M3GAN has opened to sky-high reviews and a healthy projected box office, marking renewed interest in one of horror's more offbeat subgenres. Evil dolls have never been a driving force in horror movies, but they tend to percolate below the surface. Figures like Chucky the doll -- and more recently, Annabelle from the Conjuring series -- belong to a fitful yet resilient tradition that quietly turns out its share of creepy hits. It's not hard to see why. The Uncanny Valley gives dolls and similar toys an innately unsettling quality, which good directors can do wonders with. M3GAN appears to have that all figured out.
The subgenre goes back a good deal further than may be apparent and, indeed, didn't start with dolls at all. Ventriloquist's dummies -- equally creepy, but ostensibly for adults -- formed the basis of what eventually became the evil doll subgenre. Strangely enough, they never flourished quite the same way the likes of Chucky did.
Ventriloquist's Dummies Made an Easy Stand-In for Mad Performers
The genre's roots lie in 1929's The Great Gabbo, which featured a star ventriloquist who succumbs to jealousy and madness while treating his dummy as a flesh-and-blood person. 1945's anthology film Dead of Night took the concept one step further, as its ventriloquist Frere murders another performer, whom he believes has "stolen" his dummy Hugo. It ends with Frere smashing Hugo in a jealous rage from his asylum cell. In both cases, the dummy simply acts as a good dramatic device to emphasize their owners' fractured psyche. DC's first incarnation of The Ventriloquist is a riff on that, as Arnold Wesker's dissociative identity disorder manifests itself through his gangster dummy Scarface.
It took The Twilight Zone to infuse ventriloquist's dummies with a malevolent will of their own. Season 3, Episode 33, "The Dummy," features an evil dummy named Willy, who grows increasingly assertive over his owner Jerry. The episode ends with one of the series' signature twists: Willy becomes the ventriloquist while Jerry transforms into his dummy. It worked so well that the series made a second episode -- Season 5, Episode 28, "Caesar and Me" -- telling a different story about a dummy that comes to life. In between, the show officially started the shift to dolls with Season 5, Episode 6, "Living Doll," about a child's doll who murders her owner's abusive stepfather.
Dummies Haven't Thrived in Horror the Way Dolls Have
Despite The Twilight Zone's efforts, dummies never caught on in quite the same way that dolls have. Ventriloquism as an art form has fallen into comparative obscurity, and dolls have always been more popular, which helped establish the likes of Chucky as movers and shakers in the genre. 1978's Magic is an aberration -- about a ventriloquist played by Anthony Hopkins sliding into madness -- though it sticks to the older tradition of the dummy being a fulcrum for human emotions rather than an evil being in and of itself.
Beyond that, the biggest example of dummies in horror movies stems from 2007's Dead Silence, which used the ghost of a sinister ventriloquist as its monster. Despite a nonsensical story, it finds a singularly unsettling trick: both the ghost and her victims are altered to resemble living dummies. Nevertheless, it did poorly at the box office, and no other filmmakers felt inclined to follow in its footsteps.
Dead Silence was directed by James Wan six years before he directed The Conjuring and delivered Annabelle to horror fans. Wan is one of M3GAN's producers and shares story credit with writer Akela Cooper, so clearly, he knows the turf. His efforts connect the new film to the earliest roots of the subgenre, including the very different kind of doll that it all sprang from. Its success may prompt a new look at just how unsettling dummies can be and give the Annabelles and Chuckys a run for their money.
M3GAN is now playing in theaters.