THE BOY (2016)

[GRWelsh]

This was a dud. Don't waste your time. I only watched it because Lauren Cohan was in it (Maggie from "The Walking Dead").

[geneweigel]

I saw it a while ago. Its just very narrow too poppy and not enough real

[GRWelsh]

I was thinking it had to be inspired by "Robert the Doll," that haunted doll in Florida. Dolls can easily be creepy because of the "Uncanny Valley" effect, but to be truly scary something more is needed and therein lies the difficulty. The twist was supposed to address this, but to me it just took the whole thing in an utterly ridiculous direction.

[geneweigel]

I think I had mentioned already, PENNY DREADFUL (2014-2016) had a weird angle on dolls that was reminiscent of that Abraham Merritt story BURN WITCH BURN (1932) that probably had the best take on dolls (people being converted against their will into evil doll monsters).

Its like TRILOGY OF TERROR (1975 TV Movie) had a great doll story (1969 Richard Matheson story "Prey")and the end where the doll spirit possesses her was spooky but it had a spider-like quality to it that was a whole different unsettling feel than a "cute" thing gone bad.

Another weird doll horror (fantasy) story is the Mr Peppercorn story from ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS "Where the Woodbine Twineth" (1965) with the doll being some kind of unexplained and indirect tool for sorcery.

[GRWelsh]

That segment from TRILOGY OF TERROR is a classic. I thought it was really scary when I was a kid, but it's hard not to watch it now without being critical ("What are you crazy? You can't drown a magical construct!") or thinking of the parody version in THE SIMPSONS ("Yep, here's your problem. Someone set this thing to evil."):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6mvoyX74po

I'm glad you mentioned "Where the Woodbine Twineth" because I never watched it before. I just looked it up and watched it. It could easily be a prequel to a movie like THE BOY providing a backstory for why someone would believe a doll is a real child or at least supernaturally connected in some way. What I liked about this TV episode was the ambiguity of suspecting something supernatural is going on yet never quite getting the evidence in a way that others couldn't dismiss as coincidence or delusion. The story it is based on, originally titled "You Never Believe Me" by Davis Grubb, is here:

www.101bananas.com/library2/woodbine.html

The story may have been inspired by the 1870 poem by Septimus Winner:

www.poetrynook.com/poem/gone-where-woodbine-twineth

I like how in the TV episode, Nell can finally hear Numa talking near the end: "Life is hard. But where the woodbine twineth, it's summertime all the time. There's apples and peaches, and you can play anything you want to play any time you want to play it. The jacks are the stars, and the ball is the sun or the moon. There's candy canes and everybody has a dog." That sounds like a child's concept of heaven, which seems to hearken back to the poem about a soldier's idyllic final resting place.

[geneweigel]

"Where the Woodbine Twineth" is unsettling for me. I remember mentalities like that when I was a kid about kid's obsessed with toys and talking for them and also the whole lone house in a vast wilderness (my grandmother's massive property was on the edge of huge park reserve.) feel with old dolls that I grew up with in the Summers. Cousins used to say creepy shit and the piles of old creepy dolls didn't help that either. The house was looted just before her demise so all those dolls went away. (Place is haunted by her in the 90's though when I was still going up there.)

[GRWelsh]

"Where the Woodbine Twineth" is a great story and thanks for pointing me to it. It reminds me of an older conception of fairies when the lines were blurred between the little people and the dead. Also touching on that older tradition was PAN'S LABYRINTH and HELLBOY comics. "Where the Woodbine Twineth" was unsettling for me as well but for different reasons... The little girl who played Eva looked like photos of an old girlfriend of mine from when she was little in family albums. She killed herself in 2012. She once wrote me a letter saying when she was little she never thought life would be so hard when she grew up. That seemed to be a theme touched on in the TV show version at least: life is hard, but you can get away from it all if you go where the woodbine twineth...

Some other puppet horror themes are in Thomas Ligotti's fiction and THE SECRET OF VENTRILOQUISM by Jon Padgett. Also, I recently read an issue of Batman with the Ventriloquist as a supporting character and it had one of the best comic book pages I've seen in recent memory. Not horror but just a cool take on the psychology of someone obsessed with a puppet.

[geneweigel]

For my Irish grandmother it was real. It was almost spoken like a truth that shouldn't be spoken but we should be aware of. I inherited her 2 1/2 inch leprechaun statue that nobody wanted and my daughter broke its legs off and part of me freaked.