Publication Date: 03-26-2026

Dolly (2026) review

Dir. Rod Blackhurst

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★★

“In the woods, a mother cried, and wished for a love, long denied.
She soon appeared, a child of grace, ‘til evil struck with his dark embrace.
The girl now hides, behind a mask. To raise her own, long at last.”

At a time when a lot of horror movies want to look prettier and more polished than the genre-works of yore, Dolly embraces looking like a nasty piece of work. Its aesthetic reminded me of Wolf Creek, one of my all-time favorites, but frankly, it’s more germane to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Shot on 16mm, and focusing intimately on a ramshackle abode, with the kind of foyer from yesteryear that just feels unnerving: dated wallpaper, moth-eaten curtains, and stained rugs. This is a picture that revels in ugliness to its own benefit.

Dolly opens with Chase (Seann William Scott, long time no see) taking his girlfriend, Macy (Fabianne Therese), to the woods for a marriage proposal with a scenic backdrop. Never mind the fact that there’s antique dolls nailed to trees all around the forest, not necessarily setting up a locale fit for a Kay Jewelers commercial. Adding to the ominousness is the presence of what sounds like a frothy music box jingle, followed by the appearance of Dolly (NWA wrestler Max the Impaler), a hulking monster with a doll-like face. Dolly kidnaps Macy, hellbent on raising her as her own.

Dolly is an expansion of co-writer/director Rod Blackhurst’s short film Babygirl (2022); he’s expanded his concept from four minutes to 76, assuring there is no fat on this lean little work of grungy, Grindhouse flair. Perplexingly, however, Blackhurst and co-writer Brandon Weavil decided to divide this already-slight work into seven arbitrary chapters. My guess is the idea was to structure Dolly like a fairytale. Either way, it’s rather unnecessary, as the punctuations themselves don’t feel like they’ve stood on their own to tell a smaller story in relation to a larger one (see Strange Darling for that move used to great effect).

The small number of characters immediately confirms that Dolly will not be packed with kills, but instead, dread and unsettling visuals, the likes of which Blackhurst knows how to deliver. There is a lot of body horror that is richly (and practically) captured, and Blackhurst has fun locking onto Macy’s perspective of wandering through Dolly’s house, careful not to show enough so your mind has time to marinate. It’s also a credit to Fabianne Therese that her character, while thinly drawn, is made laudable because, in addition to being charismatic, she doesn’t feel like the archetypal horror character engineered to make bad decisions to suffer the wrath of the villain. While unfamiliar with Mark the Impaler’s wrestling resume, he’s a natural born performer and seems to relish being dropped into a different costume.

2026 has already been rife with Shudder releases. Their acquisitions have been questionable (Whistle, This is Not a Test), but their history (Dangerous Animals, Late Night with the Devil) proves worthy of trust, at least for now. Dolly somewhat resembles the kind of film Blumhouse used to prioritize before falling down a rabbit-hole of sequels. Should Eli Roth’s new project known as The Horror Section continue to gain steam, there’s going to be an interesting race for gnarly horror films brewing amidst this great renaissance period for the genre.

Starring: Fabianne Therese, Russ Tiller, Mark the Impaler, Seann William Scott, and Ethan Suplee. Directed by: Rod Blackhurst.