I'm McGaris and this is post-mortem.

Dolls were meant for children.

Teddy Bears, Raggedy Ann, Barbie and Ken,

even the scariest of the funco pops are all about fun and play.

So when did dolls get so damn scary?

It started with the ventriloquist dummy.

It's a weird job wanting to stick your hand up a doll's ass, pull on a cable that makes his mouth

move, and then throw your voice convincingly to convince the audience that the little

fellow on your lap is a living and breathing thing. I had a Jerry Mahoney dummy when I was a kid and tried to learn the process which was mastered by a guy named Paul Winchell who when he wasn't doing his kids show with puppets helped to create the artificial heart.

But even then, I started to realize that these little toys could get pretty creepy.

The first scary doll movie that I know of is an early talkie called The Great Gabo,

dating back to 1929, and it starred Eric von Stroheim

as a psychologically damaged ventriloquist

who started to believe that his dummy Otto itself was a living breathing

creature and was rebelling on his tuxedod master and taking control of the act, and

von Strohheim's life in the process.

Gabo was the monster, however, and it was only through Otto that he could express what might

be construed as kindness to others.

One of the first genre anthologies was Dead of Night,

a British movie from 1947 that featured among its varying tales of the odd and vaguely supernatural,

a story called the Ventriloquist dummy, a genuinely

disturbing foray into multiple personalities with no less than Sir Michael Redgrave as the increasingly

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