Hendrix is the bestselling author of The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires and The Final Girl Support Group, and his homage to the “cursed doll” trope here is reminiscent of his homage to the “final girl” trope in his last novel.Įarly in How to Sell a Haunted House, single mother Louise Joyner learns that her parents have died in a car accident not far from her childhood home just outside of Charleston, South Carolina. This freaky terrain is what fascinates Grady Hendrix in his new novel, How to Sell a Haunted House. There is just something deeply unsettling about a realistic, human-like object that comes close to but is not quite human. Being weirded out by dolls has something to do with how humans perceive faces, and how our brains distinguish a someone from a something. Why? Because dolls are creepy! Just ask folks with pediophobia (fear of dolls or inanimate objects that look real) or pupaphobia (fear of puppets and marionettes). Let’s face it: creepy dolls are a trope of the horror genre. Sinister dolls had appeared in movies and television shows long before Chucky arrived on the scene, including in 1978’s “Magic” with Anthony Hopkins and in episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and “Fantasy Island.” More recently, Slappy, the ventriloquist dummy mascot of the Goosebumps franchise, led to a few sleepless nights for my youngest daughter - and, as a result, for me, too. Even before I saw the now-iconic film “Child’s Play” in 1988, I wasn’t fond of dolls or puppets.
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