Hell’s Stroller

A pram sits unattended on a New York sidewalk, something crying inside it. You lean in to check—of course you do—and the thing inside launches upright and screams at you from about ten centimeters away.

The animatronic infant is a promotional stunt for the horror film Devil’s Due, and as stunts go it’s technically well done. The robot has the specific wrongness of something designed to look alive but committed to it only about eighty percent of the way—too pale between movements, too still when it’s not performing. The footage of unsuspecting New Yorkers encountering it is exactly what you’d hope: dropped coffee, a full sprint, one man who backs away crossing himself.

What makes this work is how thin the gap is between ordinary life and absolute wrongness. A crying baby in a pram reads as safe, familiar, someone else’s problem. One wrong movement and the whole register collapses at once. The stunt understood that better than most horror films manage to. Which probably says something unflattering about the film it was advertising.