Thanks to a childhood encounter with a plastic fiend named Jesmar, Ben Bryant has spent his life terrified yet intrigued by the surprisingly extensive killer doll film genre. As ‘M3GAN’ hits cinemas, he delves into why we’re still so spooked by them.
am alone in the house. But I know she’s upstairs listening. If I keep the cartoons loud enough maybe she won’t hear me put on my Batman slippers. I shuffle softly to the door and pull it open just enough to squeeze through into the hall. There’s the front door. The bunch of keys on the mat where my mum posted them through the letterbox. Will I be able to find the right key in time? I look up and Jesmar is there, standing at the top of the stairs, with her patchwork playsuit, placid smile and straw-coloured fringe. The air is electric and I can hear a terrible moaning. I need to run but suddenly I’m swimming through concrete. Where is the key –
“Sir?” There is a light on my face. “Sir! Are you alright?” The air hostess is standing over me. The moaning is very loud now. The moaning is coming from me. Oh my god “Aaaaaaaaaahhh I’m sorry, I was having a nightmare.”
I have just been woken up on a packed long-haul flight to New Zealand. My mistake? I’d watched Annabelle Comes Home – the third in the series of horror films about a killer doll. It’s not generally regarded as the best of the franchise, but it was easily frightening enough to provoke a recurring childhood nightmare about Jesmar, a life-size doll from my childhood that belongs to my mum. Jesmar was at one point bigger than me.
Dolls – particularly dolls that are made to a certain specification of three-foot tall and blue eyed with yellow, straw-like hair – are an ongoing source of fear and fascination for me. So the announcement of M3GAN, a horror film about a blue-eyed AI doll that sings “Titanium” by Sia and goes on a murder spree, filled me with anticipation.
The hype around it shows that I am not alone. There is a surprisingly extensive niche of doll horror movies. I have combed through them mainly, I think, to prod at my weird phobia to see what gives me chills and what just leaves me cold. The pioneering Child’s Play franchise, which started in 1988, never left too much of an impression – perhaps because my introduction to it was the satirical Bride of Chucky, by which point the series was so camp it had become a horror comedy. The Conjuring and Annabelle franchises – for me the best and worst, a terrifying watch – came much later, in the 2010s. Stop motion in films can sometimes push the same buttons – especially Ash’s dancing wife Linda in Evil Dead 2.