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Possessed, haunted, or otherwise brought to some sick parody of life, evil dolls are some of the creepiest enemies in horror cinema. Their small stature lets them skitter around in closets, cupboards, and beneath the bed, making them just as difficult to find as they are to stop. Whether the doll is controlled by a person, a supernatural force, or is acting on its own volition, here are some of the scariest dolls in horror films.
Updated on July 29, 2022 by Patrick Armstrong: The dead-eyed stare of dolls will always be creepy, mimicking a life they don’t possess. Whether dolls, ventriloquist dummies, or puppets, these unnerving figures will probably continue to have horror movies made about them for as long as the film industry exists. With more of these hand-crafted creeps added to film every day, it becomes harder and harder to choose the very best. There’s no question, however, that these dolls rank amongst the most sinister ever imagined.
12 Fats (Magic)
Horror fans will always remember Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal the Cannibal, but Magic saw him starring as a very different kind of monster. In this film, he plays a struggling magician who reignites his career when he begins working alongside a ventriloquist dummy, Fats.
In most horror films featuring ventriloquist dummies, the dolls are possessed or otherwise animated. In Magic, Fats is the magician’s split personality, the ultimate embodiment of his disintegrating psyche. With a creepy premise and Hopkin’s incredible talent behind it,Magic makes Fats a doll that many viewers will wish they could forget.
11 Hugo (Dead of Night)
Another ventriloquist dummy, but this one dating from a much earlier project, Hugo appeared in the 1940s British horror anthology Dead of Night. The film includes a number of standout performers, including Mervyn Johns, Sally Ann Howes, and Googie Withers, but it’s best remembered for its final story featuring Michael Redgrave and Hugo.
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Redgrave’s character and Hugo share a prison cell, and the horror of the events that take place within is only magnified by the black and white film and the scratchiness of the audio. Though there are many fine examples of terrifying dolls in modern horror, in a few brief but chilling moments Hugo and Dead of Night set the standard for some much that was to come.
10 Brahms (The Boy)
What’s the creepiest way a character can interact with a doll in a horror movie? The answer is taking care of it as if it were a real person, at least according to The Boy. In it, an elderly couple who had lost their son at an early age decide to raise a life-size doll in his place, going so far as to hire a nanny (played by The Walking Dead’s exceptional Lauren Cohan) to care for him.
Anyone who thinks things improve from there has never seen a horror movie. Though The Boy isn’t an extraordinary film, Brahms is an extraordinary doll and more than delivers the requisite creep factor. Many horror movie dolls are creepy because of how real they look. Brahms is one of the few dolls to be creepy because of how real he is treated.
9 Pin (Pin)
The doll in 1988 Canadian film Pin is unique in the creepiest way possible. He isn’t a puppet, ventriloquist dummy, porcelain collectible, or any other common variety of horror movie doll. No, Pin is an anatomically correct medical dummy used by the disturbed Dr. Linden to teach children biology.
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Pin is a cult classic, receiving only a fraction of the attention that it deserves even amongst horror aficionados. The film features strong pacing, interesting characters, and a quality premise, and it should be a fixture in every horror fan’s collection based on the strength of its horrifying medical doll alone. Pin is all the right kinds of wrong.
8 Billy (Dead Silence)
James Wan is no stranger to horror, with films like Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring under his belt. Dead Silence may not have received the same attention as those more popular franchises, but it still contains a terrifying doll the equal of any of them. Billy is a ventriloquist dummy, which in the eyes of many would make him nightmare fuel even if he weren’t talking.
Of course, Dead Silence is a horror movie, so alive he is, and Billy wants to use every available moment of his wakefulness to terrorize those around him. Anyone with doubts needs only look to Mary Shaw’s performance, and Billy’s escalating anger when his realness is questioned, only making the setting that much worse.
7 Billy (Saw)
Another ventriloquist dummy, this one also called Billy, in another film guided by the directorial hand of James Wan, can be found in Saw. This doll is an actual puppet, a dead, mechanical thing only given as much life as its owner wishes. Unfortunately, Billy’s owner is John Kramer, the serial killer better known as Jigsaw.
As the face of Jigsaw’s horrible games, Billy is synonymous with torture and impossible choices. His tricycle, suit, and the red spiral on his cheeks have all become images burned into the mind of every Saw fan, and even the minds of many who have never seen the film.
6 Doll (Deep Red)
Legendary horror director Dario Argento always brings something special to his films, and that something often comes from the imagery. Argento’s films demonstrate a mastery of the image, the beautiful as well as the unsettling, and so when the time came for him to craft a doll to feature in his film Deep Red, success was a certainty.
Prominent teeth, a receding hairline, and intelligent eyes are some of the doll’s signature features, but everything about it is unnerving. The cueing of the music and the violent shifting of the camera when the doll storms the study adds another layer of anxiety to a moment the doll has already made horrible.
5 Clown (Poltergeist)
Clowns are scary. Dolls are scary. Clown dolls are almost unfairly upsetting, and Poltergeist has a great one. Tobe Hooper, the same director who brought audiences The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, gave viewers another reason to hide under the blankets with this supernatural horror film.
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The bed jump scare sequence remains one of the most jarring and upsetting horror moments in any movie, and that’s all thanks to the clown doll. The clown is menacing in a dozen different ways before it even moves, the kind of doll that gives one a bad feeling just looking at it. The moment it is possessed by the supernatural force, things get far, far worse.
4 Blade (Puppet Master)
To have even one memorable doll in a horror film is blessing enough. It’s difficult to craft that any inanimate object to that level of frightful glory. Puppet Master is a franchise blessed with numerous horrifying dolls. Andre Toulon’s puppets include Pinhead, Jester, Six-Shooter, Torch, Leech Woman, Tunneler, and Doctor Death, but most frightful of all is their de facto leader, Blade.
Imbued with the soul of the German surgeon Dr. Hess, Blade has a pale face, dark trench coat, and weapons for hands, ensuring that he’ll intimidate anyone with whom he comes into contact. A single animated doll is scary, but an army of them is far worse, and it’s Blade’s leadership that makes him one of the scariest of all time.
3 Annabelle (The Conjuring)
The Conjuring franchise is one of the longest-running and most successful in all horror, and above all else there is one doll to thank for that: Annabelle. From the severe eyebrows to the rash-red cheeks and glaring eyes, Annabelle is terrifying on a visual level, and that’s before she comes alive.
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The doll and her actions would be scary enough in themselves, but Annabelle benefits from being a member of the expansive universe of The Conjuring. There are multiple, interconnected movies dealing with Annabelle, thus deepening her frightful lore at every turn. Whereas some evil dolls are superficial, with Annabelle there is always something else horrible to learn.
2 He Who Kills (Trilogy Of Terror)
Trilogy of Terror is a 1975 horror anthology film directed by Dan Curtis. The third segment of the anthology, “Amelia,” features a woman terrorized by a Zuni fetish doll. “Amelia” contains only a single actor, Karen Black as Amelia, but her performance as she tries to escape the wrathful doll is more than enough to sell the piece.
The doll contains the spirit of a Zuni hunter named He Who Kills, and when the gold chain holding the doll is check slips off,Amelia’s apartment becomes a nightmare. From his exaggerated design to his movements through the apartment, He Who Kills is an absolutely terrifying antagonist,
1 Chucky (Child’s Play)
Charles Lee Ray was a human serial killer before, in his dying moments, he transferred his soul into the body of a Good Guy doll. With that decision, Chucky was born. His appearance is frightening, yes, but more frightening than that is the idea that Chucky embodies in Child’s Play.
He is the perversion of goodness: literally turning a Good Guy into a murderous monster, just as he transformed into a serial killer in his human life. Chucky’s personality, mean spirit, and quips will always keep him close to fans’ hearts, even if they never want the character close to anything else in their lives. Despite his height, Chucky stands head-and-shoulders above every other scary doll.
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