Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
It will eat your soul.
And there's a creepy doll
That always follows you
It's got a pretty mouth
To swallow you whole
My name is Talky Tina, and I don't think I like you.
There's something scary about dolls. It's probably because many of them fit squarely in Uncanny Valley territory. The blank gaze and unmoving stare reminds us too much viscerally of corpses, perhaps. This goes even more when the doll is damaged in some way, such as missing limbs or eyes, or having holes in its head.
Another way to do it is make it a clockwork toy (usually an organ-grinder's monkey with cymbals); something that moves on it's own WHEN SOMEONE WINDS THE KEY. then not have it wound up for years, and have it move anyway.
In horror, dolls are often used as part of the scenery to help establish the mood. They may even be the antagonist or be used by the antagonist. Despite how ridiculous a doll trying to kill people should be, it's still seen as quite frightening.
Examples
open/close all folders
Anime and Manga
- Boogie-Kun of Karin is a doll possessed by a serial killer.
- Episode 11 and episode 12 of the Kuroshitsuji anime. Full stop.
- Ghost Hunt has Minnie, a possessed doll.
- Near from Death Note constantly plays with Creepy Doll's and uses them to test his various theories. Misa wears an Elegant Gothic Lolita style dress in one instance, For when she was committing suicide after she thought Light died. Overall, the dress combined with her depressed facial expression makes her look like a life-sized porcelain doll, to an eerie effect.
- In one episode of Mokke, a bunch of abandoned Hina dolls are possessing a bridge to try to get attention.
- A creepy doll in traditional Japanese dress appears throughout Paprika. It starts out as a sort of dreamscape "avatar" of one character, but later takes on a life of its own.
- The episode "Shingo's Innocent Love! A Sorrowful French Doll" in Sailor Moon is all about the Creepy Dolls.
- Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure had a Stand called Ebony Devil, which was this.
- As pictured above, there's one in Asuka's Mind Rape sequence.
- The truly horrifying part is when the doll is hanging from the ceiling spinning on the end of a rope along with Asuka's mother.
- After going insane Asuka's mother Kyouko is seen holding the same doll in her arms and talking to it, believing it to be her daughter and refusing to aknowledge the real Asuka as her kid. Now you know where Asuka's hate of the "doll" word and concept comes.
- Suigintou, Barashuishou, and Kirakishou, the antagonist dolls from Rozen Maiden. Interestingly, Suigintou is considered the most attractive Rozen Maiden, at least physically, and Barasuishou is reasonably popular as well. Both have Woobie qualities that endear them to fans, but Kirakishou is another thing entirely.
- In Descendants Of Darkness part of Kazutaka Muraki's general state of madness stemmed from memories of his mother's enormous collection of porcelain dolls. It didn't help that the panels of the manga depicting the dolls copy-pasted four or five of them to horrible heights of creepiness.
- Dolls are a recurring motif in the Count Cain series. One chapter featured a girl in a leg-cast who kidnapped other girls to turn their corpses into dolls.
- Kampfer has a line of stuffed animals that look like they committed Seppuku with their intestines sticking out, and two of their names translate to Suicide Tiger and Suicide Black Rabbit. These are FOR KIDS.
- And the girl who looks the most girly of the characters has an entire room of them. And the main character is expected to sleep in there.
- The first season of Shakugan No Shana had Friagne the Hunter, who, while he wasn't a doll himself, was way, way too attached to his Creepy Doll minion Marianne. The reason he's in town is so he can dissolve the city to give her real life.
- Sorta the point for Hyde and Closer as dolls are used as curses to attack people. Even Hyde, the protagonist's doll, isn't exempt from this, heck it has a chainsaw sword in his zipper!
- YuGiOh GX had a episode where Jaden and his crew face a creepy doll come to life.
Film
- The movie 9 has The Seamstress. She's basically a giant snake with a porcelain doll's head that grafts the dead body of 2 onto her tail and uses it to hypnotize 8 into submission, before sewing him inside her body and dragging 7 away and boasts numerous appendages just designed for chopping up innocent stitchpunk skin.
- Tourist Trap: The mannequins.
- The Zuni Fetish Doll from Trilogy of Terror.
- The razor-toothed killer dolls from the movie Barbarella.
- The Clown Doll from Poltergeist.
- Profondo Rosso: the walking deformed doll.
- The various dolls that the Other Mother makes in Coraline. All of the Other people invoke this themselves, with their creepy button eyes.
- Chucky, from Childs Play.
- There's also Tiff and Glenn from the same series. Though Glenn is somewhat of a subversion and Tiff is... Tiff.
- All of the puppets from the Puppet Master franchise.
- The Doll Master.
- Reincarnation (aka Rinne) features one of the creepiest damn ones you may ever see.
- Toy Story has one in the first film, although it's the face of a doll on top of metal spider legs. It's not exactly evil but it's still Nightmare Fuel. The other toys can also be this way if they choose, as shown when they rebel against Sid.
- The 1987 movie Dolls.
- The 2007 film Dead Silence.
- The opening of the movie Titanic features a group of divers exploring the Titanic wreck. A few shots pan across some of the destroyed trinkets and other such former valuables scattered across the ocean floor. One shot reveals an eerie white face that resembles a child and for a moment you think its a child's detached head, but it turns out to just be a lone face separated from a doll.
- Speaking of dolls and dead children, the abandoned baby doll in Johanna's bassinet from Sweeney Todd. It's decayed with age and probably smoke damage/mildew, and is damn scary. To the point that this troper's reaction was also "oh my gosh, what is that?" and her sister's was "Is that the baby?!" (This scene also serves as an Empathy Doll Shot for Johanna's current plight.)
- Subverted in Pinnochio, a B-slasher film. The kid had a split personality which she projected onto her doll.
- Black Devil Doll is a Blaxploitation slasher flick with a radical black activist being reincarnated as the eponymous doll.
- How about Casey? Newt's doll in Aliens was the hollow plastic head that probably used to belong to a baby doll. The girl comforted it when she was nervous.
- In Poltergeist, there is this clown doll that terrifies the shit out of the boy. Until the boy finally gets the balls to place a blanket on the doll. Later on, he places it under the bed. This should classify as Nightmare Fuel; because of the spirits possessing the house, close to the end of the movie, the clown attacks the boy. Guess who won't be sleeping tonight now. T.T
- Parodied in Scary Movie 2, when the doll attacks Ray... which is the mistake of its life. Ray rapes it.
Literature
- Slappy the dummy in Goosebumps. Granted, he's actually a ventriloquist's dummy but he fits the Creepy Doll factor to a T.
- As mentioned before, the various dolls that the Other Mother makes in Coraline.
- In Richard Matheson's short story Prey, a young woman is terrorized by an African Zuni warrior doll that she brings home as a gift for her boyfriend, and which subsequently comes to life. (The story was memorably adopted as part of the ABC TV movie Trilogy of Terror in the '70s.)
- A Series Of Unfortunate Events: This Troper actually shivered when she read the description of Pretty Penny, a doll that Aunt Josephine gave Violet in The Wide Window.
- Also the movie adaption of the first three books in the series has a creepy bobble head doll called "the littlest elf'' in the rearview window of Count Olaf's car.
- In the Stephen King story The Sun Dog, a character thinks that a toy (not exactly a doll, but a stuffed panda, that talks) that her niece has is very creepy, and imagines that one day, it will say stuff like: "I think tonight after you're asleep, I'll strangle you to death" or "I have a knife".
- As mentioned in the Film section, Coraline has some.
Live Action TV
- The Twilight Zone had Talky Tina, a surprisingly creepy and murderous doll.
- This was parodied in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" with a killer talking Krusty doll. However, unlike Tina, someone had accidentally set it to "evil" instead of "good."
- Also parodied in the Johnny Bravo episode "Little Talky Tabitha".
- Rod Serling must have been a fan of this trope, because Night Gallery had the episode, "The Doll" which had, you guessed it, a creepy doll that was actually part of a revenge curse.
- Episode 12 of The Amanda Show had a skit called "Rock-a-bye-Ralph", in which a girl can't sleep so her parents give her a doll named Ralph. It's eerily similar to the Chucky doll, it talks very cheerily, and it won't shut up even after the girl feeds it to her dog ''it still continues talking in it's overly cheery voice from within the dogs stomach''.
- There were a few of these in Are You Afraid Of The Dark.
- Even better! The episode "The tale of the dark music" had a life-sized walking and talking doll, with a creepy perpetual grin, dressed in a cute blue party dress acting innocent and nice, when it really had evil intentions and wished to lure the male lead in that episode into the dark cellar behind it.
- Sabrina The Teenage Witch had a creepy doll called Molly Dolly chase her around her home on a Halloween episode.
- The X Files episode "Chinga" had a Creepy Doll that drove people to inflict harm on themselves ("Let's have fun!").
- Curb Your Enthusiasm: Susie's daughter Sammy has loads of these decorating her room.
- The incredibly creepy (at least, to a 12-year-old) 1985 BBC series Maelstrom
 featured lots of scary dolls in the darkened attic of an old log cabin.
- Hidden Camera Show Scare Tactics has a collector of Creepy Dolls-one of which being his "mother"-as one of their favorite setups.
Music And Sound Effects
- As you can see at the top of the page, Jonathon Coulton has a song about this very trope. In fact it's the Trope Namer.
- Laura Branigan's song "Self Control" begins and ends with a shot of a rather creepy doll.
- The video to the song "Technologic" by Daft Punk.
- The video to the song "Blue" by The Birthday Massacre.
- There's a few of these in the Pink video Please Don't Leave Me starting at 2:21. Notice all the dolls in the audience and then the close up on them. Brr...
- The video to the song Clown by Korn has both Creepy Doll's and Monster Clown's. Not to mention a lot of insanity.
- The MTV special editions for Issues had one of these.
Close Music And Sound Effects
Tabletop RP Gs
- The Ravenloft setting is home to doll golems, animated toys which cause uncontrollable laughter with their bite, and 'carrionettes', sentient puppets that can swap minds with their victims.
Western Animation
- A few of these appeared in certain Rugrats episodes. Leading the list is Mr.
Friend Fiend.
Video Games
- Alma carries a doll around with her in First Encounter Assault Recon. The effect is not really all that childish.
- Especially since she's covered in blood up to her ankles and typically surrounded by hellfire.
- In The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask, there's a little girl in Ikana Valley who's father lives in the wardrobe in the basement because he's slowly turning into a Gibdo. Later on, if you look inside his wardrobe it's revealed that he had a mummified little doll resting in the corner.
- Calcobrina from Final Fantasy IV.
- Silent Hill seems to LOVE these:
- Silent Hill 2 features the Mannequin, a monster made out of two shiny plasticine womens' lower torsos stacked on top of one another. Possibly symbolizes the main character's objectification of women.
- Silent Hill Origins features Ariel, appearing as a doll that can either break your neck in the air... or run around on its hands to kill you. CREEPY.
- Silent Hill Homecoming, however, cranks it up to Eleven with Scarlet. A giant, elongated mannequinn with porcelain armor that, when blown off, reveals that there's inexplicably flesh and muscle beneath it. Add this to the fact that it came out of a pool of Doc Finch's blood and the One Woman Wail creating Soundtrack Dissonance... it is EASILY the most frightening monster in the entire game at least in This Troper's opinion. Finding out WHAT and WHY Scarlett is doesn't help. Not that you probably hadn't figured it out by now anyway...
- Silent Hill 3 also contains a slightly more traditional Creepy Doll in the form of the dolls Stanley leaves behind for Heather in the hospital. It's interesting to note that the protagonist originally thinks of the doll as another child's, and is disgusted when she finds out it's supposed to be for her. On his last journal entry, the doll is torn to pieces. Creepy...
- And of course, Silent Hill 4 has Walter Sullivan's doll, which if picked up, haunts Henry's room permanently, making it impossible to get the best ending.
- The Robbie the Rabbit Doll pointing at YOU when you look in a certain hole.
- Vagrant Story's Quicksilver and Shrieker enemies.
- Clock Tower: The First Fear has a room full of beat up dolls. One gives you a key. After that, another will attack you.
- Each game in the Shadow Hearts series has a dungeon called the Doll House, which is the home to a demonically possessed doll. In the first game, the spirit possessing the doll is not quite as scary as the doll itself, which sits in the middle of an extremely disturbing room, on a rocking horse, creaking slowly back and forth. In the second game, there's a similar dungeon, meant for a character who has a doll of his own. Not quite as scary as the first, but still quite a bit disturbing, given that there are dolls all over the house watching you... In the third game, there are dolls all over the place, and the Nightmare Fuel comes from what you have to do to them - plucking out their eyes.
- The PC kid's game I Spy: Spooky Mansion has a wardrobe filled with nothing but dusty, antique dolls as a level where you were told a poem (like in the books) to find things. In the game, when you found an object you were told to find, the object would become animated and then the object was checked off the list. In the wardrobe level, nearly every object you were told to find was a doll, and when found would move and talk with high-pitched voices and squeaky joints. Very creepy to a kid playing the game.
- Online MMORPG Gaia has a "joint puppet" feature for the PC. If that doesn't fit this trope, then the livid-patchy "dead doll" option will.
- Subverted in Touhou with the character Medicine, a doll youkai, master of poison. Subverted because the character is not really creepy... being a loli, like all the others.
- There is a mod in Unreal Tournament called Unreal 4 Ever, which has a doll for a weapon. When used, the doll skips around a map making doll-like noises, until an unlucky victim comes too close and detonates the doll, causing a nuclear explosion. Just imagine being chased by a seemingly harmless doll that's really out to kill you.
Real Life
- How about this commercial for PS 3?
- The Doll Face video features a doll face on a jack in the box type contraption that mimics images on the tv screen trying to find the perfect visage for itself. The worst part is the fact that the thing is apparently sentient, and it falls very very deep into the Uncanny Valley once it paints its face with makeup to give it such a healthy glow that it resembles a human face.
- When author H. Rider Haggard was a boy, his nanny used to own a creepy doll called "She-who-must-be-obeyed" which she used to get him to behave. This was at least partly the inspiration for his novel She.
- Google Robert the Doll, and try sleeping ever again. They say, you know, that he knows when someone's talking about him, thinking about him, or typing a TV Tropes entry about him aaarghaaarghaaargh
- Even worse is the fact that the doll's owner's wife (who hated the thing...like everyone else) apparently starting haunting their old house. Robert's old room, to be exact. This Travel Channel clip insinuates that she has no choice in the matter. Oh, also, Robert ages, apparently. His hair's gone white and he's got liver spots now...
- Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer combined this trope with Lolicon for maximum creepiness. His dolls inspired the Silent Hill 2 Mannequins. See a Not-Safe-For-Work-Or-Sanity photograph◊.
- This Troper's mother collects dolls. Thousands of dolls. The "Doll Room" is pure Nightmare Fuel what with all those staring, unblinking eyes ... My brother once remarked that if any burglar was ever caught in there at night he would probably be found the next morning curled up on the floor wetting himself and muttering "the eyes ... the eyes..."
- It's Baby Laughs A lot!
- This Youtube user lampshades this trope to its fullest.
- Some ball-jointed doll owners embrace this to the fullest. Onegreyelephant's doll mods (which can be found on at least one of the Nightmare Fuel pages, probably Toys) are something between art objects and Eldritch Abominations... and still more than a little cute.
- Any doll that has a function (most commonly crying) and being given to someone without being warned about it will cause distress and alarm in the unsuspecting recipient.
- Then there's that ghost story...Dolly one step, dolly two step, Dolly's gonna get you...Don't tell me you weren't scared of that as a kid!
- A lot of people find the Doll Room in House on the Rock to be hard to get through.
Web Original
- Open Blue's Vice-Amiral Swasou owns a lot of creepy dolls. Even creepier is the fact that they appear to literally go places when nobody's looking.
|
|
