What Makes Magic (1978) An Underrated Horror Movie Gem

By Ewan Paterson / February 19, 2026

While the horror genre has conjured a cacophony of dreadful, terrifying images in its time - more than a few of which it has a habit of returning to often - one particular fixture seems to possess a uniquely unnerving kind of staying power. Crafted from porcelain or sometimes wood, the creepy horror movie puppet has been terrorising audiences for decades, be they a supernaturally powered force of evil or just a creepy keepsake for the genre's more earthly threats. Whatever the case, and whatever shape, size, or form they take, we just can't seem to get these diminutive doom harbingers out of our heads.

It's a weakness horror cinema has been keen to exploit, but for every playful tyke like Saw's Billy the Puppet, there are probably about a dozen Annabels - haunted horror movie dolls who coast by on looks alone and leave all that delicious, uncanny appeal by the wayside. The end result of this is that the horror puppet has become something of a cheap gimmick - an easy, low-effort scare that can lazily connote historical terror or psychological instability, and also probably be used for a boat-load of lazy jumpscares for good measure.

To paraphrase a well-loved 2003 Jack Black comedy - it's tacky, and I hate it.

But to be frustrated with the current state of horror movie puppetry must obviously mean that, at some point, we had some seminal examples of the trope done well. Ealing Studios' masterful 1945 horror anthology Dead of Night is one such example, boasting arguably the scariest horror movie puppet of all time in Hugo, a domineering stage performer whose ventriloquist struggles to contain. The segment, titled "The Ventriloquist's Dummy", took a psychological approach to the relationship between puppeteer and puppet, including a zinger of an ending that bore more than a few shades of the same trick Alfred Hitchcock deployed in Psycho 15 years later.

As a component of a wider anthology, The Ventriloquist's Dummy remains one of the most economical and terrifying horror movie segments ever made, but its brief brilliance also leaves us wanting. In concept and execution, it's fantastic, but there was still greater depth to explore in that relationship between the ventriloquist and his instrument - a depth that screenwriter and author William Goldman tapped into with his script for the unnerving yet surprisingly sympathetic psychological horror film, Magic.

Released in 1978 and directed by Richard Attenborough, Magic - which Goldman also published as a novel two years prior - stands out as an early career highlight for the great Sir Anthony Hopkins, coming hot on the heels of his previous collaboration with Attenborough, A Bridge Too Far, which premiered the previous year.

In the film, Hopkins portrays Corky, an abrasive, up-and-coming entertainer trying to make his way in show business with his ventriloquist act, headlined by Fats. But Fats isn't so much an act as he is an outlet for everything the real Corky tries to repress: impulsive, rude, and obviously (being a puppet), properly creepy. When Corky's secret is threatened with exposure just as he's about to hit the big time, that internal mental battle is given violent, physical form, with our shaken ventriloquist desperately trying to hide his mental instability and maybe - just maybe - embark on a happier, calmer journey instead.

[Article continues on next page...]

Why Fats From Magic Is The Creepiest Horror Movie Puppet

Across the spectrum of creepy horror movie puppets, we have those that are firmly embedded in the supernatural - inanimate objects given form by spirits, demons, or whatever else - and then those that are of a more earthly persuasion, in which they become an outlet for the psychosis or mania of a given character. Some may also straddle between these lines, cleverly employing the whiff of the supernatural to further disempower the ventriloquist and sell the desperation and vulnerability of their predicament. Magic, in regards to this spectrum, sits firmly in that latter-most category, with Attenborough and Goldman destabilising our own sense of reality as Fats asserts his control over Corky, seemingly growing more independent and combative the more his puppeteer tries to suppress him.

The design of Fats also goes a long way in selling this unsure footing. He's a caricatured facsimile of Corky - they wear the same clothes, have the same facial features, and are essentially a physical manifestation of Corky's dark impulses. Fats has something of a totemic quality to him, in that way, taking on power through his physical presence, where once he would've been consigned to an internal dialogue.

Magic's real brilliance here isn't just that it makes Corky's torment so unnerving, but also that it treats the character with such genuine sympathy. Hopkins, true to form, delivers an ineffably human performance as the tortured Corky, only occasionally veering into tropey territory as the film explores the character's psychosis, while his burgeoning romance with childhood sweetheart and now neglected wife Peggy (the great Ann-Margret) is also handled with affection. Consequently, Magic emerges as surprisingly more than the sum of its already compelling iconography, developing into something of a tragic romance in which two lovers are unable to reconcile their own multiplicitous identities.

I say it's surprising, but given the talents of Goldman, Attenbrough, and Hopkins, it shouldn't be. The former had only a few years earlier emerged as one of Hollywood's most promising screenwriters, having penned the scripts for inimitable classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and All the President's Men, and Magic carried the same attributes that made those other films so timeless. Goldman's fiction could always be relied upon to deliver a throughline of invention and multifacetedness, and in Magic's case, that came from its character drama and the thematic irony of the relationship between performance and mania.

To perform is, in essence, to wear a different face. We most regularly associate the term with showbiz and entertainment, but each of us individually will adopt different faces for different contexts, whether it's a morning face, a social face, or maybe - heaven forbid - a YouTube thumbnail face. The idea of a personality is so fluid to begin with that, when you place it in the pressurised world of entertainment, the boundaries between the artificial and the genuine can blur, potentially to the point where determining when a performance ends and begins can be difficult.

In that context, Corky and Fats' relationship proves even more piercing. As a manifestation of Corky's dissociation, Fats is a physical reminder of his performance in day-to-day life, risking exposure of his private torment whilst actualising dormant desires and impulses. He's a memento of his trauma and insanity - the intrusive thought he can't shake, but one that, twistedly, he's come to rely on to survive.

[Article continues on next page...]