Dolls make perfect sense as toys – a small human, for small humans to play with – and they have been around for ever, unsurprisingly. We had miniature play people way before anyone invented trains, Pokémon or all the other kids’ stuff (OK, maybe we always had slime). A small soapstone human figure was found in a 4,500 year-old Siberian child’s tomb, and there are ancient Greek dolls, while ancient Egypt had “paddle” (flat) dolls then, later, absolutely horrible Roman-era rag dolls. Most times and regions seem to have them: there are Inuit dolls from 1000BC; dolls are explicitly described as playthings in Japan in the 11th-century Tale of Genji.
But if they are so universal, why are they also so upsetting? There’s a name for the fear of dolls – pediophobia – and no wonder. I mean, tell me dolls don’t make you feel funny on some level and I’ll assume you’re a bit funny yourself. The easiest possible shorthand to identify someone as a wrong ’un on screen or in print is to make them a doll collector; dolls are a perennial horror movie trope, from The Great Gabbo (a 1929 ventriloquist’s dummy) to M3gan.
