sherbetbizarre
Special Branch
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2004
- Messages
- 5,245
Yeah, those two pics look too sharp to be "vintage".
My sister used to play with a severed head. What's it called? Girl's World I think.
Come and play with us. Come and play with us, Danny. Forever and ever and ever...
just two little girls standing by a wall
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!
A selection of Scary Vintage Dolls That Will Make Your Skin Crawl
http://www.vintag.es/2015/10/these-scary-vintage-dolls-that-will.html
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 ..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)
View attachment 1596
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.
At least this version can't do that awful fake laugh.
According to Wikipedia, she took barbiturates and slashed her wrists.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 ..
At least this version can't do that awful fake laugh.
Fair enough but I'd heard she'd hung herself using piano wire? .. I can't say for sure ..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.
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 ..
I saw this and thought of this thread.
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!
Ulalume Photoshopixx? that's very unusual
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.
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.