The Cabin in the Woods did a fine job of making fun of the whole evil-object concept by featuring a basement filled with occult jewelry and magic music boxes, etc. But the horror genre has to continue, and the subgroup in which an inanimate object is the killer remains among the hundreds of new scary movies each year. 

This weekend, for instance, sees the release of Oculus, in which an ancient mirror seems to have caused the deaths of its owners for centuries, and the film's protagonists are likely next.

Is it actually the mirror that does the killing? One thing about the items in The Cabin in the Woods is that they're all tied to something else, a homicidal family or a monster of some kind. But oftentimes the evil object, whether inanimate or mobile on its own, is in fact the thing to fear.

The most popular, and probably the most common, is a doll. Yet that's an easy one because they're so humanlike. They're just like short slashers, really. Trees are also used a lot, and they too can be easily made to seem humanoid. Another popular choice is a vehicle or multiple vehicles, especially from the work of Stephen King, who wrote Christine and Maximum Overdrive.

A lot of evil object movies are, of course, the very low-budget type that nobody's heard of until they show up on lists or discussions like this. A favorite example is Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. The title is pretty self-explanatory.

Then there are more famous, more mainstream entries into the subgenre. The Ring features a haunted VHS tape, Hellraiser has the puzzle box, which also opens up a portal to another world filled with evil monsters like Pinhead, but it also is quite lethal on its own.

We could also argue that any haunted house movie fits into this group, as houses are objects and when haunted they are evil. But they're so prevalent they have a subgenre all their own.

The best, though, is arguably the one from the movie most parodied in the first half of The Cabin in the Woods: The Evil Dead. Sam Raimi's classic has two horror MacGuffins, a tape recorder/audio reel and "The Book of the Dead." The latter has become one of cinema's most iconic props, mostly thanks to the creepy, textured front cover with the distorted face. 

Both recorder and book return in Evil Dead 2, as you can see in the clip via Turner Classic Movies below.