Where Dolls Hang lets you watch Night of the Living Dead inside a haunted doll horror game

Where Dolls Hang is a survival horror game from Steelkrill Studio inspired by Isla de las Muñecas — the real Mexican island that holds the Guinness World Record for the largest collection of haunted dolls. You play a detective investigating missing persons in a cursed forest, and the game is due out sometime this year.

Gameplay has you examining bodies, collecting clues, placing evidence markers, and documenting crime scenes with an in-game camera. You also find VHS tapes scattered around and bring them back to your safehouse to watch — and that's where things get interesting. Alongside those in-game clues, the safehouse TV can play actual public domain horror films, including George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. The article floats other candidates that could make the cut: Manos: The Hand of Fate, Plan 9 From Outer Space, The Screaming Skull, Roger Corman's Little Shop of Horrors and The Wasp Woman, and White Zombie, among others.

Night of the Living Dead ended up in the public domain through a quirk of 1968 US copyright law, which required a visible copyright notice on any protected work. The film had one under its original title, Night of the Flesh Eaters, but when the title was changed before release, the notice was accidentally dropped — and with it, the copyright. That legal accident is why the film is freely available on the Internet Archive and why a small indie studio can drop it into their game without a licensing deal. Public domain horror is a surprisingly rich catalogue, and Steelkrill seems to be leaning into that as part of the atmosphere.

No exact release date has been confirmed beyond "this year." The Steam page is live if you want to follow the project — and apparently brace yourself for a double dose of horror, in-game and on the safehouse screen.