Hi! I'm Talky Tina!

Really?!?

I went this long without bringing the insanity that is the creepy doll to the pages of TropeFest?

Fuck me, this is overdue.

GAH!!

Remember that whole "Uncanny Valley" thing we talked about?  Dolls fit squarely into that area and, frankly, creepy plastic homunculi are a staple in horror films.  From Magic to Dead Silence, from Saw to The Twilight Zone,  dolls have been trippin' our shit out FOREVER.  Their stiff bodies.  Their vacant stares.  They way that one eye always sticks.  Their lack of genitalia.  The way that bitch, Barbie, always gets whatever the fuck she wants.  They're fucking freaky.

You're smilin' NOW, ain'tcha, you fucking cunt?

I've been to houses of doll collectors and fuck me if I don't want to leave immediately.  They keep that shit in the bedroom, too, where the little fuckers can watch.  Wrongness on SO many levels.

So, yeah.  A lot of times a doll in a horror film is being used to set the mood.  There's this corrupted innocence that the creepy doll sends out in waves to make a dark scene even darker.  It says "Something bad happened to a child, here."  It says "Crazy folk live(d) here."  It says "Get the fuck out, this is MY house."  Some great examples here are the ventriloquist dummies in Dead Silence, the doll in Titanic, the abandoned doll in Sweeney Todd and "Casey" in Aliens.

I OWN you...

Alongside that, we have the doll as the actual antagonist.  Chucky comes immediately to mind (So do Tiffany and Glenn).  As does the aforementioned Talky Tina, The Seamstress in 9, The puppets from the Puppet Master series.  Sometimes the dolls are not antagonists per se but they're being controlled, as in Barbarella, the horror film Pinnocchio and the mannequins in Tourist Trap.

Now, as stated previously, dolls clearly enter the Uncanny Valley but this is not unexpected and, while it's unsettling (which is why it made its way into horror to begin with) being creeped out by them is actually a legitimate thing.  Pediophobia is the fear of dolls and it is a branch of automatonophobia which is the fear of humanoid figures.

The better to eat you with, my dear...

The most common explanation for this phobia is that something traumatic happened in relation to a doll in a person's past but there are many theories connected to it.  Freud believed it to be the fact that children believe their dolls could come to life (while they are learning to distinguish living and non-living things as well as in their older fantasies).  Ernst Jentsch expounded on it and went on to hypothesize that it has something to do with intellectual uncertainty as to whether something is alive or not.  Suffice it to say that "dead or alive" is kind of a common theme in horror.

Poupee... another way the Japanese fuck with our heads.

Personally, I'm not a fan of dolls.  They don't wig me, really, but I don't need their bitch asses starin' at me, neither.

They're like tiny, plastic stalkers...