie fans love it, and so do horror authors and filmmakers, as it is a great source of inspiration. In March 2013, Steve launched Tales of Terror, with the same goals in mind but with a much finer technology and a complex engine, something that wasn’t possible initially. He has since published countless horror-themed books.

Book preview

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Tales of Terror’s

Rivals of Terror 2019

Dolls & Horror

INTRODUCTION

Bisques, fetish dolls, plush, ventriloquist dummies, voodoo dolls, worry dolls; dolls come in various shapes and forms. They are a major archetype of horror movies. In this book, film critic Steve Hutchison reviews and ranks 50 of the best horror movies featuring dolls ever released. How many have you seen?

Child’s Play

1988

A doll possessed by the ghost of a serial killer pursues a young boy in order to trade souls with him.

Child’s Play isn’t the first instance in which a killer doll terrorizes its owner, but the subject was mostly approached in anthology shorts and with limited animatronics, or in movies that underused the gimmick. This isn’t the case here. While it takes a while for Chucky, the possessed doll, to get its reveal, our imagination fills in the blank as the story unfolds.

There is something creepy about an inanimate object coming to life, especially when it’s after the soul of a young kid. The doll’s design is terrifying and skillfully rendered. The slow pace allows for great suspense and clever jump scares you’ll never forget. There had been Gremlins before, then Critters, but nothing quite like Child’s Play in the miniature department.

Both the writing and the directing come together nicely and give us a virtually perfect product. The actors all give a good, unique performance. Chucky joins Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees in the ranks of famous contemporary horror villains. He’s a strange but highly marketable product of voodoo magic and pop culture. He comes with a set of batteries and a foul-mouth...

8/8

Child’s Play 2

1990

An adopted boy once the victim of a possessed doll suspects it found its way to his new foster home.

Chucky’s no longer an enigma. We’ve seen him walk, talk and stalk already and this means we now get more explicit exposure, fewer chills, but more amusing murders and one-liners. The doll is scary enough on its own but it can no longer rely on our apprehension and imagination. Fortunately, the script avoids most pitfalls of horror sequels.

Two of our three main protagonists from the original are not returning and the story centers on Andy, the kid, instead. Considering he is who Chucky’s after, this isn’t much of an issue. Child’s Play 2 goes all out when it comes to special effects and uses no shortcut to impress us. Most of them are rendered through puppet work and animatronics, with the occasional midget thrown in the mix.

This holds up to the original in terms of writing, directing and acting but it has more ambition. It is arguably a perfect sequel. It brings back most of the elements that worked the first time but the script has fun with them and pushes the concept to the extreme. This is a more prestigious movie than its predecessor was, with a grand finale you will not easily forget.

8/8

Poltergeist