In just 40 short years, puppets and animatronics have moved from family film staples to horror stalwarts. What happened?
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #52.
In 2004, aged somewhere between four and five, I saw two films in the cinema which would prove oddly formative, in very different ways.
The first was Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban – Alfonso Cuaron’s wizarding world mega-hit that marked the franchise’s turn from Chris Columbus’ family-friendly adventure flicks to something… stranger. The second was Robert Rodriguez’s Christmas classic The Polar Express, the first film crafted entirely from digital replacement animation. Both scared the heebie-jeebies out of me.
The fight-or-flight moment in Potter was understandable – the transformation of the nice professor lupin into a malnourished werewolf-creature is quite literally the stuff horror fiction is made of. But the moment in The Polar Express which stuck with me far more than a snarling supernatural beast comes relatively early in the film, when a young, dressing-gown-equipped Tom Hanks is left alone in a train carriage filled with old toys on their way back to Santa’s workshop.
“The forsaken and the abandoned,” as the familiar-sounding conductor tells our young hero, are part of The Big Man in Red’s new experiment: “Re-bicycling, something like that”. What is old and unloved will become new; stained dresses and jumpsuits will be scrubbed and mended; rotoscoped doll heads will be grafted to new rotoscoped doll bodies.
But as the comforting voice of the guard disappears into the darkness, the boy’s attention is drawn to one toy in particular: a puppet interpretation of Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge. “You’re a doubter!” it cries from beneath its crooked nose, traumatising a generation of toddlers on their first trips to the big screen. The BBFC has no guidance around the uncanny valley; unless puppet-Scrooge uses a four-letter word or a shotgun, stringed terrors can get away with anything short of murder, and the film has held onto its U-for-Universal classification ever since.
Which is odd, because plenty of adults – and, I imagine, a large number of children – would find a marionette far more disturbing than Jason Statham taking a blow to the head. Puppets, dolls and animatronics might have started life as children’s entertainment, but that’s hardly where they’ve stayed. Just like The Shining put dressing identical twins in blue frills out of fashion, Poltergeist, Child’s Play and a thousand no-budget horror flicks since have relegated these childhood companions to the stuff of nightmares.
Now, as we teeter on the verge of AI apocalypse in a thoroughly digitised world, you’d think that practical, anthropomorphic horror would seem quaint by comparison. But with M3GAN and Five Nights At Freddy’s proving there’s money in pediophobia (that’s the fear of dolls and humanoid inanimate objects, folks), on-screen interpretations might just be more popular than ever – just not in a way Punch & Judy Inc would appreciate.
Once upon a time…
If there’s a time we can look back on as the heyday of puppets on film, it’s probably the 1980s. Where the days before The Dark Crystal were dark, terrifying times of little stringed fellows and dolls destined to crack in sinister directions, Henson Associates took the general goodwill it had garnered from The Muppets to use its puppetry expertise, if not for evil, then at least something less suited to the side of a lunchbox.
The Dark Crystal and, to a lesser extent, Labyrinth use their fantasy settings to sneak some objectively terrifying puppets and animatronics into a pair of family flicks. Whether it’s the too-smooth felt-skin of the heroic Gelflings or the vulture-esque Skeksis opposing them, the world of Thra, if presented to a focus group of concerned parents today, would seem unlikely to go down a treat. Even the company’s U-rated follow-up has an unearthly quality to it bordering on the uncanny – one it shares with Wolfgang Petersen’s more surreal stablemate, The Never Ending Story.
But these ampromorphs were hardly the reserve of films destined to become ‘cult classics’. E.T., Gremlins’ Mogwai, and the aforementioned Muppets were flooding screens with cuddlier visions of the puppeteer’s craft. Puppets (and actors wrapped in glue and silicone) were everywhere.
The otherworldliness of watching something inanimate move it head had not gone unnoticed by the horror community. While the Halloween, Friday The 13th and Nightmare On Elm Street franchises fuelled the slasher boom the decade is now known for, Alien, Poltergeist, Child’s Play, The Thing, Beetlejuice, Dolls and a thousand other latex monstrosities large and small capitalised on an emerging home video market to crawl into living rooms and bedrooms across the world.
Since then, puppets, dolls and animatronics have more-or-less completed their move from childhood companions to the stuff of nightmares. Where the bestselling toys list each Christmas was once the domain of Cabbage Patch Kids, Trolls and Furbys (Furbies? Furbii?), anything with eyes and independent movement has struggled to break into yearly Christmas toy charts since the millennium.
Thinking about fear
But why have puppets, dolls and animatronics proved so enduringly unnerving? In what may be this site’s first and final reference to the works of Sigmund Freud (we’ve gone posh), his 1919 essay, The Uncanny, popularised the notion that we’re all a little freaked out by things that look a bit too human. Robotics professor Masahiro Mori added the “valley” part of the equation in the 1970s, hypothesising that our empathy with an object or animal increases as its human-like qualities increase until, very suddenly, it doesn’t.
Interestingly, considering their historical use as playthings and entertainment, young children are often terrified of dolls and puppets. While the brain is still trying to work out what the human face looks like in the first place, anything that looks sort-of like it is a pretty unhelpful distraction.
Dark Crystal’s Gelflings, with their very human eyes and hair paired with not-quite human-shaped faces, you’d think would have terrified a newborn if they’d ever been presented with one. Ditto the clown doll from Poltergeist, or the Victorian china dolls littering particularly haunted stately homes.
Of course, pediophobia (there’s that big word again) on screen doesn’t just apply to things of the human variety. In Matthew Holness’ 2015 horror Possum, the titular monster is about as far from human as it’s possible for a puppet to be. But aside from the obvious terror of something that looks like the kind of spider you’d have to kill with a shovel in the Australian outback, there’s another fear to be mined in things moving in ways that they shouldn’t.
Modern horror has always been a huge fan of this, of course. Whether it’s a door closing of its own volition, or a long-empty rocking chair creaking in an empty room, the idea of an unseeable force bringing life to an inanimate object is enough to wet even the hardiest of beds. But the idea of bringing life to something that’s very obviously not alive, whether it looks like a middle-aged woman or a five-foot bird creature, seems to trigger something in our primitive monkey brains that tells us to stay away.
To make matters worse for our subconscious, the idea that dolls and puppets are associated with childhood only makes them more terrifying. Things we might once have loved lying broken and forgotten, they remind us that time waits for neither person nor puppet. One day, we too could join the ranks of “the forsaken and the abandoned”, as Tom Hanks so helpfully implied earlier (The Polar Express would have been a very different film if he’d said it outright). That these genres of toys have themselves fallen out of use in recent decades only makes our unfamiliarity with, and therefore fear of, them all the more pronounced.
Puppets in space
As we move kicking and screaming into the age of AI, however, the effects of the uncanny valley are far from limited to the analogue world. Slightly botched CG interpretations of famous footballers have been triggering alarm bells for decades, but as we look to a future filled with Ex Machina androids and all the pleasantness that thought provides, is there still room for cinema’s puppet and animatronics industry to give us the heebie-jeebies?
To put it simply, yes. As our lives become more and more intwined with our AI overlords, we’ve already become accustomed to humanoid graphics and CG creations popping up on a daily basis. But as the physical world gets increasingly relegated to the recycling bin of history, dolls, toys and fleshy mounds with limbs sticking out are becoming rarer, more unusual, and even more divorced from reality.
They’re becoming, if anything, more uncanny.
