In The Twilight Saga’s Breaking Dawn: Part 1, Bella finally gives birth to her half-vampire, half-human baby daughter, inexplicably named “Renesmee.” There’s a lot of hype leading up to her birth, given that Renesmee is supposed to be extremely beautiful, more beautiful than her hot parents. In the process of attempting to create a realistically gorgeous baby, the Twilight crew created an animatronic doll to use in the film, instead of a real child.
It was so creepy they had to scrap it entirely, subbing in a digitally animated baby. Yet the legend of Renesmee grew. In the bonus features for the released movie, fans got a glimpse at how Renesmee, dubbed “Chuckesmee” by the cast and crew, turned out. The images of the freaky looking doll, which looks more like a prop designed for The Hills Have Eyes than hot vampire spawn, spread like wildfire. To this day, the Renesmee doll is almost as famous as the movie’s characters, despite not even appearing in the film. Having seen Breaking Dawn when it came out, for a second I swore that I had seen the doll in the movie, until combing through old news reports corrected that assumption. “Truly, it was one of the most grotesque things I’ve ever seen,” the movie’s director Bill Condon said of the prop. “It was a horror show! There was one shot where I call, ‘Cut!’ and suddenly she turns her head and mechanically stares right into the camera. It was incredibly disturbing.”
What happened to the cursed Renesmee doll? As much as I wish she was sitting on a sofa in Robert Pattinson’s apartment, she actually lives in Forks, Washington, the setting of the Twilight movies, which were largely filmed in Oregon. In recent years Forks has become a tourist destination for Twilight fans, hosting an annual “Forever Twilight” festival in September close to Bella’s birthday. The town also has a permanent Forever Twilight collection of Twilight memorabilia and props from the movie, including the cursed Chuckesmee prop.
