Basic Trope: A child's doll is scary or villainous.
- Straight: Alice's new doll, Bertha, is a creepy-looking antique Victorian porcelain doll that in the middle of the night, gets up and wanders around the house singing "Lizzie Borden took an axe..."
- Exaggerated: Bertha's porcelain face is painted with a Brown Note pattern that makes anyone who looks at it go raving mad. She roams the neighborhood on dark nights massacring the children in their beds with a pair of dull, rusty nails.
- Downplayed: Bertha is a Victorian doll that was neglected on a shelf for a long time, causing the paint to wear off, which makes her look creepy. Alice doesn't like playing with her and hides her in the closet so she doesn't get scared.
- Justified:
- Alice's Big Brother Bully tells her scary stories about evil dolls to make her scared of Bertha.
- Bertha is possessed by the vengeful spirit of her previous owner, a murdered Victorian girl.
- Inverted:
- Bertha, an animate doll, is terrified of the serial-killing Enfant Terrible Alice she's been given to.
- Bertha, an adorable Animesque doll that invokes the feeling of looking at a kitten, absolute delight. Also, if she's alive she's heroic.
- Subverted: Alice is terrified when her scary porcelain doll Bertha comes to life and grabs a pair of scissors... only to watch Bertha defend her from a masked burglar who tries to break into her room.
- Double Subverted: After brutally murdering the burglar, Bertha turns to Alice and says in a little girl's voice, "If you tell anyone about this, you'll end up like him."
- Parodied: Bertha is a doll with a comically monstrous face who's treated as Ugly Cute at best or treated like she's an Eldritch Abomination at worst even though she's a completely normal doll otherwise. And if she's alive, she's very much like a Spoiled Brat.
- Discussed: "That doll is freaking our daughter out! We should donate it to a museum and pray it isn't alive."
- Lampshaded: "Everybody likes portraying dolls like this little beauty here like they're disasters waiting to happen, or at least look the part."
Back to Creepy Doll.
