Originally posted on Tumblr on May 21st, 2025

"Enraged gods and demons clash in eternal battle, integrating essence, matter, into new forms of life. I too shall be able to attain this metamorphosis."

Major content warning for transphobia in this one. The author is an experienced professional in finding meaning in trash; all others should proceed with caution. Also I spoil the twist of Psycho.

To be honest: the gender stuff is really what I want to talk about here, far more than the hypno content.

There is an undoubtable sense of gravitas that the unknown lends media; this is the principle that fuels entire online communities. We live in the information age, media is more accessible than it has ever been; and yet– some things will slip through the cracks.

Miss Leslie’s Dolls was once a lost film. Released in 1972, it is the lowest budget of low budget flicks, complete gutter trash. An inane script, terrible acting, terrible sets and pacing and it's a miracle we can even see it all. It opens on a dark and stormy night. A figure in a black raincoat crouches over a coffin and withdraws a golden medallion. It swings above as the mysterious figure attempts to hypnotize… a corpse.

(It doesn’t work)

I fucking love this opening scene so much. It’s atmospheric in the most blunt-force manner, it’s soo silly. It’s got the glistening sheen on a black raincoat and the thrush of thunderstorm rain and a reused lightning animation, all wrapped up in an absurd little aborted hypno scene. I didn’t even know there was hypnosis in this movie until that point– I was watching it for problematic trans rep!

Miss Leslie’s Dolls is about a trans woman; like many good horror films, it uses its framework of “characters get stranded in a strange place” to act mostly as a cipher that examines the psyche of its antagonistic force, the true main character: Miss Leslie Lamont.

Here are some things we learn about her (only a partial list– this film has a lot of bizarre extraneous details)

Leslie is a strange spinster in a blue dress, with big hair and a big medallion. She has a cat named Tom. She is reclusive and awkward and she really, really loves dolls.

Leslie also worships the occult; she uses hypnotism to turn women into living “dolls” to stand, frozen, around her ever-burning altar.

Her ultimate goal is to successfully hypnotize a woman into such a suggestible state (a “death-like trance”) that Leslie will be able to fully possess her, and thus gain the body she has always wanted.