Killer dolls

Killer dolls are... uhh... dolls that kill. Typically, killer dolls are either possessed by a demonic essence or in some way infused with the spirit of a deceased person.

Child's Play
In horror fiction, the most well-known killer doll is Charles Lee Ray, better known as Chucky from the Child's Play film franchise. In the first film, Charles Lee Ray was a Chicago serial killer who was gunned down in a police shoot-out. To save himself from dying, Ray performed a voodoo ritual that transposed his spirit into that of a Good Guy doll. The doll later came into the possession of a young boy named Andy Barclay. Chucky, having no desire to spend the rest of his life trapped inside of a doll, tried to reenact the ritual to place his soul into Andy's body, but was forced to kill several people in order to accomplish this. Ultimately, Chucky never succeeded in claiming Andy and was destroyed and rebuilt several times over. Ten years after his last murder attempt, Chucky was renewed by a former lover named Tiffany. To insure Tiffany's compliance in his schemes (and to get her back for mistreating him), Chucky performed the ritual on her, trapping Tiffany's soul inside of a wedding bride doll. Chucky and Tiffany then killed several more people as they tried to recover an amulet required to turn them back to normal, but ultimately turned on one another. Through a means that no one can explain, Chucky somehow inpregnated Tiffany and she gave birth to a baby doll. The sadistic parents disagreed on the gender of their bizarre offspring with Chucky identifying him as a son named Glen, while Tiffany preferred to think of it as a young girl, which she named Glenda.

Child's Play film series

 * Child's Play (1988)
 * Child's Play 2 (1990)
 * Child's Play 3 (1991)
 * Bride of Chucky (1998)
 * Seed of Chucky (2004)

Other films
The killer doll motif in modern horror began with the 1987 film Dolls, directed by Stuart Gordon. In the film, an elderly couple named Gabriel and Hilary Hartwicke are both witches whose house is filled with various ornate dolls and toys of their own design. They have taken to killing those whom they deem amoral and placing a curse upon their souls, which transposes them into the dolls in their house as punishment for their crimes. When a group of travelers spend the night in the Hartwicke household, the dolls take to torturing and killing those whom they believe to be unworthy of life.

Notes & Trivia

 * Despite the title of the franchise, the antagonists featured in the Puppet Master film series are actually dolls and not puppets.