‘The Boy’ Trailer: ‘The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan Babysits a Creepy Doll
As horror films have taught us for decades, dolls can be downright terrifying: the clown in Poltergeist, for instance, or the dolls in James Wan’s films The Conjuring and Dead Silence. We can now add another film to the creepy doll horror sub-genre with The Boy, the new movie from the director of The Devil Inside, starring The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan (aka Maggie).
The first trailer for The Boy has arrived and it offers an interesting, chilling concept: a British couple hires a young American nanny to care for their son, but there’s just one catch — he’s a spooky little porcelain doll. As trailers (especially for horror films) often do, this one appears to hit every major plot beat, leaving very little to the imagination. The Devil Inside was kind of (okay — really) a letdown, but The Boy has some potential with the inherent creepiness of dolls, although it seems like overkill to make the doll look so overtly unsettling.
Here’s the official description:
Greta (Cohan) is a young American woman who takes a job as a nanny in a remote English village, only to discover that the family’s 8-year-old is a life-sized doll that the parents care for just like a real boy, as a way to cope with the death of their actual son 20 years prior. After violating a list of strict rules, a series of disturbing and inexplicable events bring Greta’s worst nightmare to life, leading her to believe that the doll is actually alive.
The idea of using a doll to cope with a real loved one’s death is not unheard of — there are websites that offer baby dolls to women coping with the sudden death of an infant, which may seem a little creepy to the average human, but has indeed proven itself marketable.
The Boy hits theaters on January 22, 2016.