A brief history of deadly dolls in horror cinema – from Annabelle to M3gan

By Sandra Mills, Associate researcher, faculty of arts, cultures and education, University of Hull

From Longlegs (2024) to M3GAN (2022) to Annabelle Comes Home (2019), creepy dolls are eerily at home on the big screen. Their cinematic history can be traced back to The Doll’s Revenge (1907) in which a young boy witnesses his previously destroyed sister’s doll reassemble itself, before tearing him apart and devouring him.

Over the course of the 20th century, cinematic dolls became more aggressively homicidal and the 1980s saw a…

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