There are horror movies that are objectively good, but not necessarily tonally appropriate for throwing on near Halloween. Then there are movies that play things relatively safe, but ooze Halloweeny vibes. Dolly firmly, unabashedly belongs in the latter. Shot in 16mm, fuzz and scratches galore. Credits appear in chunky font that feels ripped straight from the cover of a Stephen King novel he doesn’t remember writing. I sat in my theater, bathed in a warm glow of text so red and soft you wanna hug it. I was sold from the very beginning. All scored by Nick Bohun (Creep Box) with a phenomenal series of late 70s horror synth drone tracks.
A trailer I found on YouTube sold Dolly to me as a Shudder-funded indie horror movie with a Film Threat review claiming it’s “The scariest movie yet in the great chainsaw massacre tradition.” I haven’t stumbled across a slasher pitch that appealing since In A Violent Nature, and that knocked my socks off. I damn near punched the air when I realized IAVN2 had a trailer before Dolly.
I may not have seen past the first thirty minutes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but I am firmly in the target demographic for Dolly. I’m in my thirties, a movie dork, and would rather watch ten 3.5/5 Shudder Originals trying something funky than one four-quadrant mega-franchise horror movie.
After all: it’s horror. It should have the guts to do weird shit, on occasion.
Dolly lives for the weird shit. For better or worse.
What is Dolly?
At its heart, Dolly is simple. Macy (Fabianne Therese) is about to go hiking because her smoking hot boyfriend Chase (Sean William Scott) wants to propose somewhere majestic. As they drop off his low-maintenance daughter, Macy shares some foreshadowing-laden dialog about not being ready to be a mother. Then, in Chase’s perfect condition totally-not-rented antique muscle car, the two race off to get the movie started.
The titular Dolly is a Michael Meyers-esque nonverbal woman living in the woods. Dolly’s strong, has a ceramic doll head mask permanently bonded to her neck, and just wants a doll to raise. The marketable celebrity gets a shovel through his jaw, Macy is knocked unconscious, and the actual horror can begin.
What follows is a rip-roaring hour of Macy dressed up as a doll in a house full of ceramic dolls dealing with Dolly herself. At times uneasy alliances form as Macy plays along with the baby roleplay Dolly clearly desires. At times she actively tries to kill Dolly. What truly grabs me about the house sections of the movie is the deft commitment to Rules.
A horror movie lives and dies by its internal consistency. Sure, a hulking Voorhees with a machete or an unkillable doll like Chucky are scary at first. But once you learn the rules dictating how they act, the audience mentally shifts gears. An able-bodied person standing in a field could drop-kick Chucky easily and beat the snot out of him. He’s not actually a threat. The fun and frights of Chucky lie in all the contrivances that keep happening to trip you up (literally and figuratively).
75% of the horror in The Thing is knowing the rules of how the Thing works. It takes a ballsy movie to just tell you the rules of the thing from the start. Whether or not your horror villain is interesting or not lives and dies by how they hold up after the audience knows the rules. This is where Dolly thrives, because her situation is inherently simple by design. She wants a doll to take care of. She treats Macy like a doll. She hates men, for reasons provided by Ethan Suplee later in the movie.
Dead by Daylight fans will find a lot of similarities between The Huntress and Dolly. Both are muscle-bound women surviving alone in the woods, desperate to raise a child but with such a warped understanding from having lived wholly alone they’re incapable of actually taking care of one. So their kids keep dying. Dolly is stuck in an infinite loop of finding victims who either die or escape because playing along as her doll will eventually kill you through malnutrition or sheer violence.
Macy makes for an enjoyable flawed protagonist. She makes some boneheaded decisions, but they’re earnest mistakes. She also takes the shots that 90% of slasher final girls never take. She bites, stabs, kicks, screams, and claws her way through the movie. She’ll play by Dolly’s rules on occasion but at no point is she Stockholm’d into empathizing.
And Dolly just keeps on kicking. Max the Impaler is undeniable in the role. I came into this movie having only briefly seen a trailer. The opening shots show Dolly trying to keep her daily play up with the doll before Macy. We’re tuning in to end of a much more bummer movie in which Dolly decapitated a kid at some point and hasn’t found fresh meat to replace that doll (yet). There is gravitas and presence to Dolly in a way that makes her distinct as a character even when you can’t see the mask. There are slasher villains that can have anybody in the suit and it doesn’t matter. If you replaced Max the Impaler in Dolly 2 their presence would be missed immediately.
I’m going to move into a section discussing the more sensitive topics broached, but in the interest of not giving away spoilers I’ll do a mini-conclusion here: if the idea of a Shudder-funded indie horror movie shot on 16mm film in Tennessee appeals to you in the slightest, you’ll have fun with this. It gets gory enough to make you squirm in your seat at times. It gets uncomfortable enough to earn that Chainsaw Massacre review blurb without touching cannibalism a single time.
It’s not perfect, but it’s not trying to be. It’s clearly some horror nerds slamming the basic building blocks of what they love together to try and produce something fun and just profitable enough to get a sequel. They’re confident enough in that part they poke fun at the inevitability of a Dolly 2 in the credits.
The Rough Stuff.
Time to talk about the other side of “Dolly lives for the weird shit.”
Dolly’s nonverbal, has several meltdowns, and clearly gets overstimulated. There’s a genuine argument to be made for her being autistic. Ring the bell, we’ve got a classic mind-of-a-child abused slasher. A trope so tired Behaviour Interactive used it for their second ever killer (The Hillbilly, their knockoff Leatherface) back in 2016. Which itself is damning, because Dead by Daylight is basically a house of cards built out of basic horror cliche. Every movie is going to have one aspect you can relate to DBD, but several is where things get a little shaky.
The one redeeming quality of this lies in the in-movie marketing. It’s clear Dolly herself was never actually going to be explained in any significant detail. Hints are dropped up until a character confirms, out loud, to have abused her. It comes to nothing, because you have to be just vague enough to leave lore for Dolly 2, after all. The sequel where we’re on her side by the end of it.
In addition to the neurodivergent-coded slasher, you got your threats of sexual violence towards Macy. You got your grindhouse-y technically-not-sexual-but-absolutely-sexual scenes. Chief among them being the scene where, after pissing herself, Macy lays on a table silently crying with a pacifier in her mouth while Dolly puts a new diaper on her. Oh, and of course the scene where Dolly punishes Macy with a spanking by wooden paddle.
Like I said earlier: horror movies live to get weird with it. But there’s a vibe to watching Dolly cold. Almost like it’s written by a horror nerd who is aware of ABDL kink play but only knows through cultural osmosis. Kind of like how occasionally you’ll get a horror villain whose big twist is they’re a cross-dresser, because the writer vaguely knows trans people exist but only through stereotypes and old movies.
All of which amounts to scenes near the end where it feels like the script thinks it’s sayin’ something, man. Scenes that insist they are profound, but very little is actually happning besides you nodding politely. Uh-huh, that’s a doll being birthed out of another doll. Got it.
Birth canal imagery? How bold.
I enjoyed Dolly. I will buy the Dolly steelbook if Shudder puts one out in a few months. But Dolly is absolutely one of those movies where occasionally a shot lingers too long and you can feel there’s something pithy and English 301-y in the screenplay arguing it’s poignant as hell. None of which comes through in the actual shot.
Final Thoughts
If the previous section didn’t shake you off, go see Dolly. It’s fun, it doesn’t partake of cheap loud-noise jumpscares. It saves its pennies for truly grotesque gore visual effects (practical and impressive computer composites). What rough edges it does have (I genuinely think there are scenes that use bad shots to cover for the fact they didn’t get b-roll of the thing a character is talking about) are easily excused. If you are deep enough into horror you find charm in lower-budget affairs that try something while playing around in a sandbox of old tropes, you’ll have a heck of a time.
I sincerely hope they shot behind-the-scenes footage of this and record a director’s commentary. I’ll eat that up with a spoon.
It’s tightly-contained, wears its bloody heart on its sleeve, and builds something delightfully indie I would love to throw on during a horror movie marathon in a cabin in the woods.
Yes, I’ve done that multiple times.
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