The core of the uncanniness in these stories always seems to be the recognition of life in something that shouldn’t be alive: the slow blink of wooden eyelids under their own control, the raising of a tiny tuxedoed arm with a knife in hand, and so on. And of course, no one can forget Slappy the Dummy from the Goosebumps series.
The Twilight Zone featured two notably creepy stories about ventriloquist’s dummies, “The Dummy” and “Caesar and Me.” Anthony Hopkins got in on the act with his dummy Fats in the movie Magic (1978).
There is no shortage of good horror and weird fiction about ventriloquism, but it’s always focused on the dummies, isn’t it? Arguably the best part of Dead of Night (1945) is the segment about the ventriloquist’s dummy, Hugo, who makes his owner descend into insanity (or serves as the projection of the ventriloquist’s psychosis, an always blurry line in these stories).
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