Puppets + Halloween should equal something right up my alley, but oddly in scary movies it frequently does not. I do love Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, which achieves the exact combination of creepy, cute, and quirky that I’m looking for, but it’s not puppets. Some of the creepy dolls in horror movies are technically puppets, but they are not up my alley at all and I would not go into any alley they were in. My search for that perfect combo of horror aesthetics and narrative with puppet charm and humor has led me through many subgenres of horror puppetry, from early 20^th century ventriloquist dummies and living dolls, to the little rubber monsters of the 1980s, zombie puppet opera, and a cabin in the woods complete with a serial killer who resembles Elmo.

The history of horror movies is full of ventriloquist dummies, Punch and Judy-style marionettes, clown puppets, and uncanny valley dolls. I don’t question this – they are horrifying so it makes perfect sense. The puppets and dolls of the early 20^th century were mostly those types, and the options for visual effects were limited, so of course you ended up with things like Hugo the ventriloquist dummy in Dead of Night (1945) or miniature living dolls played by real people in The Devil-Doll (1936) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958). I tried to like them, but they were always just a combination of disturbing and disappointing for me. I wanted monsters! I wanted creatures of the night! I wanted puppets that I’d actually enjoy looking at while they were freaking me out.

At this point I’m entertained by watching a tiny woman screaming at a giant rotary-dial telephone in classic B-movie fashion or how Mr. Franz, the owner of Dolls Inc., deals with the HR problem of employees trying to leave his company by shrinking them down and forcing them to act out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for him, but when I was younger I just couldn’t get over the total lack of actual puppets in Attack of the Puppet People. He does shrink a black kitten down to the size of a matchbox, which was adorable then and now, but a puppet is an inanimate object given life by human action and by definition the Puppet People contained exactly zero puppets.

The long-running Puppet Master series (1989-present), created by Charles Band and Kenneth J. Hall, does actually have puppets, which are creatively designed but still very much in the terrifying marionette aesthetic. The movies are good campy horror fun, with five core puppet characters created during the WWII era by a master puppet maker named Toulon, who gives life to them using an ancient Egyptian animation formula. One of the puppets is called Pinhead and sports a tiny head on a broad-shouldered body, which is a very different kind of pinhead from Hellraiser (1987). The puppets are dangerous but not necessarily evil, unlike the Demonic Toys which crossed over into Puppet Master from Band’s Demonic Toys series and, naturally, include a clown and a creepy baby doll.

Much more up my alley are the little rubber monster movies of the 1980s, like Gremlins, Ghoulies, Critters, Munchies, and Hobgoblins, which hit that entertaining combination of horror aesthetics and narrative with puppet charm and humor. Steven Kostanski (The Void and Psycho Goreman) also loved those movies and has created a very entertaining new addition to the genre with Frankie Freako (2024). Inspired by an actual 1-900 call-in ad for Freddy Freaker’s Freak Phone from the late 80s , it’s an homage that seems like it might actually have been created in that era. In an attempt to prove that he’s not the boring guy his girlfriend thinks he is, uptight workaholic Conor Sweeney calls a weird party hotline he’s been seeing ads for and ends up unleashing a crew of chaotic little alien party monsters that destroy his house and turn his life upside down. Hijinks ensue.

It was filmed with a tiny crew and the cast is almost entirely Conor Sweeney. Yep, Kostanski gave the character the same name as the actor. At the screening I attended, Sweeney said he thought that was just a placeholder until he eventually realized it wasn’t. He also described how he was mostly acting with weird stuffed animal versions of the creatures staring at him because the animatronic shots were filmed separately. The limitations of the budget it was filmed on actually mesh well with the extremely retro look and feel of the film, and the disturbing genius of the Frankie Freako party line ad and the Xanadu-style costume Conor ends up in when he’s offered up as a consort to their alien ruler make it worth the watch on their own.

Most of the more recent horror-themed puppet movies I’ve come across in my search have tipped heavily towards super violent, which makes sense in horror and gives an opportunity to play with puppet intestines, even if that’s not my favorite thing. It might be yours though, so here are a few of them. Stitches (2023) is a sock puppet horror-comedy directed and filmed by Ian Goodwin in a two-bedroom apartment during COVID, which is impressive and clever but I quit watching because I couldn’t get past the date rape jokes early on. One stand out is Jesse Blanchard’s Puppetcore Frank and Zed (2020) , which is a brilliant but incredibly gory all-puppet tale of two reanimated best friends trying to live a peaceful zombie life in an abandoned castle until a local official tricks the villagers into attacking them. It definitely meets the criteria of Muppety puppets, horror, humor, and heartwarming moments, but wow, is it violent.

What I was really looking for though was a full length movie equivalent of the Dracula musical, A Taste for Love, that Peter (Jason Segel) stages in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which would be more like a Hammer Horror film with atmosphere, pathos, humor, and of course, puppets. In that vein, there was a Night of the Living Dead Puppet Show that Milwaukee-based puppet troupe Angry Young Men, Ltd put on for a number of years, where the living were played by humans and the zombies by puppets. The Milwaukee Opera Theatre commissioned them to turn it into an opera, but they were both live shows so sadly I have only seen clips. They also do sketches on their YouTube channel that have a very Muppet Show horror vibe.

Finally, I found two films that seemed like they might fit the bill, oddly with very similar concepts but executed in quite different ways. Karl Holt’s Benny Loves You (2019) and Lisa Ovies’ Puppet Killer (2019) are both comedy-horror movies about a childhood toy that comes to life when it’s set aside and brutally murders anyone the kid loves as an adult because it wants to be his only friend. Simon in Puppet Killer is an actual muppetish puppet monster with fur the same color as Elmo’s but a much more disturbing face, and Benny is a bright red toy whose communication is limited to his programmed dialogue delivered in an Elmo-esque voice, so “Play with Benny!” and “Okey dokey” get used with very different implications at different times.

Puppet Killer turned out to be the one for me. In addition to it being really well done, I think the main reason is because Puppet Killer is written and directed by a queer Mexican-Canadian woman while Benny is so much from the perspective of a straight white dude who has never learned to do anything for himself but feels like he deserves more and I’m just tired of watching that guy’s story, even with puppets. Benny has a lot of clever moments and tons of puppet action, but there are also a few throwaway casual transphobic and racist lines and Benny’s behaviour reads more like an abuser than a jealous psycho toy that doesn’t quite understand what it’s doing. The scene where Benny ends up in a shootout with the cops is especially well-conceived though, with stuffing flying out of the bullet holes then sticking out as he runs and ending in a headshot that goes right through side to side with a spray of fluff.

Puppet Killer focuses on sweet Jamie, who is traumatized by believing that his beloved puppet, Simon, murdered his stepmother when he was a kid after she threatened to get rid of him. His mother loved horror movies, and he and Simon used to watch full-on slasher flicks with her when he was little, so everyone thinks that’s what traumatized Jamie and it makes sense that Simon has that in his head as a model for behaviour. Jamie and his friends go on a weekend trip to his childhood cabin where Simon is stored in the basement and Jamie tries really hard to balance protecting his friends from Simon with his love for Simon, which adds an emotionally touching layer to the film. It also has a conceit where they’ve cast actors who are very much adults and just have them behave like teenagers, with 17-year-old Jamie played by 49-year-old Aleks Paunovic. Ovies has done a really good job of creating a standard cabin in the woods slasher movie with the puppet twist and really committing to the adult-teenagers making it feel different and clever. The puppet action sticks with things the puppet can be shot doing in a way that really works, and there’s an especially clever scene where Jamie has his hand inside Simon like a regular puppet, which allows the actor to really wrestle with it.

Puppet Killer ends with a classic horror “it’s over…or is it?” shot that sets up a sequel. I hope someday I get to see either that or the entire Universal Studios monster catalogue in puppet musical format.

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Alex MacFadyen is fairly sure he never summoned a demon into any of his childhood toys, but right about now he’s glad they’re in storage rather than in his basement.