Murderous Mannequin

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    In another minute, these are going to burst through the shop window and start killing people...


    A sister trope to Demonic Dummy, the Murderous Mannequin is a clothing mannequin brought to life and sent to kill. Like Mecha-Mooks, a hero can be shown cutting down swathes of these without moral qualm as they are 'not truly alive.'

    See also Creepy Doll, Demonic Dummy, Perverse Puppet.

    Examples of Murderous Mannequin include:

    Advertising

    • There was an ad for Levis where guy buys a pair of Levi's jeans off a mannequin in a store. Mannequin proceeds to follow him home, lurks creepily outside his house... and the last shot is the mannequin's shadow sloooooowly moving over the guy's sleeping form.

    Anime and Manga

    • Flame of Recca , though it was a surprise. The heroes came upon a beautiful woman and her small doll, who were able to use strings to restrain and kill their enemies. One of them realized that the woman never bled, and so figured out instead of the woman making the doll talk, the doll was actually a little girl, using one of the magical artifacts to give the mannequin life. Cue tragic backstory.
    • One of Junji Ito's short stories was about an artist who made headless mannequins (though his reason was for people to appreciate the body-language, not the face). Then his creations came to life, began killing people, and placing the victims' heads on their necks. Yeah.

    Comic Books

    • There's a pulp comic called "Mannequin of Murder" in which a guy invents a serum to freeze people into mannequins. This is intended as a form of And I Must Scream torture, but they eventually come back to zombie-esque life and kill their creator. Then they go back to posing, get shipped all over America, and start going on killing sprees after dark.
    • Brother Power The Geek in The DCU is a heroic version of this, although he turned pretty creepy when Neil Gaiman decided to play with the concept. He appeared again in The Brave and the Bold (revival) #29 where he was more of a kind Frankenstein's monster who disappeared under the sewers after saving a child from a fire.
    • Nathan Dolly, from Spider-Woman, managed to transfer his essence into two mannequins and used them to commit several crimes.

    Film

    • A horror short from 1980 called Living Dolls.

    Live Action TV

    • The Auton animated shop dummies from Doctor Who are the preferred footsoldiers of the plastic-controlling Nestenes whenever they visit Earth.
    • A witch animates mannequins as minions in the Kolchak the Night Stalker episode "The Trevi Collection".
    • The Twilight Zone episode "The After Hours". This angle is played up throughout the episode, although it's somewhat averted at the end when it's revealed that the main character is a mannequin who got the chance to experience human life, and now it's another mannequin's turn.
    • A Yandere one appeared in an episode of Tales from the Darkside.
    • In the Supernatural episode "Mannequin 3: The Reckoning", the Monster of the Week possesses mannequins to kill its victims. It sure was lucky that all of its targets happened to work with mannequins or use sex dolls, though.
    • A subversion in the recurring sketch on Mad TV featuring a psychotic murderer who everyone (except the Only Sane Man) thought was just a mannequin because he would stand really still whenever anyone was looking directly at him. Anyone else who eventually noticed the mannequin kept changing positions would come to the conclusion the Only Sane Man must have been the one to move it and kill all those people for whatever reason.
    • This might be the best way to explain the puppet versions of previous Super Sentai teams unleashed by Basco in Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger. They basically reanimate previous teams powers in the form of keys, who then become life size. There's no person in the suit, and yet they're trying to attack.

    Video Games

    • The Mannequins in Silent Hill 2. They look a bit a bit different than most mannequins, though.
      • Subverted in SH3—those who played SH2 would expect something from a mannequin conspicuously framed and lit in the center of a room that must be crossed in order to get an item...
    • Subverted in Condemned. Though several mannequins appear to follow you around in the department store level, even completely encircling you when you fall into a dark pit, they never actually attack you.
      • However, there are crazy homeless mannequin impersonators on that level, who will attack you.
    • In the Fort Frolic level of BioShock (series), you see what appear to be mannequins all around the place, though it becomes pretty obvious that they're actually Splicers who have been killed, coated in plaster and posed around the place by Sander Cohen. Even worse, some of them aren't dead.
    • Subverted in the Half-Life 2 mod Nightmare House 2, which has you spending one level with a lot of mannequins - which multiply and come closer when you do not look at them, but do not attack. You then encounter a SWAT officer knocking on a window from another room and using gestures to show you where to go. When you get to the place where he was, there is just a mannequin.
    • After mannequins were added as furniture for player houses in Final Fantasy XI, they eventually started to be added as rare special enemies too.

    Western Animation

    Web Comics

    Web Original

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