Presenting a little girl with a doll will eventually be regarded as an act of child abuse. There is no scarier prop in the horror movie genre and I wouldn’t have one in the house for all the farms in Cuba. This is the prequel to the 2014 movie, providing for fright-fans the back-story of the eponymous doll with the painted face and frilly dress. Samuel Mullins (Anthony LaPaglia), a dollmaker, and his wife Esther (Miranda Otto) live in one of those gothic timber houses in the middle of nowhere that you would have to be bonkers to set foot in. Twelve years ago their young daughter was killed and her room is now boarded up, with her demonically possessed doll inside it.
Four orphaned girls and a cute nun arrive to gratefully take up the residency offered them by the lonely couple. One of the kids, Janice (Talitha Eliana Bateman), has had polio and needs a metal walking stick to get around. It is to her that creepy things start to happen. The build-up in tension is measured but effective, so it is genuinely unsettling when Janice first encounters Annabelle. Suspense is added layer by layer as all of the girls are made aware of the malevolent spirit that threatens them (including a scarecrow in the barn that weirded me out totally). On top of that, there is the mystery of what part Samuel and the bed-ridden Esther might be playing in the dark shenanigans. As you would expect from schlock-horror aimed primarily at teens, subtlety is abandoned in the latter stages as the evil that inhabits the home goes berko in its hunt for souls to devour. There is a pronounced religiosity (in the form of Catholicism and crucifixes) included in the drama that might have been done without, but the heart-stopping moments are perfectly executed, even when you can see them coming – anticipation is half the fun. The ending jumps alarmingly into the realm of the psychotic, promising macabre sequels.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
