You know, life is tough for the abandoned doll that washes ashore under mysterious circumstances.
There only ever seems to be two outcomes, here: It either gets called evil and tossed back into the waters from whence it came, or it riles the townsfolk up so much they desperately try to light it on fire in some kind of giant doll barbecue.
And then Guillermo del Toro of all people retweets the pictures.
Un viejo muñeco ventrílocuo, hallado envuelto en un bulto y atado en el río Bravo de Tamaulipas, al norte de México. Siempre vuelven. pic.twitter.com/tia3NTnm8y
— Horror Losers (@horrorlosers) February 23, 2020
Last month, we saw the first scenario play out with a coconut. This week, we got to see the second, with what appeared to be a menacing ventriloquist dummy.
Residents of San Antonio La Esperanza, a village in Mexico, noticed the strange doll as it bobbed up and down in the waters of a nearby river. They didn’t know it was a doll at first — it was human-shaped and bundled up in a raggedy old blanket, so their first thought was dead body. See the tweeted picture above in which one person pokes at it with a stick.
But oh, no, perhaps this was something even worse!
According to The Daily Star, the townsfolk were so disturbed by the dummy’s appearance, what with its Slappy-esque face and demon hands, that they attempted to light it on fire. And yet, in what I imagine was a scene not unlike something out of a Monty Python movie, the water-logged doll simply refused to burn. Was it cursed? Was it evil?
As it turned out, probably not, as two intrepid journalists were able to track down the doll’s original creator. While he couldn’t say how or why the dummy ended up in the river, or why its hands looked like they once belonged to a hagraven, he did reveal that it was made of epoxy resin, which is apparently difficult to burn.
But burn it did, eventually.
