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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 its own when someone winds the key, then not have it wound up for years, and have it click its cymbals in a haunted, mechanical rendition of Terrible Ticking.
In horror, dolls are often used as part of the scenery to help establish the mood, even providing a theme for The Doll Episode. 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. A similar idea lies behind the Demonic Dummy and Scary Scarecrows.
The creepiness of dolls stems from the Uncanny Valley.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
Comic Books
- One of V's targets in V for Vendetta has a huge doll collection. When V abducts the man, the punishment he devises for the ex-concentration camp official is to populate a mock concentration camp with the dolls, and send them all to the ovens. It successfully breaks the man's mind, and the effect on the reader of all those dolls burning is none too pleasant either...
- "Scarface," the leering, knife-scored dummy that is an alter ego/tormentor of Batman villain The Ventriloquist. He's particularly horrifying in scenes where he isn't being operated and his mouth's not moving, but the psychotic Ventriloquist still imagines that the puppet is talking to him! An especially effective scene occurred in the animated "origin" episode "Read My Lips," where Batman - who is of course one of the smartest and most rational men on the planet - had to convince himself that the doll wasn't really alive.
- It is revealed in her ongoing series that Zatanna has a deep-seated and crippling phobia towards puppets. Not voodoo dolls or wax effigies, those she can handle with no problem and occasionally uses herself, but normal, garden variety puppets. It all stems from an unpleasant experience in her childhood, but even now, as a grown woman and powerful superhero, her unease is nearly paralyzing. When she tried to guest-star on an episode of Sesame Street, reasoning that helping educate and entertain children was worth any sort of personal discomfort, she did not even make it through her scene before she vomited into an on-set trash can. She is currently in therapy to help her deal with this issue.
- In an issue of the revamped CREEPY comics there was a story called The Doll Lady. Needless to say, it was creepy.
Fanfiction
- In Aeon Natum Engel, the cultist suffers a nightmare, where she hears a sobbing of a little girl. When she reaches the source, she finds five dolls, a large one and four smaller ones, laying broken before the large one. And then the larger doll starts screaming while sinking into the void. It Makes Sense in Context. Too much sense.
Film
- In Disney's The Princess and the Frog as Dr. Facilier is being dragged away by his "friends" some of them take the form of voodoo and rag dolls.
- The movie 9 has The Seamstress. It's basically a giant snake with a porcelain doll's head that grafts the corpse 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 slashing up the skins of the stitchpunks; thus rendering them immobilized. UGH.
- 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 Child's 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 Accidental Nightmare Fuel. The other toys can also be this way if they choose, as shown when they rebel against Sid.
- The 1987 movie Dolls.
- Parodied in that fake French commercial under the brand of "Dolls Klaus Barbie." In that time, Klaus Barbie was a former Nazi judged for crimes against humanity.
- The 2007 film Dead Silence.
- The opening of 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 it's a child's detached head, but it turns out to just be a lone face separated from a doll.
- Based on a Real Life story. Bob Ballard on his first visit to the wreak by manned submersible encountered a disembodied doll's head just like the one in the Cameron film. The sub's crew of three hardened explorers freaked the hell out at this discovery.
- The abandoned baby doll in Johanna's bassinet from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. It's decayed with age and probably smoke damage/mildew, and is damn scary. (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.
- The... odd-looking... figurine from the horror movie parody Doom House. It haunts the protagonist by appearing wherever he goes.
- The film version of Red Dragon has this, with the dolls of the murdered children. The Uncanny Valley effect of their eyes actually helps The Profiler figure out part of the Serial Killer's fantasy.
- That harlequin doll that Jigsaw uses as his mouthpiece in the Saw movies.
- In Shallow Grave there is a perfectly normal laughing doll. It still manages to get a hellishly creepy scene.
- Freddy Krueger often decorates his victims' dreams with mutilated dollies, and is occasionally seen holding one by its legs or hair. A symbolic nod to his past killings of young children, which we never actually see on-screen.
- Subverted in Summer School, where the male lead is seen slicing the head off a Raggedy Andy doll. This could've been creepy, had he not immediately offered the cloth head to his dog, whose favorite doll-head chew toy has been misplaced.
- The titular carnival attraction in The Funhouse is filled with them.
- 'Maniac'''s Frank Zito keeps various mannequins in his apartment as odd trophies that wear the clothes and scalps of his female victims. In the ending, he has a hallucination where they come to life and rip him into pieces.
- In the film Amusement there is a scene where a babysitter goes to bed in a room filled with creepy clown dolls. She is so disturbed that she complains on the phone to the parents of the kids she's watching, especially about one freaky life-sized clown doll sitting in a chair. The parents reply that there is no "big" doll. It turns out it's a killer in disguise, which the kids have for some reason let into the house because he said he wanted to play.
- In the miniseries for The Tommyknockers, police officer Ruth has an entire collection of creepy dolls in her office. After she finds out what's going on with the town, the aliens make the dolls come "alive" and attack her, to prevent her from phoning for help. The scarecrow doll is especially scary.
- The ventriloquist's dummy in the 1978 film, Magic.
- The movie Dead Silence is a good example of how creepy a doll can really be even when NOT possessed by evil spirits hell-bent on ripping out your tongue and making you into part of its collection.
- In the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, Tiny Tim is first seen gazing into a shop window with (authentic Victorian) mechanical toys - including a laughing-man doll that's pure nightmare fuel.
Literature
- 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: 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".
- He also wrote The Monkey, about a doll-like toy whose clanging on its cymbals signals someone's death. Even if you throw it away.
- The Ragwitch takes this trope and absolutely runs with it. The titular Creepy Ragdoll is basically an Evil Overlord that takes over the body of the protagonist's sister, turning her into a half-human, half-cloth thing and forcing her to watch helplessly from inside as the Ragwitch resumes Her interrupted reign of terror. Garth Nix: for all your High Octane Nightmare Fuel needs.
- In Elizabeth A. Lynn's The Silver Horse, a world of animate toys includes broken dolls who are very, very bitter about the wrongs committed upon them by careless children.
- The action figure in the short story "Good Friends and Good Family" (scroll down) by Desmond Warzel isn't particularly creepy at first, but it gets worse.
- J.R. Lowell's Daughter Of Darkness is about Willie, a super-intelligent little rich girl who collects dolls — not the cute kind, either — from all over the world. The maid refuses to clean Willie's room because she feels like the dolls are "watching" her. She's right.
- There's a short story (the title of which escapes this troper at the moment) about a girl who goes to stay with her aunt for a vacation. While there, she finds her aunt's old china doll, which is described as being very beautiful, except for its orange-ish, creepy eyes. When she keeps the doll in her room at night, she sees the eyes are glowing and freaks out. The doll becomes less creepy when we find out later why the eyes look the way they did - one of the doll's previous owners died in a fire and the doll, sitting on a mantleplace, had to watch. The orange coloring was the firey scene, replaying in her eyes. After the girl comforts the doll, the eyes turn to a normal grey color.
- Terry Berger's The Haunted Dollhouse may have the dollhouse's owner turning into one of these.
- The young woman in Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss has a good reason for making her masks and figurines, but the old caretaker thinks he's on to her. "There's dolls you play with, and dolls you pray with..."
- In an 87th Precinct novel by Ed Mc Bain, a doll has a recording of an actual murder in it.
Live Action TV
Music
Tabletop Games
- Mortasheen has na entire sub-category of monsters based on this, some examples being a ragdoll stuffed with mind-control parasites and teddy bear that manipulates emotion
- 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.
- Then there's this little gem, from Exalted:
The Scripture of the Maiden on the Shelf:
...who sat on a child's shelf and watched the entire world.
For years and years, she did not move.
"Survival is control," she said.
- Magic: The Gathering has the Stuffy Doll, which is apparently a living voodoo doll. Which is completely indestructible. It's a reference to the doll's appearance in (and survival from) previous cards, starting with Black Vise and The Rack.
- Galateids often fit this trope.
- Betrayal at House on the Hill has an event called "Creepy Puppet".
- The description: "You see one of those dolls that gives you the willies. It jumps at you with a tiny spear."
- Pathfinder has Soulbound Dolls, crafted from a fragment of a creature's soul—either donated, or taken forcefully. In theory, they're EmptyShells, but in practice they retain some of the donor's personality, and it's not predictable which personality traits will appear. On top of that, they're the only construct that's vulnerable to mind-affecting effects, so even if they start out okay, they could still become Brainwashed and Crazy later.
Western Animation
- A few of these appeared in certain Rugrats episodes. Leading the list is Mr.
Friend Fiend.
- The animated short Alma has a little girl find a whole toyshop of creepy dolls including one that looks just like her. Then she becomes that doll by touching it and the shop sets up for its next victim
- Breach of Generator Rex collects creepy dolls, among other things.
- In the Christmas Special episode of Billy and Mandy, in the room full of defective equipment there is "a creepy doll whose eyes follow you around the room." After it's introduced it's eyes fall out and roll across the floor.
- Yoki the Trash Talk spewing doll from Jimmy Two-Shoes.
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 whose 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.
- The skull kid sightly fits this... specially with how Majora plays with him.
- In Wind Waker, when you meet the Great Fairy Queen. She takes the appearance of a child, yet holds a doll that looks like a miniature Great Fairy, all of which look like grown adult women. The effect is rather unsettling, a fact not helped by the background music.
- The Brawl Doll, a boss from Wario World.
- Fatal Frame: The first game had a room filled with long haired, creepy dolls. And something nasty tried to kill you in it. But Fatal Frame 2 took that to the next level with the Dollmaker and the lifesized doll of his dead daughter, who was promptly possessed by an evil spirit and convinced her sister to murder her father. Now the pair of them wander around as shuffling ghosts, while the father controls his dolls and convinces them to kill you.
- Fatal Frame 3. The attacking handmaiden ghosts who look like little geisha dolls that will kill you with their hammers and ghostly tricks each have their own room. Their choice of decoration? Dolls. A whole ton of them. Skewered on the walls.
- Condemned 2 features an abandoned factory full of creepy baby dolls that run at you and explode. You can also pick them up and throw them like grenades. Ethan even pulls a pin out when he does this.
- Calcobrina from Final Fantasy IV.
"Yip-ho-ho!"
"Guess who?"
"We're Calcobreana!"
"We're cute!"
"And scary!"
"We love to kill!"
- 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. 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 there's the dolls in the Otherworld Hillside Center. One's in a wheelchair, while another- only a few feet away- is held by a humanoid...thing, suspended over a hole. Symbolism?
- 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.
- If you're not careful whilst downloading custom content for The Sims 3, you can unknowingly download a doll that will slow down your game loading times and crash your games.
- That's probably Dexter The Bear, a stuffed Bear that gives you the ability to kill other sims with either a knife, a poker, or a hammer. The hammer lets you kill toddlers too, which gives way to the creepy toddler behaviors. That is, when Dexter worked properly and didn't crash the game.
- In summer 2010 there was also a custom content girl doll in a dress that attached itself like a virus to any uploaded content you created. It got onto the official exchange and caused a number of crashed games before people found it.
- 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 Accidental 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.
- Gaia Online has a "joint puppet" feature for avatars to use. 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.
- Played straight in that she does hate humans and is of the very few instances a character is canonically NOT friendly.
- Averted with Alice Margatroid's adorable dolls. Granted, they're (almost) all inanimate. (We aren't sure about Shanghai.)
- Ironically, Alice herself has been described as creepy.
- Hina Kagiyama is head of the Nagashi-bin doll army, which is entirely cursed with misfortune. It's possibly a subversion, though, since the idea is to ensure the misfortune doesn't affect anyone else.
- There is a mod in Unreal Tournament called Unreal4Ever, 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.
- Tails Doll, from Sonic R. Can you feel the sunshine?
- Castlevania series has animate man-size marionette with long-blond hair. It's lying around idlely until the hero comes nearby. Then it giggles, twists its neck in a circle, and floats through the air with unnatural movement as if manipulated by invisible strings. There are also variations that emit electricity, said to be possessed by the ghosts of prisoners that died in the electric chair. Chronicle has small dolls, the walking clowns and hover dolls, though you might find the voiced hover dolls adorable.
- In Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life, your character has the option of buying a teddy bear for your child in chapter three. And then it turns out that the fucking thing blinks and moves and your child will hold conversations with it.
- Used very subtly in Half-Life 2. They're never in plain sight, but if you go out of your way to poke through the trash or explore the abandoned playgrounds, you can find normal children's dolls... in ruins. Missing an arm. Missing an EYE. Covered in something black. Very creepy.
- One of the hidden-object search scenes in Return to Ravenhearst consists of dozens of creepy, damaged dolls arranged on shelves.
- In the sequel, Escape From Ravenhearst, you interact with dozens of creepy animatronic mannequins.
- Onimusha has Ayame, a demonic, Ax Crazy Genma-doll which will randomly appear in the castle and will try to slash you to pieces with her gigantic claws. Also fiendish puppets and dolls will appear hidden in some chests in Onimusha 3. They'll leave behind the object they're guarding when defeated.
- A creepy doll whose eyes move is part of the antique shop's decor in The Lost Crown: A Ghost-Hunting Adventure. Not exactly a doll, but this game also features a spooky, headless dressmaker's dummy that inexplicably appears in the bathroom each night, looking like an intruder in the dark.
- Metal Gear Solid 4 has the thoroughly creepy Psycho Mantis and Sorrow dolls as unlockable weapons.
- Kingdom of Loathing has the Misfit Doll accessory. Basically a normal doll with black hair, white skin, and hollow eye sockets. Adds Spooky damage (which is apparently generated by frightening the opponent) to attacks. Also has the Evil Teddy Bear and Cymbal Playing Monkey familiar and Killer Rag Doll and Creepy Marionette off-hands.
- You can get a creepy clockwork monkey as a combat item. The item description is in the quotes page.
- There's a junk item in ForumWarz, the Haunted Doll, but it doesn't really do anything... At least, nobody's seen it do anything.
- You can also wind up stuck with a Burnt Doll by pissing off a certain NPC.
- Resident Evil had a few moments with creepy dolls:
- First with Code Veronica (and its remake level in Darkside Chronicles) in which you travel through a house of dolls, filled with Zombies, Bats, Bandersnatches, oh and least I forget, little dolls and a giant suspended doll, all of which are modeled after the games main antagonist Alexia Ashford. Plus there is also the music, and gets its worse in the games remake in Darkside Chronicles.
- And there was also the Resident Evil 4 prototype, which featured Leon going through a castle owned by Umbrella (at least we assume) that is... weirdly enough haunted with hook-wielding ghost demonic dolls and tentacles in a black mist. It was as if he made a wrong turn at Raccoon City and went to Silent Hill. (Damn it would have been scary.)
- Haunting Ground has a room full of it, and is, in fact, a puzzle. Doing this incorrectly will prompt spikes coming out of the dolls to give you a game over.
- Ōkami has some of these in the Sunken Ship dungeon. They aren't exactly creepy on their own righ, but combined with the surroundings, occasional chest-monsters and the sound world that at first makes them seem like they're laughing at you, we can't really blame you if you feel like Power Slashing them, just to be sure.
- One made to look like the game's protagonist spooks the player out near the beginning of Rule of Rose. It makes an appearance later on, but its plot-significance is small.
- The Rose Princess also appears to be one. It turns out that was just a stand-in for when the real one was ill.
- Torned out and dirty dolls in Epic Mickey, which you can do a spinning attack on for restorative items. They're even creepier than an eyeless Dumbo ride.
- The second battle in Earth Bound Zero is against a possessed doll which one of your sisters owns.
- These are encountered as late-game enemies in Alice: Madness Returns. They are damn creepy, to say the least. They represent the children that Dr. Bumby has brainwashed and broken into child prostitutes.
Web Original & Webcomics
- Very Creepy Doll Commercial From The 60's and Extremely Creepy Doll Commercial
- 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.
- In The Secret Life Of Dolls, it's particularly bad with Tonner Edward Dollen, but at first when Anna Dollerious says what she thinks about getting The Littlest Edward◊:
"[I'm] not so lonely that I wanna go to sleep and have THAT lurking over me when I wake up. And you know he'll, like, imprint on one of us or some shit—knowing your luck, E, he'll imprint on Cleo, and he'll just sit on her pillow all night, rocking back and forth."
And we all shudder together. It's a nice feeling, sisterly solidarity.
- Silent Hill: Promise has a terrifying kewpie doll.
- Fred Finds A Creepy Doll: an officially licensed Fred doll, which he thinks is a voodoo doll of him. And then it starts talking...
- Inverted in The Order of the Stick, where Goth undead-phile Tsukiko keeps a doll of Xykon (who is creepy) in her bedroom. The doll, in contrast to the actual Xykon, is a cuddly plush toy.
- In Marble Hornets, the Slender Man doll Jay finds in an abandoned house may or may not count, but the baby doll in totheark's "Indicator" video definitely does.
- In Frankie and Stein, there's SUTURE tm, this little doll "stitched together out of love, respect for your elders, and the remains of other stuffed toys."
- In Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series, Creepy Child Rebecca has a teddy bear that speaks in a demonic voice, worships Satan, and makes death threats to the other characters.
- Chad Vader has Baby Cookie who seems to be trying to the creepiest of creepy dolls. She wears nothing but booties and a zorro mask while making her chosen minion play, dance and kill.
- Any of Salad Fingers three finger puppets can be this. To elaborate, Hubert Cumberdale can become human-sized, gain red eyes, and scream for no apparent reason, as well as randomly turn into a black liquid that burns at the touch. Marjory Stewart-Baxter jealously watches Salad Fingers have a picnic with a little girl through the window. Jeremy Fisher can also become human-sized, stores a weird green fluid in his plugged-up mouth, and can suddenly transform into a second Salad Fingers to get eaten alive by the first.
- Hi, uh, Cal. Didn't see you there.
- Doctor Steel makes several of these.
- Tina's muñeca para el Dia de los Muertos looks outright hideous! Its true nature (assuming it is in fact more than a decoration for the Day of the Dead) has yet to be revealed, although given Tina's backstory, it is easy to develop some theories about this.
- BitmapWorld has a storyline that parodies the Jonathan Coulton song, but then swerves off into Edgar Allan Poe territory. It begins here.
- Eerie Cuties has Blair, a girl doll possessed by a male spirit. Rather stupid and very, very perverted one, at that. Though he's annoying rather than creepy and ends up as a Chew Toy — sometimes literally.
- In Minion Comics the protagonists have Tur-Tor - a stuffed turtle with drugged-out eyes that plays tapes of gangster rap songs about children committing domestic violence.
Real Life
- Robert the Haunted Doll is a doll on display at the Fort East Martello Museum. It is the former doll of painter and author Robert Eugene Otto. When he was a child, Otto was given the doll as a gift from a servant who, according legend, used black magic to curse it. Through the years, family members reported hearing Otto speaking to the doll, and hearing a strange, inhuman voice answering back. They also reported that the doll seemed, at times, to move. People who visit the doll where it currently resides sometimes claim the doll moves and that, if they want to photograph it, they need permission first otherwise their cameras don't work.
- One thing that can make dolls really creepy in real life is the fact that kids aren't gentle with toys. If you ever see a doll in a kid's playroom, stuffed uncomfortably in a toy box, or in the middle of a toy pile, often getting "crushed" under other, heavier-looking toys, and still having that smile, it becomes a quick way to convince anybody to clean that room.
- How about this commercial for PS3?
- The Struts fashion doll line. Toy ponies with big come-hither eyes that can be dressed up Barbie-style. No, really.
- 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.
- This might help, although it does increase the tear-jerker quality. If nothing else, the song is amazing.
- If it makes you feel any better, it is a human actress' face on the doll.
- 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 lolis for maximum creepiness. His dolls inspired the Silent Hill 2 Mannequins. See a Not-Safe-For-Work-Or-Sanity photograph◊.
- Allegedly, he developed his "thing" for ball-jointed dolls after meeting his 15-year-old niece. Thankfully he felt his feelings for her weren't appropriate and switched to the "poupee" (puppet) instead. It Got Worse after his wife died.
- 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 Accidental 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.
- Aaron Spelling's mansion had a room especially built to house a huge doll collection; unfortunately the kids it was intended for found it to be a little creepy.
- The marionettes used in the OP of the Chilean Soap Opera "Los Titeres". Brrrrr!
- The lyrics of the song skyrocket it into High Octane Nightmare Fuel: "You are not the owner of your life/We are puppets and nothing else/Our threads are Fate/Which moves us at its will"...
- Clown dolls.
- It's taken this long to mention "The Hands Resist Him"◊ (more commonly known as the "Haunted eBay Painting")? This troper was 14 when she researched this painting, and she still feared supernatural retribution.
- Truthin Television moment about these things, it turns out according to one "study" we perceive what is alive and what is inanimate by the look of the face and eyes more then anything else, so now we know the human truth..dolls are just freaky soulless things!
- Who the Hell in Japan came up with this horrifyingly creepy Woody toy?! Brrrrr!
- "My Buddy, My Buddy...wherever I go, he goes..."
- The Island of the Dolls (“La Isla de la Munecas”) south of Mexico City. Featuring trees decorated with hundreds of mutilated dolls.
- Mattel's Saucy doll. The website is appropriate. Look at that face.
- Deliberately invoked by Imezco with their Living Dead Dolls, and BeGoth's Bleeding Edge dolls-these are dolls that take the idea of Creepy Dolls and run with it. Living Dead Dolls come in coffin-shaped boxes and have dates of death, while the Bleeding Edge dolls are pierced and have odd eyes. Not surprisingly, both of these kinds of dolls are very popular with Goths.
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