Rod Blackhurst’s Dolly is the kind of horror movie that sneaks into your bones and makes you feel unsafe even in broad daylight. Filmed on Super 16mm, it’s a gritty, grain-soaked nightmare that feels unearthed from some cursed VHS bin, yet it pulses with fresh, feral energy. A love letter to Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the new French Extremity, Dolly doesn’t just borrow from its influences; it weaponizes them.
The story unfolds in unsettling chapters, each one escalating the dread. It begins with an eerie domestic prologue: Seann William Scott, continuing his fascinating comeback from The Righteous Gemstones, plays a dad in a sequence that lulls us with old country music before snapping the tone in half. By the time Chapter 1 ends, you’ve already muttered “holy shit” under your breath.
Enter Dolly. Played by professional wrestler Max the Impaler, in their first-ever screen role, the film’s titular monster is unforgettable. Imagine a female Leatherface in blood-red garb, crossed with a raggedy Ann doll and a psychotic Santa Claus. The porcelain mask, weathered, cracked, missing one eye, with sickly blond strands pushing out of the scalp, is pure nightmare fuel. Dolly doesn’t just kill; she plays. Victims are tossed, choked, toyed with like broken dolls before being finished off. The performance is physical, terrifying, and oddly tragic, just as Blackhurst intended.
Chapter 3 delivers one of the film’s wildest turns: Dolly’s house. It’s a literal dollhouse in the woods, its wallpaper out of a fairy tale gone rancid, complete with cribs, prams, and a music box that flickers sound in and out like a ghostly metronome. A man hidden on the other side of a wall warns Macy (a stellar Fabianne Therese) that “playing along” might be the only way to survive. From there, Dolly spirals into a delirious carnival of grotesque imagery: rooms of candles, dolls, and corpses that recall Toy Story’s Sid if he’d shared a basement with Dahmer.
Blackhurst’s camera closes in mercilessly, creating a suffocating sense of claustrophobia. The makeup effects are standouts, particularly a face-flayed survivor crawling through the woods, a blend of prosthetics and CGI that feels tactile and horrifying. When Ethan Suplee appears, bulked up and channeling a Bill Moseley–esque menace, the mythology deepens, though Blackhurst wisely leaves much of Dolly’s backstory shrouded in ambiguity.
The climax is as bold as it is bleak: a burial ritual surrounded by dolls, a desperate showdown, and an ending that twists the knife one last time. It’s both homage and innovation, brutal yet weirdly poetic. Over the credits, The Babyboys’ track “Mama’s Love” plays, its ironic sweetness sealing the experience with a final shiver.
If Texas Chainsaw birthed backwoods carnage, Dolly finds a new lane: the maternal slasher, obsessed with making “babies” out of the living. It’s dark, deranged, and mean, but also clever, creepy, and oddly moving. Beneath the blood and porcelain, it’s about grief, obsession, and the monstrous ways people try to fill emptiness.
Dolly may not be an easy watch, but it’s the kind of horror that lingers, haunts, and demands conversation. Blackhurst has crafted a new boogey(wo)man for the ages, one eye staring, the other lost to darkness. Move over, Leatherface: Dolly wants to play.
Jessie Hobson