On the surface, it makes no sense. Why make a movie about a cursed toy, or a cursed pair of jeans, or a big fancy mirror that drives people insane when they gaze into it for more than a couple of seconds? Well, using an object instead of an actor is cheaper, for one. It saves money on salaries, and on makeup. Plus, simple camera tricks make it easy to give audiences a fun and silly scare. As long as you don’t take yourself too seriously, the result will at least be memorable. So why not?

Most “cursed object” movies are horror-comedies—Cheewok collects several dozen here—and Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey is no exception. Sure, it’s vicious, and morbid, and gory as hell. But it’s a comedy nonetheless. Its nasty sense of humor originates in its source material: The Monkey is based on a short story by Stephen King, the, uh, king of the cursed-object story. (King wrote the stories for four of the 25 horror movies featured on Letterboxd’s list. And that’s an incomplete ing.) It also looks back to ‘The Monkey’s Paw,’ a 1902 short story by author W. W. Jacobs that sets up a few key elements of the cursed-object subgenre. First, the object itself, of mysterious origin and imbued with mystical powers. Then, the object’s sick sense of humor.

This is a common theme. Cursed objects in horror are intertwined with ironic comeuppances and gruesome morality tales—think the cruel irony in vintage EC Comics and the poetic justice in HBO’s long-running horror series Tales from the Crypt. (Speaking of TV, cursed objects also play a major role in the small-screen Friday the 13th series.) Curses have an intelligence about them, but they do not have a soul, which makes them more agnostic than hauntings and possessions.

That idea animated the creation of this list, which deliberately omits anything too human: Recordings of human voices, say, or a written curse that a human must read aloud to activate. This also includes anything with a human face, which eliminates creepy dolls and puppets. Those are both common enough for lists of their own, anyway, as are Ouija boards and haunted houses—the most common haunted object, if you think about it.

We’re talking bolts of lighting, both literal and metaphorical. We’re talking practical jokes by God at humanity’s expense—or the absence of God entirely, in favor of the inescapable, illogical randomness of death itself. To quote Perkins’ film: “Everybody dies. That’s life.”

A Wind-Up Monkey

The Monkey (2025)

The grin on The Monkey’s face is demented, which might stop a responsible parent from buying what is obviously a cursed object for their child. Not so in a Stephen King story, which is how it ends up in the hands of squabbling brothers Hal and Bill in Perkins’ film version. (Hal’s twin is a new addition for the film, as is the monkey’s snare drum. Thanks, Disney.) Unlike, say, a haunted doll movie, there’s no explanation for what’s behind the toy’s murderous methods: Wind it up, and when the last drumbeat falls, someone, somewhere will die.

A Red Dress

I’m Dangerous Tonight (1990) / In Fabric (2018)

Tobe Hooper made a few cursed-object movies in the ’90s—including I’m Dangerous Tonight, one of the more watchable films from a decade that, let’s say, isn’t the most celebrated in his oeuvre. That’s thanks to two things: Lots of pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo, and Twin Peaks-era Mädchen Amick. 2018’s In Fabric, meanwhile, is Peter Strickland at his most lush and his most nonsensical, two great modes for the Duke of Burgundy filmmaker. This one stars the incomparable Marianne Jean-Baptiste, in case “lush and nonsensical” wasn’t enough of an endorsement.

A Pair of Jeans

Slaxx (2020)

Few people saw the French-Canadian horror-comedy Slaxx in its initial run. There’s a good reason for that: It came out in 2020. Enough said, right? But this diabolically clever horror-comedy is worth a second look, both as a gonzo satire of fast-fashion hypocrisy and just a silly movie where a pair of jeans creatively murders a bunch of people. Retail workers will find it relatable, but you don’t have to be a veteran of the jean-folding wars to understand that ignoring a problem (here, questionable ethics in the garment industry) doesn’t fix it—it just makes it more pissed off.

A Big Goth Bed

Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977)

Once primarily known as the butt of a Patton Oswalt joke, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats is another cursed-object film that’s ready for reappraisal. It’s not the only killer-bed movie, believe it or not. But it is a singular cinematic object, a work of somnambulant surrealism that plays like an American Jean Rollin film. It’s heady and psychosexual, but it’s also got a sense of humor: The title “character,” an imposing Gothic canopy bed, is able to eat thanks to a bag of digestive fluid that’s explained as a “waterbed,” even though it looks nothing like a waterbed. Anyway, dissolving sleepyheads gives it indigestion, so, in a charmingly bizarre moment, it absorbs a bottle of Pepto-Bismol as well.

An Elevator

The Lift (1983) / Down (2001)

Unlike many of the items on this list, the threat posed by a malfunctioning elevator is very real. Death by elevator, whether it be by falling down an empty shaft, getting squashed into jelly by a plummeting car, or suffocating while trapped between floors, happens in plenty of movies (and occasionally in real life). And they’re all in The Lift, from prolific Dutch director Dick Maas. Although it’s so horny it can barely concentrate, The Lift handily combines multiple forms of elevator-based mayhem into a single cheesy ’80s horror movie (or an ’00s one, in the case of Maas’ remake Down).

A Tire

Rubber (2010)

The quintessential Quentin Dupieux movie, Rubber is another film where the object in question—in this case, a sentient car tire named Robert—has an independent intelligence all its own. Why? Well, Dupieux opens Rubber with a fourth-wall-breaking monologue about how annoying it is when people ask too many questions, so if you need that query answered you will walk away unsatisfied. Weird for weirdness’ sake is the MO here, so sit back and enjoy the logic-free tale of an inanimate object with a sex drive and the ability to blow things up with its mind.

A 1958 Plymouth Fury

Christine (1983)

The second feature based on a Stephen King novel to appear on our list (and one of several supernatural vehicles in King’s work), Christine combines two of the writer’s pet themes—boomer nostalgia and inanimate objects killing people—and wraps them in a shiny, cherry-red package with chrome-tipped wings. This killer car was born bad: The first scene of John Carpenter’s adaptation shows “Christine” mangling a pair of autoworkers before she even gets off the assembly line. As with The Monkey, there’s no divine plan here, just horsepower and spite.

A VHS Tape

Ring (1988)

Hideo Nakata’s original J-horror hit Ring and its many offspring blur the line between a curse and a haunting, which is inconvenient if you happen to be thinking much too deeply about the difference while compiling a list. Regardless, it’s an influential example, if an imperfect one. It’s got a killer cold open to rival even Scream, and long-haired girl ghost Sadako is an iconic horror villain. She’s the one whose curse animates a VHS tape that kills everyone who watches it in seven days—still a curse, even if it originates with a vengeful spirit. We’ll let this one slide.

A Hand-Drawn Map

I Bury the Living (1958)

Like The Monkey, I Bury the Living is essentially a big cosmic joke. The punch line here is that the protagonist, an archetypical 1950s businessman with a strong chin and a family legacy to protect, considers himself master of his own fate. And his power only grows when he takes over as chairman of a graveyard where moving pins on a giant wall map—black for the dead, white for the living—changes the fate of whoever owns that particular plot. But even wealthy white men can’t escape death in this Twilight Zone-esque chiller from Albert Band, father of Puppet Master maestro Charles Band.

A Sinister, Yet Intriguing Painting

The House with Laughing Windows (1976) / Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Results were mixed when Jake Gyllenhaal discovered a cache of cursed artwork in 2019’s Velvet Buzzsaw, from Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy. Lesser known—and way more intriguing—is the Italian giallo/horror hybrid The House with Laughing Windows, an unsettling cursed-object movie that’s also a stellar example of the “small town with a secret” subgenre. The rare film featuring an art conservationist as its hero, Laughing Windows exposes a generational curse through an oddly compelling fresco of St. Sebastian—always one of the sexier saints, here a conduit for unholy forces as well.

A Pair of Ambiguously Colored Heels

The Red Shoes (2005)

Not the Powell and Pressburger Red Shoes (although the ballet-within-the-film, about a set of slippers that literally make the wearer dance until they die, is pretty horrific). No, these shoes come from an honestly pretty obscure 2005 Korean horror movie that crams all sorts of psychosexual childhood damage into a single pair of cute yet practical low block heels. Gory and melodramatic, it’s a real mindfuck—not least the subtitles, which keep referring to these obviously pink pumps as “red.”

A Hair Weave

Bad Hair (2020)

Hair—how you wear it, and how you are perceived as a result—is a loaded topic for Black women. And while it can’t help but be campy at times, Justin Simien’s Bad Hair does take the cultural nuances of Black hair seriously: The scene where a witchy hairdresser played by Laverne Cox weaves the cursed inches into our reluctant heroine’s head emphasizes the pain of the procedure, for example. The villain in this film isn’t just CGI tendrils killing people and soaking up their blood. It’s the tyranny of Eurocentric beauty standards.

An Industrial Laundry Folding Machine

The Mangler (1995)

Cursed-object kings Tobe Hooper and Stephen King came together for 1995’s The Mangler, a movie that isn’t “good” but is a hell of a ride. An early kill sets the scene with some crude ’90s CGI at a New England laundromat that combines the aesthetics of a hair-metal video and a community-theater staging of Les Misérables. Then Robert Englund enters the story as the incestuous industrialist villain, and The Mangler goes full live-action cartoon. It’s a strange, vulgar movie, soaked in blood and full of lovable, eccentric characters.

A Very Sharp Lamp

Amityville: The Evil Escapes (1989)

The sheer number of official and unofficial installments in the Amityville Horror series can take even horror fans by surprise. These include movies about a cursed clock (It’s About Time), a cursed mirror (A New Generation), and a cursed dollhouse (called, conveniently enough, Dollhouse). But The Evil Escapes is a personal favorite, not least because the all-important lighting fixture is ugly as hell. (Think a wizard’s staff crossed with The Arm from Twin Peaks: The Return.) It’s also sharp, so characters keep cutting themselves on it—bad for them, but good for the bloodthirsty lamp.

The Concept of Spirals

Uzumaki (2000)

Ordinary things take on inexplicable, heart-stopping resonances in Junji Ito comics, where eerie coincidences escalate until the characters are frozen in terror. And that’s exactly what happens when something so abstract it barely counts as an object—namely, the basic concept of a spiral—drives an entire town to madness in more recent animated miniseries, mostly because the series drops off hard after the first episode. But Ito adaptations are tricky in general, and an exceptional take on Uzumaki is still to come.

The Whole Dang Store

Needful Things (1993)

Never short on ideas, Stephen King assembled a regular smorgasbord of cruel ironies for Needful Things: The novel and subsequent 1993 movie both feature a handful of cursed objects on display in the titular antique shop. Technically, the Devil is involved; someone’s gotta do the tempting, after all. But an emphasis on choice ties Needful Things to King’s wider moral universe, in which the real villain is human weakness. Here, each object latches onto a flaw in its purchaser’s character, giving them a motivation for the mayhem that follows—not that they really need one in a Stephen King story.