KILLER DOLLS

[Amanda Stevens]

Some weeks back, I guest-blogged on another site about a concept known as spontaneous generation—the likelihood of people exposed to the same mass media stimuli coming up with the same idea. This theory can explain why two movies with the same premise can be released by two different studios at virtually the same time. Armageddon and Deep Impact, for example.
I've now experienced this phenomenon firsthand. The idea for The Dollmaker was inspired by a 'twin' doll catalog and by the old Vincent Price horror classic House of Wax (not to be confused with the Paris Hilton version). I had the premise in my head for years before I actually wrote and sold the book.

It came out in March, along with two horror movies featuring dolls—The Abandoned and Dead Silence. And I saw a third doll movie on TV that month—The Perfect Prey—about a killer who collects antiques dolls. The CSI shows have also jumped on the doll band wagon with CSI: New York’s “City of the Dolls” and CSI: Las Vegas’s “Living Doll”(season finale). To cap it off, Jeffrey Deaver's next thriller is entitled The Sleeping Doll, although I don’t believe it’s actually about dolls.

So what is the deal with all these dolls lately? Spontaneous generation or just some weird coincidence?

[Amanda Stevens]

I guess people have always been fascinated (or repulsed) by dolls. I just never noticed how popular they were until my book came out. All of a sudden, they were everywhere!

[Angela Wilson]

That's hilarious! I remember an old Twilight Zone about dolls (I'm 32, so it was a second-generation TZ, which lasted about a season). This doll would "wake up" at night and murder people. Scared the kageebies out of me. (I was little, like under 10.) I had porcelain dolls in my closet top shelf and was terrified of them after dark. There was also the old one - Rod Sterling time - when the dolls in the doll house came alive. Creepy, but not as scary as the other one to me.

Remember Chucky?

It seems like dolls have a resurgence every few years or so. I wonder if there is a Web site out there to track it?