Editorials
Before Annabelle and Chucky, We Met Talky Tina in “The Twilight Zone”
On the surface, nothing should be easier than making a killer doll story. After all, you’re taking something so innocent, so comforting that we give it to children to help them sleep, and making it evil. The juxtaposition alone does most of a horror writer’s work for them.
But when the initial spine shivers stop and the brain’s logic facilities kick in, the concept falls apart. Why would a grown adult be scared of a 30” toy? No matter how angry it gets, it’s still made of plastic or porcelain. How much harm could it do with those teeny-tiny toy hands?
Simply put, a good killer doll story is more than just child’s play. It takes a top-notch storyteller to keep the idea of the monster scary, without letting its physical limitations become apparent.
A number of horror movies have done just that, particularly the Child’s Play and Annabelle franchises, but they all build off the groundwork laid by the 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone, “Living Doll.”
Directed by Richard C. Sarafain, from Jerry Sohl’s adaptation of Charles Beaumont’s short story, “Living Doll” contains none of the philosophical moralizing for which The Twilight Zone is best known (unless you count “don’t be mean to kids” as a moral). Instead, it tells a straightforward scary story about the titular doll, bought by loving mother Annabelle Streator (Mary LaRoche) for her daughter Christie (Tracy Stratford) to help the girl cope with her overbearing new step-dad Erich (Telly Savalas). When Christie and Annabelle are around, Talky Tina waves her arms, shakes her head, and recites her signature phrase, “My name is Talky Tina and I love you very much.” But when the cruel Erich gets alone with her, Tina trades adoration for admonition, warning him “My name is Talky Tina and I’m going to kill you.”
Despite his attempts, Erich cannot convince his family of the doll’s threats, nor can he dispose of her. Every time he thinks he’s destroyed her, Tina appears again in Christie’s bed.
Lacking the special effect budgets enjoyed by modern filmmakers and saddled with the standards & practices restrictions of late-60s network TV, Sarafain cannot overtly show Talky Tina’s menace. Even when she kills Erich by laying on the staircase and tripping him as he walks down, the moment lacks the punch of, say, a babysitter falling through the window in the original Child’s Play.
That scene ends with the camera holding on Erich laying at the bottom of the stairwell, Tina next to him, her empty eyes watching without blinking as his eyes go blank. He knows that she did it on purpose. He always knew she would.
As that moment demonstrates, Sarafain made Talky Tina a credible monster by showing us how much Erich fears her. Much of the credit here goes to Savalas, who stuffs his hulking frame into a casual white shirt and slacks, like a mob heavy masquerading as a suburban dad. He layers every line with a brutal belligerence, so that the audience thinks he’s one glance away from physically assaulting his family, even in his few moments of kindness toward them.
With such an imposing victim, “Living Doll” wisely avoids trying to make Tina look scary, giving her an angry sneer or delivering her lines with a growl. Instead, legendary voice actor June Foray reads Tina’s threats with the same sing-song sweetness as she does her declarations of love. She may turn her head or open her eyes, but her facial expressions never change. When she tells Erich, “You can’t hurt me, but I can hurt you,” she does it with the same bright smile she always wears, because killing Erich is just another part of her playtime.
Of course, Tina doesn’t have to change her appearance because the story makes the doll itself just the focus of larger turmoil. From the gloomy cello episode composer Bernard Herrmann laces under the opening shot, a simple image of Annabelle bringing packages into the suburban Streator home, we know there’s something wrong. Tensions between the resentful Erich, who feels insecure about his inability to conceive a child with Annabelle, and the family he bullies create unease even before Tina begins acting strangely. The mistrust he’s sown makes it easier to understand why Annabelle would doubt him, even as he demands she believe his fear of the doll. Talky Tina doesn’t need to orchestrate fatal accidents or leave creepy notes to bring down Erich; she just needs to make him doubt his own sanity – doubts his family shares.
Tina’s aided in her machinations with powers that make her more than an evil doll. Not only can Tina move her head and open her eyes by herself, her internal gears turning with an otherworldly hum, but she’s also nearly invincible. When Erich tries to set her ablaze, his fire puffs out. Taking a circular saw to Tina’s head produces showers of sparks, but no cuts on her neck. Tina can even call Erich to taunt him on the phone. The big and brutal Erich becomes an impotent weakling when facing the power manifested in Talky Tina.
Later filmmakers like Tom Holland, Don Mancini, and James Wan might have had more effects and gore to work with, but one can see them following this episode’s lead. When Chucky makes troubled little Andy the prime suspect of his crimes, or when Annabelle teleports from a dumpster to two nurses’ apartment, we hear the echo of a voice we’ve heard before.
It all started with Talky Tina.
The great Ernest Dickerson turns seventy-five years old this month, so we’re looking back at his most memorable contribution to the horror genre – 1995’s Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight!
The film hit screens while the Tales from the Crypt series was winding down its run on television, and it stands apart with a story that feels a step or two removed from the franchise norm. That was the smart play, though, as the show’s stories – and those from the original EC comics – work best in short bites. The result is a film that holds up beautifully as a gory good time.
Now keep reading to see what I heard on the commentary for…
Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995)
Commentator: Ernest Dickerson (director), Michael Felsher (moderator)
1. Dickerson was in post-production on Surviving the Game when he got a call from his agent saying that producer Gil Adler wanted to meet about a Tales from the Crypt feature film. It went well, so Dickerson met with Joel Silver next and secured the job.
2. The original screenplay for the film came to the producers as a spec script wholly detached from the Tales from the Crypt brand. They added the Crypt Keeper (voiced by John Kassir) bookends to make it fit.
3. Dickerson was more familiar with the original EC comic books having read them as a kid, but he had watched a few episodes of the HBO series, so he knew what the current vibe was for the project.
4. Adler directed the film’s wraparound segments, meaning Dickerson never actually got to work with the creepy puppet. “Gil and the Crypt Keeper had a great relationship,” he adds, “they worked together for years.”
5. While he was new to the Tales from the Crypt family, Dickerson had previously worked as a director of photography on the Tales from the Darkside anthology series. That show is underappreciated in my humble opinion, and I will go to bat for both it and the equally underloved Monsters.
6. A big appeal of the horror genre for Dickerson is the idea of dark mysteries that challenge our imagination. For this film, that came down to the mythology being created between the characters.
7. Five executive producers are listed in the opening credits, but Dickerson says the only two he had dealings with were Silver and Richard Donner. The other three were Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and David Giler.
8. Dickerson had only ever seen Billy Zane in movies with a full head of hair, so he was surprised when Zane showed up on the first day with a bald head. “He had this case, and he opened up the case that he had all these hair pieces in, and he says, ‘So which one of these do you think I should use?’” Dickerson looked at him and suggested he just go bald for the character.
9. While the bulk of the opening exteriors were filmed in a desert just outside Los Angeles, the shot of the old church at 11:26 was created on a warehouse hangar soundstage where the film’s interiors were shot.
10. When he had read the script, Dickerson pictured the character of Jeryline (Jada Pinkett Smith) “as a little, tough lady.” He had recently seen Smith in Menace II Society, and while the producers had someone else in mind for the role, he fought to get her instead.
11. Just as Zane surprised Dickerson with his hair (or lack thereof), Smith arrived on the first day with her hair dyed platinum white. He “liked the idea” but asked her to please get it tweaked so it looked more yellowish blond. “It’s definitely a statement.”
12. He had seen Brenda Bakke in the 1989 sci-fi/action film from Japan, Gunhed, and thought she’d be great here as Cordelia. The rest of us might recognize her from Death Spa or Trucks.
13. Felsher comments that the film’s setup does a good job not telegraphing who’s going to live or die, and he uses the “nice guy” (Charles Fleischer) and “the kid” (Ryan O’Donohue) as examples. “You don’t play by those rules here,” he says, and Dickerson replies that he wanted to subvert those rules. That extends to Smith as well because she’s Black, “and usually in movies like this they’re the first folks to die.”
14. Dickerson says they had forty days of filming, “which, the way I’m used to working, was a very generous schedule.” It was budgeted at around $10 million.
15. This probably won’t surprise you, but Zane improvised the bit at 26:25 after he jumps out the window and says, “Fuck this cowboy shit! You fuckin’, hodunk Podunk, well, then, motherfuckers!”
16. In the original script, the demons that The Collector (Zane) raises from the dirt actually looked more like the people they used to be. “They were more human,” but the very smart decision was made in pre-production to make them look far more unique instead.
17. The demons are killed by shooting their eyes, but Dickerson felt there should be one more element to it. “Shoot out their eyes, you gotta duck because the souls come shooting out, and if it hits ya, boom, it can kill ya.” This is a fun touch.
18. He’s been asked more than once if these demons are where Peter Jackson got the idea for how the orcs would look in his Lord of the Rings movies. “They do look like orcs.”
19. He recalls having seen Ronny Yu’s The Bride with White Hair shortly before going to work on Demon Knight, and he hoped to bring some of that staged style into his own film. An example of that in practice is Brayker’s (William Sadler) brief flashbacks to Christ on the cross.
20. Character deaths were mostly based on the idea that “each person’s downfall was going to be predicated by their weakness.” The Collector discovers someone’s weakness and then uses it against them. Cordelia wants to be loved, Jeryline wants to travel, Uncle Willy (Dick Miller) is a horndog for both liquor and ladies, Danny loves horror comics, etc.
21. Dickerson says that plenty of genre classics were in the back of his head while making the film, including Assault on Precinct 13, Alien, Aliens, and more.
22. Cordelia is possessed into a demonic form, and Dickerson’s idea for how she’d look was originally a bit different. “Since Cordelia was a prostitute, I thought that her mouth should actually be a vertical slit that was in her stomach… which would open up with teeth and a tongue.” It was nixed, he says, when “the wife of one of the producers read that and said ‘no way you’re putting that in the movie.’”
23. The key makes an appearance in the followup, Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood, but it wasn’t originally meant to. Apparently, early test audiences expected it to be a more connected sequel to Demon Knight, so the filmmakers added it in to appease them. This is where I go on record saying that Bordello of Blood is a fun time. Can’t touch Demon Knight, obviously, but it’s more entertaining than its reputation suggests.
24. They had to film Uncle Willy’s bar scene “dream” twice, once with the women topless and once with them in bikinis, to have versions for both theaters and television broadcast. “Dick’s a pro.” (To be fair, Dickerson says this in regard to Miller having to endure the makeup application, but the sentiment fits both situations, so…)
25. Dickerson says he’s “always amazed at the love that people show this film,” and adds that fans bring it up to him incredibly often. This is great to hear, as we should always be telling artists how much their work means to us while they’re still alive and able to hear it.
26. Zane also suggested the gag at 1:08:21 with the sponge coming out of his mouth. The beat reminds Dickerson to praise the actor even more, adding that he was an “ally” to the director when “bad ideas” came down from the studio suits.
27. He didn’t get any pushback on killing little Danny. He did insist on one added element, though, as he wanted to immediately follow the boy exploding in the air with a shot of his bloody and torn sneaker hitting the ground below. “And the sneaker had to be a hightop.”
28. Dickerson says there’s “something kinky sexy about” Smith being covered in blood, and then the two commentators go quiet for almost two minutes out of respect for the scene. It’s a good opportunity to reflect on how Dickerson had previously mentioned Alien and Aliens as films being in the back of his head during filming, and how two scenes here reflect that – Jeryline stripping down to her underwear for the final confrontation feels like a nod to Ridley Scott’s film, while an earlier scene with Irene (CCH Pounder) and Dep. Bob (Gary Farmer) realizing they’re surrounded and choosing to blow themselves up alongside some of the demons is something of a callback to the air vent sacrifice in James Cameron’s film.
29. Asked about the film’s critical reception at the time of release, Dickerson says it received good reviews from horror-loving critics and then talks about the importance of horror in general. “Horror has always been a great way of putting out ideas, of talking about some of the things that affect us as people. Some of the best horror, like the best science fiction, talks about what it’s like to be human. Some of the best horror gets very political.”
30. The original ending would have featured The Collector showing “his true self, which is a demon made of fire.” They spent a lot of time trying to make it work, but it was “extremely difficult… back in the day of analog effects.” It was rewritten into the faceoff between him and Jeryline featuring the dancing, the crotch fire, Zane’s attempts at saying “love,” and his eventual demise from her bloody spit.
31. They both agree that a direct sequel to Demon Knight could be a lot of fun, but Dickerson says he’s unaware of any talk on the possibility.
32. Dickerson was super excited about this new Scream Factory Blu-ray in 2015, and he mentions that before its release, he had imported a Blu-ray from Germany presumably to enjoy the film in HD. He’s just like us! (Or am I the only one here who’s imported a German Blu-ray of the much maligned werewolf flick Big Bad Wolf…)
Quotes Without Context
“I was so happy to get Dick Miller for this movie.”
“There was a time when guys used to put ketchup on everything.”
“I’m a big student of Hitchcock, and the best way to make a moment of horror work is to lull the audience into a false sense of security.”
“A villain should always be the most interesting person in a movie.”
“They were a really great bunch of performers who were performing on these little leg-extension stilts wearing a diaper that had a radio-controlled tail that was being manipulated by a special effects tech right out of the frame.”
“It’s hard to direct air; it doesn’t do what you want.”
“The only censorship problem came from the producer’s wife, who didn’t want the vagina dentalis [sic] in the movie.”
“One of the executives wanted to know why the devil didn’t try to have sex with Jada.”
“It always starts with the script.”
Keep up with more horror commentary breakdowns here.
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