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Dolls?

Two-life-size-Victorian-style-dolls-shocked-Londoners-this-morning.jpg


http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-...epy-victorian-6947467#rlabs=9 rt$category p$4
 
GNC said:
My sister used to play with a severed head. What's it called? Girl's World I think.
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I was told off when I was about 5 at infant school for painting a girl's Girl's World head to make it look like a monster. It was bring a toy to school day as I remember.
 
Alexandra Daddario wants her eyes back. No, wait, that sounds even worse.
 
GNC said:
Come and play with us. Come and play with us, Danny. Forever and ever and ever...
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It does remind me of the famous Diane Arbus photo that I believe was the inspiration for the twins in The Shining ( the film, anyway)
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How Arbus managed to create such an unsettling image of what is, basically, just two little girls standing by a wall (one with crumbs from the cake she'd just eaten!) is beyond me. But it does also have some of the same quality of what can make dolls so unsettling, too.
 
Ulalume said:
just two little girls standing by a wall
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Interesting - I didn't know the Arbus origin of the Kubrick idea. I can't think of earlier explorations of the twin girls theme in literature or film.

The twin boys who come to mind are Tweedledum and Tweedledee but their bufoonery, like their music-derived names, is too noisy to be sinister. Twin girls in an attitude of almost parodic good behaviour are much more unsettling, to echo Ulalume's word.

Maybe it is the notions that girls share secrets and that twins are especially, almost telepathically close. When it comes to the images, I am reminded of something called the "ogre effect" which occurs when faces are aligned:

A page about it here with videos.

This distortion seems to happen when we flash through a number of images; I have not been able to make it happen with the Arbus photograph.

The twin dolls on the underground are wonderfully horrid. I gather they are teasers for some show or exhibition. It will need to be good to live up to this trailer! :eek:
 
JamesWhitehead said:
Interesting - I didn't know the Arbus origin of the Kubrick idea. I can't think of earlier explorations of the twin girls theme in literature or film.

The twin boys who come to mind are Tweedledum and Tweedledee but their bufoonery, like their music-derived names, is too noisy to be sinister. Twin girls in an attitude of almost parodic good behaviour are much more unsettling, to echo Ulalume's word.

Maybe it is the notions that girls share secrets and that twins are especially, almost telepathically close. When it comes to the images, I am reminded of something called the "ogre effect" which occurs when faces are aligned:

A page about it here with videos.

This distortion seems to happen when we flash through a number of images; I have not been able to make it happen with the Arbus photograph.

The twin dolls on the underground are wonderfully horrid. I gather they are teasers for some show or exhibition. It will need to be good to live up to this trailer! :eek:
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That reminds me of the 'Silent twins':
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/jun/28/fiction.classicalmusicandopera
There was a fascinating documentary about them, years ago.

Not dolls but just as unsettling. Dolls seem to have been an important part of their imaginative world and play.

I think we have residual fear when it comes to dolls because of the old idea of 'poppets' in folk lore/superstition - a bit like voodoo dolls.
 
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Ulalume said:
It does remind me of the famous Diane Arbus photo that I believe was the inspiration for the twins in The Shining ( the film, anyway)
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How Arbus managed to create such an unsettling image of what is, basically, just two little girls standing by a wall (one with crumbs from the cake she'd just eaten!) is beyond me. But it does also have some of the same quality of what can make dolls so unsettling, too.
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As I was taught at art college, Arbus was an en ex model who developed schizophrenia and the focussed her photographs on things that looked wrong .... the kid grimacing with the hand grenade, the two little girls that Kubrik was definitely inspired by for The Shining, people with deformities, a movie façade building front ... just weird 'everything's a lie' shit. She ended up hanging herself ..
 
Swifty said:
As I was taught at art college, Arbus was an en ex model who developed schizophrenia and the focussed her photographs on things that looked wrong .... the kid grimacing with the hand grenade, the two little girls that Kubrik was definitely inspired by for The Shining, people with deformities, a movie façade building front ... just weird 'everything's a lie' shit. She ended up hanging herself ..
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According to Wikipedia, she took barbiturates and slashed her wrists.
 
Bloody hell, the poor woman must've been determined.

I knew someone who hung himself with a guitar string (one of the wound ones, I believe) not long before Beck's 'Loser' came out, featuring that very phrase in the lyrics. Bit tactless of Mr Hansen, I thought.
 
I just can't find dolls scary/creepy/unsettling at all. In fact, the more "creepy" they are the more I seem to like them.
I recall once when I was around 7 years old I visited a family friend's house with my mother and sister. The lady of the house suggested that me and my sister might like to go upstairs and look at the "doll room". Well, it was an ancient old house, and we made our way up the huge wooden staircase with a large, ancient portrait of some dour looking, long-dead ancestor at the top of the upper landing watching our every move. The room with the dolls was round to the right as you reached the upper landing, and it had hundreds of very old dolls which would no doubt be every pediophobics nightmare. I was just disgusted that there were no Pippa or Sindy dolls amongst the collection, and felt thoroughly deceived.
 
Andy_X said:
Bloody hell, the poor woman must've been determined.

I knew someone who hung himself with a guitar string (one of the wound ones, I believe) not long before Beck's 'Loser' came out, featuring that very phrase in the lyrics. Bit tactless of Mr Hansen, I thought.
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Previously mentioned on WASP's concept album "The Crimson Idol" from 1993. Although the bloke in that does it on stage during a gig.
 
Swifty said:
As I was taught at art college, Arbus was an en ex model who developed schizophrenia and the focussed her photographs on things that looked wrong .... the kid grimacing with the hand grenade, the two little girls that Kubrik was definitely inspired by for The Shining, people with deformities, a movie façade building front ... just weird 'everything's a lie' shit. She ended up hanging herself ..
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According to Arbus herself and her surviving family members, she was focused on capturing the hidden aspects of her subject.
 
Seconded. Reminds me of that mummified bride they had in a shop window somewhere.
 
MorningAngel said:
I saw this and thought of this thread.
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I looked at that picture earlier, and thought how much it reminded me of a "true" story my cousin told me the Chistmas we were 10, the one (along with the infamous Raggedy Ann story) that put me off dolls forever.

The story goes that once upon a time, a little girl had a beautiful china doll which she loved so much, but one night it clambered off its shelf, crept into her brother's room, and - revealing hideous razor-sharp teeth - ate him. :eek: :p

Since we already suspected that dolls did creep around when no one was looking, this just confirmed our worst fears. Ok, i know it sounds silly now, but it seemed perfectly reasonable at the time!

Anyway, I was just looking at the picture again and noticed it has one of our family surnames on the bottom of the card. It made it just a wee bit more terrible!

:D
 
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In the psychedelic 60s sci-fi silliness Barbarella, the heroine is attacked by dolls that snap at her with razor-sharp teeth. Maybe someone had caught a showing of that and it fuelled their nightmares? It's a strangely unsettling scene.
 
Ulalume said:
Anyway, I was just looking at the picture again and noticed it has one of our family surnames on the bottom of the card. It made it just a wee bit more terrible!
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Ulalume Photoshopixx? that's very unusual :D
 
Why, by the 70's, were antique dolls, clowns, and ventriloquists' dummies fiends and not friends? When was the turning point?
Funny, when I was growing up, cartoons from the 30's and 40's were common TV fodder for kids and I was charmed by the ones wherein dolls & other toys came to life at night. I WANTED my toys to come to life at night. Clowns, too, were commonly thought to cheer up children in hospitals--my "Official Tonsils Removed" certificate from Cook's Children's' hospital was signed by Cookie the Clown and had lovable non-sinister graphics on it. I was never creeped out by my big brother's Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy either; we both enjoyed ventriloquist Paul Winchell's kid's show on TV.
I can see that the trajectory of sinister dummies was perhaps started by 1929's "The Great Gabbo" and was perfectly realized in the 40's "Dead of Night," but those didn't seem to taint all ventriloquism when I was a kid. Was the first evil doll Talky Tina in the early 60's "Twilight Zone" ep? But, wait, she was a good guy--she was a killer doll doll,sure, but she killed an abusive husband and father, as I recall. There was a goofy sinister killer antique doll in a "Night Gallery" ep but that was so poorly done it shouldn't have had much bearing on our overall cultural perception of dolls. And just when did clowns become villeins rather than friends? I know individuals who, as very young children, found in-person clowns to be so boisterous as to be frightening, and I was not fond of circus clowns, but only because they were non-verbal, thus boring as hell. Never had a problem with Bozo on TV.
 
GerdaWordyer said:
Why, by the 70's, were antique dolls, clowns, and ventriloquists' dummies fiends and not friends? When was the turning point?
Funny, when I was growing up, cartoons from the 30's and 40's were common TV fodder for kids and I was charmed by the ones wherein dolls & other toys came to life at night. I WANTED my toys to come to life at night. Clowns, too, were commonly thought to cheer up children in hospitals--my "Official Tonsils Removed" certificate from Cook's Children's' hospital was signed by Cookie the Clown and had lovable non-sinister graphics on it. I was never creeped out by my big brother's Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy either; we both enjoyed ventriloquist Paul Winchell's kid's show on TV.
I can see that the trajectory of sinister dummies was perhaps started by 1929's "The Great Gabbo" and was perfectly realized in the 40's "Dead of Night," but those didn't seem to taint all ventriloquism when I was a kid. Was the first evil doll Talky Tina in the early 60's "Twilight Zone" ep? But, wait, she was a good guy--she was a killer doll doll,sure, but she killed an abusive husband and father, as I recall. There was a goofy sinister killer antique doll in a "Night Gallery" ep but that was so poorly done it shouldn't have had much bearing on our overall cultural perception of dolls. And just when did clowns become villeins rather than friends? I know individuals who, as very young children, found in-person clowns to be so boisterous as to be frightening, and I was not fond of circus clowns, but only because they were non-verbal, thus boring as hell. Never had a problem with Bozo on TV.
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Well, the genesis of the evil clown has been long debated over in the "clowns - evil or funny" thread, but IIRC no definitive conclusion has ever been reached on tnat one. Fear of dolls, on the other hand, is one of the most common phobias,one that seems to have been around for a while.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pediophobia

From a personal standpoint, my wariness of dolls was probably first triggered by the film, "Horror at 37,000 Feet"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horror_at_37,000_Feet
Which was one of those dreadful late night movies that my older siblings subjected me to as a very small and impressionable child (thanks a lot, sibs :rolleyes:) at one point, the demon on the plane posesses a doll, and...well, frankly, all I remember is the doll's melting face, but that was plenty. :p Still, it didn't quite put me off my Baby Alive doll, but as I grew older, I became more uncomfortable with it.

In the 70's, demonic posession seemed to be the hot topic and that must have continued for a while, because it was already the 80's when my peers and I began giving our Raggedy Anns tne side-eye. Anyway, once we connected the ideas of "demonic posession" and "dolls", a whole new world of uneasiness opened up before us. ;)
 
Ah, i knew I'd seen this picture and description before!
From "horror at 37,000 feet" at Kindertrauma
http://www.kindertrauma.com/?p=3948

The best scene, out of literally dozens, involves the dumbstruck surviving passengers’ attempts to appease the evil presence on the plane with a sacrifice. Flirting with becoming a vicious mob, they grab a doll from a little girl (thank God there is always a little girl on these doomed flights) and decide to go voodoo crazy on it and repurpose it as an effigy. They glue fingernails onto the doll, hair, and even draw some kind of crazy clown face on it. It doesn’t make much sense (I’d like to think the evil was smart enough to detect the difference between a living human and a doll), but the scene is just too lunatic not to love. Further joy is found when the mock sacrifice begins to bubble with brown ooze as it is rejected by the unappeased spirits.
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Man, that thing messed me up for years!
 
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