OK. I admit it. I’m automatonophobic.
I don’t think I have many irrational fears. I don’t like snakes, and am certainly a bit frightened of them, but there’s nothing irrational about that. They’re nasty and likely to be poisonous. I don’t like slugs either, especially when they eat things in my garden. They’re unpleasant but easy to deal with and I’m not at all scared of them. Likewise spiders and insects.
But ventriloquists’ dummies give me nightmares every time.
When I was a little boy my grandfather took me to the Spanish City in Whitley Bay. There was an amusement arcade there and one of the attractions was thing called The Laughing Sailor. You put a penny in the slot and a hideous automaton – very similar to the dummy a ventriloquist might use, except in mock-nautical attire – began to lurch backwards and forwards, flailing its arms, staring maniacally and emitting a loud mechanical cackle that was supposed to represent a laugh. The minute it started doing its turn I burst into tears and ran screaming out of the building. I’ve hated such things ever since.
The anxiety that these objects induce has now been given a name: automatonophobia, which is defined as “a persistent, abnormal, and unwarranted fear of ventriloquist’s dummies, animatronic creatures or wax statues”. Abnormal? No way. They’re simply horrible.
I’m clearly not the only one who thinks so, because there was an article in The Independent a few years ago by Neil Norman that exactly expressed the fear and loathing I feel about these creepy little dolls. Feature films including Magic and Dead of Night, and episodes of The Twilight Zone and Hammer House of Horror have taken it further by playing with the idea that a ventriloquist’s dummy has been possessed by some sort of malign power which uses it to wreak terror on those around.
We’re not talking about a benign wooden doll like Pinocchio who metamorphoses into a real boy; we’re talking about a ghastly staring-faced mannequin that is brought to life by its operator, the ventriloquist, by inserting his hand up its backside. The dummy never looks human, but can speak and displays some human traits, usually nasty ones. The essence of a ventriloquist act is to generate the illusion that one is watching two personalities sparring with each other when in reality the two voices are coming from the same person. Schizophrenia here we come.
It must be very clever to be able to throw your voice, but I always had the nagging suspicion that ventriloquists use dummies to express the things they find it difficult to say through their own mouth, and so to give life to their darkest thoughts.
Best of all the attempts to realise the sinister potential of this relationship in a movie is the “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” episode, directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, in Dead of Night, the 1945 portmanteau that some regard as Britain’s greatest horror film. Here is the part that tells the tale of Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist being sweatily possessed by the spirit of his malevolent dummy, Hugo. It’s old and creaky, but I find it absolutely terrifying.
So what is it about these man-child mannequins – they are always male – that makes them so creepy? First, there is their appearance: the mad, swivelling, psychotic eyes beneath arched eyebrows and that crude parody of a mouth (with painted teeth) that opens and shuts with a mechanical sound like a trap. Then there are the badly articulated limbs, like those of a dead thing. When at rest, their eyes remain open, their mouths fixed in a diabolic grimace. Moreover, with their rouged cheeks, lurid red lips and unnatural eyelashes, all ventriloquist’s dummies look like the badly embalmed corpses of small boys. And they always end up sitting on the knee of a horrible pervert. Necrophilia and paedophilia all in one sick package. Yuck.
Worst of all, perhaps, is the voice. The high-pitched squawk that emerges is one of the most unpleasant sounds a human being can make. Even if you find it tolerable when you know that it comes from the ventriloquist, the last thing you want is the dummy to start talking on its own.
I started writing this with the cathartic intention of exorcising the demon that appears whenever I see one of these wretched things. It didn’t work. However, I have now decided to take my mind off this track with a change of thread. Here’s a little quiz. I wonder if anyone can spot the connection between this post and the history of cosmology?
Alternatively, if you’re brave, you could try a bit of catharsis of your own and reveal your worst phobias through the comments box…
In the Dark 