Long before Chuckey came Hugo, the creepy doll that didn’t really become iconic in horror cinema yet landed a haunting presence through similar characters and storylines in the ensuing decades. Lindsay Shonteff’s Devil Doll (1964), featuring a stage hypnotist The Great Vorelli (Bryant Haliday) and his dummy Hugo (Sadie Corre), followed a couple episodes of Rod Serling’s landmark series The Twilight Zone featuring such dummies in 1962. But it remains one of the earliest features in horror cinema to present the theme of animating a doll with a soul.

Unlike Chuckey, which is the leading evil character in the Child’s Play movies, Hugo is a sidekick in Devil Doll. The real evil lead is the doctor-turned-hypnotist Vorelli whose pursuit of controlling the human mind takes...

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