 Influenced by a 1945 British film entitled Dead of Night, in which  Michael Redgrave played a ventriloquist convinced that his dummy was  coming evilly to life. Further inspiration was taken from an episode  of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled The Glass Eye, in which  Jessica Tandy plays a woman who falls for a handsome ventriloquist  (played by Billy Barty), only to find that the ventriloquist is in  fact the dummy, while the hideous dummy is the actual ventriloquist.  Also, R.L. Stine wrote a book titled "Night of the living dummy",  which got 4 sequels also featuring the same dummy but with new  owners, in which a girl named Lindy finds an old dummy named Slappy  with a slip of paper in his pocket with strange words  (Karru,Marri,Odonna,Loma,Molonu,Karrano) which, upon being read out  loud, bring the dummy to life hell