To hell with you, Lady and the Shark.

When “Jaws” came out in 1975, I was absolutely terrified of its poster: a splashy illustration of a tiny female swimmer unaware that a massive open-mouthed shark was beneath her. I was 4, and I remember thinking: Swim faster, Lady!

Today my aversion to sharks is crippling. I’ve stopped swimming because I just know the aquatic monsters are encircling me below. I see sharks in toilets. The ones in “Finding Nemo” were pure evil.

Sharks (or other animals). Clowns. Parents. It’s a foundational principle of horror that what frightened us as kids will inevitably come back to horrify us in movie theaters as adults. (For the record, I’ve never seen “Jaws” and never will.) In the case of “Annabelle: Creation,” the new prequel to the popular horror film “Annabelle” (2014) — itself a prequel to “The Conjuring” (2013) — the childhood scare is a common and catatonic one. In other words, a doll.

Now in theaters, “Annabelle: Creation” is an origin story that recounts how the title doll — a murderous, demonic and life-size figure — terrorized a group of orphaned girls, eventually possessing one of them. The director David F. Sandberg said the movie, set mostly during the ’50s, embraces the horror convention that objects from the past are inherently ghoulish.