October 26, 2009: The Ten Most Petrifying Puppets!

In his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, psychologist Ernst Jentsch wrote, “In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton...” Japanese roboticist (i.e.: person who builds robots) Mashahiro Mori later connected Jentsch’s theory to fear response when he coined the term “uncanny valley”: the closer a human-made object comes to looking like a human, the more humans are repulsed by it. Whatever the psychology behind puppet terror is, it seems to be one of our most pervasive phobias, and creators of fiction have exploited it since long before Mori posited his theory in 1970. So now in luscious chronological order, here are ten of the most petrifying of these perilously pernicious puppets!

The spoilers are coming...

1. Hugo from Dead of Night

There had already been a few creepy cinematic dummies (Lon Chaney’s mouthpiece in The Unholy Three; Gabbo in Eric Von Stroheim’s early sound film The Great Gabbo) the one that seems to have really sparked off the trend of evil puppets was Hugo in the British portmanteau Dead of Night. While the film is often sited as the finest horror anthology, I think it’s pretty uneven. The wrap-around is nice (a man arrives at a country house to join a roomful of strangers gathered to discuss their recurring nightmares), but most of the stories are either too slight or too flabby (I’ve never been able to make it through the silly “golfing ghost” episode without fading out) to have much impact. The one that registers most is the final segment in which Michael Redgrave plays a mad ventriloquist convinced that his dummy, Hugo, has come to life and intends to murder him. Dead of Night is worth viewing for two truly disturbing sequences: Redgrave, after going completely around the bend, speaking solely in the dummy’s squeaky voice, and the absolutely terrifying grand finale in which… well, you should really watch it yourself. Every fiction that follows on this list owes a debt to Dead of Night and every petrifying puppet owes one to Hugo.


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2. Max Collodi from “The Glass Eye” episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”

In one of the most insidiously memorable episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”, William Shatner relates the weird tale of Eleanor Rigby-esque Julia Lester (Jessica Tandy). Lonely Julia is a sort of ventriloquist groupie (who isn’t?), and after she falls for puppet master Max Collodi (Tom Conway), who performs with a bizarrely lifelike figure named George, she stalks him until he agrees to a meeting. The bizarre conclusion of “The Glass Eye” proves that one should never meet ones heroes, lest one discover that said hero is actually made of maple and being controlled by a little person (Billy Barty) in a creepy dummy mask. I can’t quite decide what is more unsettling:

April 16, 2009: Things That Scare Me: Case Study #3

In spite of (or, perhaps, because of) my adult infatuation with all things horrifying and horrific, I was scared of absolutely everything when I was a kid. A television commercial for a horror movie was enough to send me racing from the den in a sweaty palm panic. As an ongoing series here on Psychobabble, I'm going to be reviewing some of the things that most traumatized me as a child and evaluating whether or not I was rightfully frightened or just a wiener.

(Incidentally, The Onion recently posted an article with the exact same premise as this series. While I seriously doubt that I’ve been ripped off, as I’m sure I’m the only one who reads Psychobabble, I just want to point out that I’m not going to allow such repetition to impede the continuation of this series. Onward and upward.)

Case Study #3: Trailer for the film Magic

Released in 1978, Magic was one of those “crazy ventriloquist expresses his craziness through his dummy” stories that had already been done in the British film Dead of Night (1945), episodes of “Twilight Zone”, “Tales from the Crypt” comics, and about half-a-gazillion other places. Still Magic is a decent little movie with Anthony Hopkins working his creepy mojo as the ventriloquist, but what really gained the movie infamy was its trailer.

Apparently, this commercial only aired on TV a few times before it was pulled because stations were inundated with calls from the irate parents of kids who had been emotionally scarred by it. I was four in 1978, and I remember exactly where I was the one and only time I saw this commercial (I was being babysat by a nice old lady who lived down the block). While neither my parents nor the nice old lady placed an irate call to any TV stations on my behalf, I was absolutely horrified by it, the content of which was so utterly traumatizing that in subsequent years I was unsure whether I’d actually seen the commercial or merely nightmared about it. 

The Verdict: On the one hand we have a ventriloquist dummy (always creepy) in unflinching close-up reciting a poem worthy of an Alvin Schwartz book and a final eyes-rolling-back-in-the-head flourish to ensure no one mistakes this for The Muppet Movie. On the other hand, the dummy sounds like Bugs Bunny. Still, that is one fucking creepy dummy, and knowing that enough other kids were screwed up by this thing to get it yanked from the air forces me to conclude that I was justified in my fright.