Week in Review
What’s not creepy about dolls, clowns, and puppets? Pupaphobia (the fear of puppets), Coulrophobia (the fear of clowns), and Pediophobia are all recognized phobias. It’s only natural that these would appear in films, usually in a horrorific situation. There’s one very specific phobia that I want to focus on: Automatonophobia. This is the fear of ventriloquist’s dummies, wax figures, animatronic creatures, and anything else that is made to represent a sentient being.
One of the first Twilight Zones I ever saw was The Dummy. That’s the one in which a ventriloquist has a dummy that is alive. The effects are hokey, nothing more than a PA carrying the dummy off screen to make it walk across the room, but the results effectively induce the willies. That episode freaked me out, and I ran to my parents, half in horror, half in excitement of one of the coolest things I had ever seen, and tried to explain the episode, but as it came out of my seven-year-old mouth, I realized it made no sense at all.
Shortly thereafter, another film came out that I just saw last Tuesday: Magic, starring Anthony Hopkins. The trailers for television remain one of the most evil looking things I have ever seen on TV. There’s a bit of it on the menu screen of the DVD. It was little more than a dummy looking at me through the screen reciting this little rhyme: “Abra Cadabra, I play with his head. Presto Chango, now he’s me. Hocus Pocus, we take her to bed, Magic is fun … we’re dead.” Although I remember it as “Magic is fun … WHEN YOU’RE DEAD.”
I begged and pleaded to see it and my parents, to their credit, did not allow me to go. If they had relented, I am sure that by now I would not be blogging for KQED — I would be painting puppet pictures while on death row. I did finally see Magic as a teenager and it was almost too much for me to handle (and that was back when I was in my gore phase!)
So I checked the film out recently, to see if it still had the same sting. Sure enough, it was still creepy. But the added level of Anthony Hopkins’ performance was much more noticeable this time. Hopkins plays a ventriloquist on the brink of success. Right before the big deal comes through, he bolts for his little hometown in upstate New York. Burgess Meredith, his streetwise agent, comes to look for him. Hopkins’ portrayal of his character’s fear and failure is perfect.