There are plenty of things in movies that can make your skin crawl—creepy clowns, haunted dolls, and, surprisingly often, babies that just don’t look quite right. If you’ve ever found yourself distracted by a baby on screen that seemed more fit for a horror film than a heartfelt drama, you’re not alone.
Years have passed, and some of the most unintentionally unforgettable (and memeable) moments in cinema have been brought to us by babies that fall flat into the uncanny valley.
Let’s begin with the undisputed queen of creepy movie babies: Renesmee Cullen from The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 2. Intended to be a half-human, half-vampire miracle baby, Renesmee instead became the stuff of internet lore, for all the wrong reasons.
In a bid to craft a face that merged the looks of Kristen Stewart and up-and-coming actress Mackenzie Foy, the special effects team resorted to CGI, even referencing Stewart’s baby pictures. The outcome? A young girl whose strangely mature expressions and glassy-eyed stare rendered her less “otherworldly beauty” and more “haunting AI prototype.”
In 2012, the technology just wasn’t advanced enough to get such a lofty idea on screen believably. Each scene with Renesmee became all about the story taking a backseat to not flinching—or giggling—at her creepy presence.
It might have been worse, though. Before the crew landed on CGI, they tried out an animatronic puppet named “Chuckesmee” by cast and crew, named after the notorious Child’s Play killer, Chucky.
The baby robot was so powerful that actors supposedly had trouble filming scenes with it. Producers described it as “one of the most frightening animatronic babies ever not to be seen on screen,” according to producer Wyck Godfrey. Although CGI Renesmee didn’t exactly pay off, she was still deemed the lesser of two evils.
Twilight is not the only movie guilty of baby mishaps. In Clint Eastwood’s war drama American Sniper, released in 2014, a key emotional scene was diminished by a jarringly blatant plastic toy. As Bradley Cooper held the dead prop, even moving its arm to simulate movement, viewers were yanked out of the otherwise solemn scene. The internet was swift to react, and the moment became a meme overnight, with people left speculating as to how that glaring fail had made it into a big studio production.
So why do these baby fails persist in our memory? It’s all about the uncanny valley—a phrase coined to explain the sense of discomfort we get when something is nearly human, but not quite. Our minds are particularly sensitized to the movements and faces of babies, so even the slightest inconsistencies in CGI or puppets are enough to produce an immediate feeling of discomfort. In the early 2010s, however, digital technology had not yet reached the level of capability required to produce realistic babies, and lifelike infants appeared on screen, notoriously hard to achieve.
Flash forward to the present day, and although visual effects have advanced leaps and bounds—consider de-aging effects applied to Samuel L. Jackson or Harrison Ford—babies are still a problematic area. Realism is all about subtlety, and even with today’s computers and software, viewers will immediately know when something is off.
With productions such as the planned Twilight TV reboot in the works, there is hope that Hollywood might have finally learned a thing or two. Often, the solution is, indeed, the most obvious: utilize an actual baby or reduce the visual effects so that the production doesn’t cross into the realm of nightmares.
Honorable mentions go to any movie that attempts to get around the baby issue with dead props or hasty CGI. But if there’s one lesson to be gleaned from Renesmee and her notoriety-plagued plastic cohorts, it’s this: when it comes to movie babies, people notice everything—and the uncanny valley is one lullaby away from being a horror show.