Jenni Monahan 

Focusing on the killer doll sub-genre of horror specifically, this is an exploration of how horror cinema has incorporated dolls and children’s culture into its pantheon of fright and, over time, corroded the public image of dolls. Through an exploration of three specific films, Dead of Night (1945), Child’s Play (1988), and The Boy (2016), spanning the course of seventy one years, we can see a clear and concise timeline of how the doll devolved into something terrifying and not to be trusted, an invader in the comfort of the familial home. Dead of Night shows us the first truly evil killer doll, with little allusion to children and childhood apart from the physique of the doll. Child’s Play brings us forward forty three years to the perfect child contrasted with the caricature of the unreasonableness of a toddler, forcing us to fully consider how we feel about children and presenting us with two perfect figures onto which to project these feelings; the doll and the child. Lastly, The Boy presents us with a newer version of this story, one wherein we have already been trained by our implicit bias to not trust the doll from the onset. Overall this thesis is an examination of the reasons dolls have become demonised in our culture, and how horror cinema, particularly killer doll horror cinema, contributed to this.