Sandra Mills
Cinema, particularly in those narratives written for children, regularly portrays childhood toys as supportive confidantes or treasured reminders of a character’s youth. Yet there is something about these inanimate figures that is inherently unsettling with their blank expressions and frozen limbs that eerily mimic the living. While the fantasy of a treasured toy coming to life may be a bewitching possibility or an untold desire for some, horror cinema directly threatens that notion as the childhood playthings it portrays become sources of suspicion, trepidation, and terror rather than pleasure. In the killer toy subgenre of horror, toys appear in various forms – as dolls, puppets, figurines, models, and other assorted childhood playthings – and commit violent acts, often under the influence of supernatural possession or malevolent technology.
Previously governed by puppets and ventriloquist dummies,[i] the subgenre underwent a significant shift in the 1980s, as this decade’s output spotlighted malevolent dolls. Coulrophobia[ii] and pediophobia[iii] merged in Tobe Hooper’s supernatural horror Poltergeist (1982) as a grotesque clown doll terrorizes the inhabitants of seemingly peaceful suburbia. Richard Ciupka’s slasher horror Curtains (1983) employed a porcelain doll as an omen of impending doom, whilst in Brendan Faulkner’s independent horror Spookies (1986) dolls are just part of a whole host of monstrous figures deployed by a wicked sorcerer to enact their will. It was the latter part of the decade though, specifically the release of two films, Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987) and Tom Holland’s Child’s Play (1988), that really transported the monstrous killer doll to the heart of the public imaginary. Child’s Play’s[iv] release sparked the subgenres most prevalent and durable cinematic franchise,[v] and thus, perhaps understandably, tends to outshine Dolls in discussions of 1980s ‘living’ doll horror. This article aims to go some way in reddressing that balance as it highlights the transgressive fluidity of the film’s doll/human hybrids, thus making a case for Dolls to be considered as a significant body horror text.
The 1980s was something of a boom decade for body horror cinema with films such as Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) and David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) increasing the sub-genre’s popularity and prevalence. The term ‘body horror’ was first coined in Philip Brophy’s 1983 article “Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.” In it, Brophy argues that films such as Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1976), Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981), and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) exploit “the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it” (280). As the film’s characters experience the unnerving reality of possessing a body “totally devoid of […] [their] control” (Brophy 282), cinematic audiences relate accordingly. Since the 1980s, as Xavier Aldana Reyes observes, the term ‘body horror’ has been connected “with a certain exploitative approach that relishes detailed description and may even indulge in what could be perceived as a sadistic gaze. The victims in body horror are not merely maimed, killed, or metamorphosed, but brutally and usually irrevocably so” (“Body Horror” 107).
Critical debate over what exactly constitutes body horror is ongoing and complex. Aldana Reyes identifies ‘body horror’ as “one of the loosest and most ill-defined terms in gothic and horror studies” (Body Gothic 52) that covers “anything from the weird fiction of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) to post-millennial torture porn” (Body Gothic 52). Paul Wells defines it as “the explicit display of the decay, dissolution and destruction of the body, foregrounding bodily processes and functions under threat, allied to new physiological configurations and redefinitions of anatomical forms” (114). This definition is echoed in the 2012 anthology The Mammoth Book of Body Horror which proposes that body horror texts tend to share a central anxiety surrounding issues of either transformation, mutation, and/or contagion. Rejecting Larrie Dudenhoeffer’s summation that “all horror is body horror” (24), this article aligns with Aldana Reyes’ suggestion that “if a text generates fear from abnormal states of corporeality, or from an attack upon the body, we might find ourselves in front of an instance of body horror” (Body Gothic 52), as is certainly the case with Dolls.
In the opening scene of Dolls an assem of stranded motorists, seeking cover from a raging storm, nd shelter in the Hartwicke mansion, the extravagant Gothic residence of dollmakers Hilary and Gabriel Hartwicke. Unbeknownst to these unexpected guests, the Hartwickes’ intricately handcrafted dolls are alive and are most protective of their elderly owners. These dolls are not the glossy mass-produced figures of Child’s Play, however, rather these ornate doppelgängers are previous human visitors to the Hartwicke residence, now metamorphosed into dolls as penance for their prior alleged indiscretions. The monstrous threat thus arises not from some external source of horror, but in the tradition of body horror narratives, it erupts, as Mark Jancovich notes, “from within the human body, and so challenges the distinction between self and other, inside and outside” (6). In his introduction to The Mammoth Book of Body Horror, director of Dolls, Stuart Gordon, asserts that “the best body horror makes your own body turn against you” (1). Dolls conforms to this, as it repeatedly showcases acts of grotesque metamorphosis. The victims’ human bodies are violated as they are brutally contorted, refashioned, and shrunk into something altogether more inhuman. Once transformed, these individuals are swiftly assimilated into the Hartwickes’ ever-expanding doll collection.
From the film’s title sequence, it is evident that the dolls within Dolls are something to be feared. Visual effects designer Robert Dawson, who had previously worked alongside Gordon on Re-Animator, skilfully crafts an eerie sequence where the opening credits emerge beside several incorporeal floating dolls’ heads. These porcelain disembodied heads are framed in such a way as to cast a disconcerting silhouette whilst their unblinking eyes stare sinisterly on. Body horror as a genre, permits, and indeed revels in, “new carnal restructurings and […] flights of fancy that may conceive life outside the ordinary” (Body Gothic 63). Within the subgenre at large, the body is frequently the catalyst for monstrous change. Within Dolls this change has irrevocable consequences for both mortal and artificial body alike, as the two merge into one grotesque doll/human hybrid.
The dolls in Dolls by nature of their very creation are unique, their humanity inextricable from their artificial bodies. Early in the narrative Gabriel Hartwicke laments the ongoing commercialisation of his craft to the mansion’s newest batch of ill-fated visitors: “nowadays people seem to want their playthings mass-produced. Nobody seems to want things that are special anymore, that are one of a kind” (Dolls). His commitment to crafting one-off creations is seemingly unwavering. These non-consensual transformations from human to non-human form defamiliarize the body, rendering it entirely other. Isabel Cristina Pinedo contends that the narrative repeatedly told by body horror “is of a human subject dismantled and demolished: a human body whose identity is violated, a human body whose boundaries are breached from all sides” (205). This is certainly the case in Dolls where the human form is recurrently violated, altering it into something altogether more inhuman, thus shamelessly exploiting corporeality.
The notion of a vengeful toy is present from the very beginning of Dolls. In the film’s prologue Little Judy is forced, by her unfeeling stepmother Rosemary, to dispose of her treasured toy bear as they approach the Hartwicke residence. Irritated by this, Judy pictures the bear, now metamorphosed into a ferocious beast, devouring Rosemary and her heartless father. Whilst easily dismissed as mere childhood fantasy, this moment highlights the significant role that vengeful toys fulfil within the narrative. The dolls within Dolls are not merely the film’s antagonists but its flawed heroes. Thus, Dolls encourages the viewer, as Craig Ian Mann notes, “to cheer for the film’s murderous dolls because they are lovingly-crafted playthings motivated solely by a desire to protect” (62-63). The suggestion that they possess a morality, however erroneous that morality may be, adds an additional dimension to the killer doll archetype presented to genre fans thus far.
The events of Dolls largely take place over one long, increasingly blood-soaked, night. As darkness falls, and the rainstorm rages on, the dolls attack the visitors in increasingly complex and graphic ways. One visitor, Isabel, is employed by the dolls as a human battering ram, her head repetitively, and bloodily, smashed against a wall. She is later found shackled to a chair captured mid-metamorphosis between a human and doll-like state. Her movements are wooden, her skin is plasticized, and her voice is strained as she repeatedly cautions that her friend must “go back” (Dolls) or face a similar fate. As her head drops forward, causing her eyes to pop out, leaving vacant sockets in their place, the almost fully transformed Isabel with jerky doll-like motion picks up the eyeballs and holds them adjacent to her head. A part of the human body, formally tethered to its owner, is now a mere object to be moved at will.
Another visitor, Rosemary, is bitten, beaten, and stabbed repeatedly after she pulls back the bedcovers to reveal a hoard of dolls brandishing miniature weapons. They immediately launch at her, skewering her and ripping away chunks of her flesh. As he gets into bed later that night her husband David is greeted by his wife’s maimed body and bloodied mutilated face, the corpse’s arms latching onto him in a rigor-mortis-driven mock embrace that he struggles to escape. The theatricality of all these kills is overt, the artful trickery of the vengeful dolls made apparent through closeup shots of eerily smug porcelain faces, excessively high-pitched cries, and lurching animation. Yet despite their graphic violence there is a comic undercurrent to these kills which renders them grotesque.
Unlike their human counterparts the dolls are proven to be seemingly unstoppable, their numbers ostensibly exponentially growing night after night as group upon group of unsuspecting visitors descend upon the Hartwicke mansion. As the visitors violently respond to the horrors being enacted upon them, the porcelain bodies of the dolls crumble and fragment leaking bloody bodily fluids that expose their mortal origins. David, after attempting to destroy a Punch puppet in a moment of grief-driven rage, inadvertently becomes one. His body violently contorts, his limbs pop out of their sockets and his skin turns to plastic, until his figu is fully refashioned into a miniaturised puppet complete with Punch-like hunchback and crooked nose. Each of these human-to-doll transformations occurs after a perceived indiscretion, be that selfishness, stealing, or bad parenting. As Gabriel Hartwicke explains, each visitor is given “a sporting chance” (Dolls) to right their wrongs, but those that fail “have to start over and play a new role in the big game” (Dolls) that the dollmaker has designed. Body horror is, as Michael Morrison observes, a genre that champions a journey to a “new kind of life” (Qtd. in Barker and Jones 205-6) either through death or bodily modification. In Dolls mortal life is curtailed and exchanged for something altogether more inhuman that promises to endure. The film ends with a closeup shot of the newest additions to the Hartwickes’ ever-expanding doll collection as four artificial figures line the mantlepiece staringly eerily on.
Like Child’s Play, Dolls can be read as an anti-consumerist allegory that employs the figure of the doll as a metaphor to critique the rampant consumerism of late-twentieth-century American capitalism. The prevailing legacy of the film, however, is that it introduced dolls that were capable of agency and thought into the killer toy subgenre of horror. The dolls within Dolls resist easy categorisation as uncanny beings capable of human-like agency and thought. These doll/human hybrids possess a transgressive fluidity stemming from their creation and an independence that seemingly emancipates them from their human creator. These dolls are both bound to, and protected by, the guise of a childhood toy that enables them to appear innocuous and thus establish dominance over their fully human counterparts.
Notes
[i] Notable examples include: Tod Browning’s silent melodrama The Unholy Three (1925), James Cruze’s musical drama The Great Gabbo (1929), Alberto Cavalcanti’s ‘The Ventriloquist’s Dummy’ section of anthology horror Dead of Night (1945), Lindsay Shonteff’s cult horror Devil Doll (1964), William Castle’s surrealist horror Shanks (1974), and Richard Attenborough’s psychological thriller Magic (1978).
[ii] Fear (phobia) of clowns.
[iii] Fear (phobia) of dolls.
[iv] The series centres upon serial killer Charles Lee Ray also known as ‘Chucky’ and his persistent attempts to transfer his soul from a ‘Good Guy’ doll to a mortal body. The Child’s Play (1988-2024) cinematic universe consists of, to date, six direct cinematic sequels, a comic mini-series, a collection of shorts, a television series which spans three seasons, and a film remake/reboot released in 2019.
[v] Along with Charles Band and Kenneth J. Hall’s American horror film series Puppet Master (1989 – 2022). The series, which centres upon a collection of anthropomorphic puppets who have been animated by ancient Egyptian magic, comprises of, to date, ten cinematic sequels alongside various reboot, crossover, and spinoff films, as well as several comic book series and a free-to-play multiplayer video game.
Works Cited
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. University of Wales Press, 2007.
Aldana Reyes, Xavier. “Body Horror.” The Cambridge Companion to American Horror, edited by Stephen Shapiro and Mark Storey, Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 107-119.
Barker, Clive and Stephen Jones. Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror. BBC Books, 1997.
Brophy, Philip. “Horrality—The Textuality of Contemporary Horror Films.” The Horror Reader, edited by Ken Gelder, Routledge, 2000, pp. 276-284.
Dolls. Directed by Stuart Gordon, performances by Ian Patrick Williams, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, and Carrie Lorraine. Empire International Pictures, 1987.
Dudenhoeffer, Larrie. Embodiment and Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Gordon, Stuart. “Body Horror: An Introduction.” The Mammoth Book of Body Horror: 25 Stories of Transformation, Mutation and Contagion, edited by Paul Kane and Marie O’Regan, Running Press, 2012, pp. 1-5.
Jancovich, Mark. “General Introduction.” Horror, The Film Reader, edited by Mark Jancovich, Routledge, 2002, pp. 1-19.
Mann, Craig Ian. “They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore: Dolls vs. Modernity.” Toy Stories: The Toy as Hero in Literature, Comics and Film, edited by Tanya Jones, McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017, pp. 62-77.
Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. State University of New York Press, 1997.
Wells, Paul. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. Wallflower, 2000.
