Since its very origins, cinema has had a strong attraction to the imagery of statues, that is to say petrified bodies, providing a new interpretation in particular of the polarity between the animation of stone and the petrification of the body. This polarity has been a leading thread—at times submerged, at times explicit—in the Western imagination since the history of archaic sculpture up to the contemporary debate on simulacra, from Ovid ̕ s tale of Pygmalion and Galatea to the myth of Medusa. The inventory I present here—consisting of three examples directly stemming from genre movies in addition to two more examples somehow more heterogeneous and problematic—does not aspire to be exhaustive nor exemplary. It rather acts as a distinctively interesting incentive inasmuch as it triggers unprecedented conceptual and media-related flashes of insight through the comparison of the mythical imagery of statues, its literary version codified according to somewhat institutionalised fantasy (i.e. fantasy literature), and ultimately the cinematic interpretation of this conceptual hub. The reference to archaic and mythical imagery within movies harks back to a pre-cinematographic background as it enters into dialogue with cinema's specific means. Conversely, it is equally possible to detect cinematographic anticipations in the history of visual devices, in mythical tales, as well as in the history of aesthetics and theory of art.