Film

The Boy

Name: The Boy
Genre: Horror, Mystery, Thriller
Released: 2016
Cast: Lauren Cohan, Rupert Evans, James Russell, Jim Norton, Diana Hardcastle

A grieving young nanny takes a live-in job in a crumbling English manor, only to learn her charge is a porcelain doll the elderly couple treat as their real son. She's handed a rulebook and left alone with it. What starts as a slow, handsomely shot gothic creeper about grief and denial swerves hard in its final act — for better or worse, depending on your tolerance for tonal whiplash.

TMDb rating

6.0

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Orphan2009

The nanny-in-peril, something's-wrong-with-this-child template done with real commitment and a genuinely startling late reveal that recontextualises everything you've just watched.

But It's meaner and more violent than The Boy, with less atmosphere and more outright shock.

The Others2001

Isolated house, strict household rules, a family hiding something, and a slow-building dread that pays off with one of the great modern gothic twists.

But Glacially paced by design — patience is the price of admission, and the scares are almost entirely atmospheric.

Annabelle2014

If it's specifically the doll that got under your skin, this is the mainstream jump-scare version — same uncanny object, cranked up to horror-movie volume.

But Broader and cheaper in its scares, trading The Boy's slow dread for loud, familiar haunted-house beats.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Dead of Night1945

It's the ancestor — the first major film to make an audience genuinely afraid of a doll-like object with a will of its own, decades before Brahms.

A British portmanteau chiller whose ventriloquist-dummy segment basically invented the template The Boy is quietly running: an inanimate object that seems to house something that shouldn't be there.

But Black-and-white anthology pacing and 1940s dialogue rhythms will feel slow and stagey to modern horror viewers.

Hush2016

Swaps the doll for a deaf writer alone in a remote house against a masked intruder — same isolated-woman, house-as-trap tension, ruthlessly efficient.

But No supernatural element at all, so if the ghost-story flavour was the appeal, this won't scratch it.

The Visit2015no page yet

Another young outsider stuck in a remote house with elderly people who are very insistent about the rules, building to a twist that reframes the whole stay.

But Found-footage shakiness and Shyamalan's fondness for tonal jokes won't suit anyone wanting straight, unbroken dread.

Dead Silence2007

A ventriloquist dummy curse, a decrepit family estate, and a plot that takes the killer-object idea and runs at it with gleeful, campy commitment.

But Broader and sillier than The Boy — this is horror playing for fun scares, not creeping unease.

Child's Play1988

The doll movie that taught a generation to distrust dolls; a genuinely well-built B-movie with a monster that still works decades later.

But Straightforwardly a slasher once it gets going — the dread of the setup gives way to body-count momentum.

The Conjuring2013

If the appeal was the haunted-house dread and the sense of an old evil embedded in a family home, this is the modern genre's best version of that mood.

But It's a haunting-and-exorcism story rather than an object-of-menace story — the doll angle is a minor supporting piece.

The Woman in Black2012

Fog-bound English countryside, a house with a terrible secret, a vengeful presence tied to a lost child — the same period-gothic register The Boy is reaching for.

But Old-fashioned and stately by design; if you wanted modern shocks rather than slow Victorian dread, it'll feel sedate.

Servant2019

Same exact premise — nanny, house, doll standing in for a lost child — stretched from a single feature into a serialised, much stranger psychological study.

M. Night Shyamalan's slow-burn Apple series traps a young nanny in a Philadelphia townhouse caring for a reborn doll that a grieving mother insists is her real baby.

But It's a multi-season commitment with deliberately withheld answers — this is a mood piece, not a tidy two-hour scare.

Marwencol2010

Strips the horror framing away entirely and shows the same fascination — a doll world standing in for a real, unbearable one — as lived human grief rather than genre fiction.

A documentary about a man who, after a brutal assault leaves him brain-damaged, builds a miniature WWII town populated by dolls representing himself and everyone in his life.

But There's no horror here at all — it's a genuinely moving, sometimes uncomfortable documentary about trauma, not a thriller.