On a recent tour of the Didsbury Museum basement, I checked out some of the excellent artifacts in the display on parenting. Now some of the dolls and other artifacts struck me as a little bit, shall we say, creepy.
Now why is that? It's just a doll, you say. Children have grown up playing with dolls for probably 100 years. I'm sure the kids that played with that doll didn't think it was weird. They didn't have nightmares about it coming to life and doing very bad things. Did they?
I imagine now that we have phones and computers and games and a zillion other toys, dolls aren't as popular. But I don't have kids so I don't know for sure.
So what is it that makes dolls so freaky? Is it all because of the Chucky movies and later on the Annabelle movies? Were dolls always so scary? It's time to find out. So let's get in that time machine and look back. And by that I mean Google.
But first, what is the uncanny valley you ask? Well, it's when a doll or robot closely resembles a human. As Wikipedia states: an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.
Let's focus on dolls for the sake of this column. What do we find creepy? The staring, glass eyes? The pretend hair on top? Or worse, no hair? Are those eyes following me? Did it just blink?
It appears that dolls didn't become really scary until the early 1900s when they became more "realistic" with the authentic eyes and skin tones.
Scary doll movies date back to 1936 at least with Tod Browning's The Devil-Doll featuring Lionel Barrymore. The creepy clown doll in Poltergeist came along in the 1980s as well as Chucky in the Child's Play movies.
As John Leonetti, director of Annabelle, the latest spooky doll movie, told the Huffington Post: "If you think about them, most dolls are emulating a human figure. But they're missing one big thing, which is emotion. So they're shells. If you look at a doll in its eyes, it just stares. That's creepy. They're hollow inside."
– Craig Lindsay is the reporter for the Mountain View Gazette
