At some point or another, we’ve all played with toys.
Action figures.
Dolls.
Some of us still collect them.
And for many of us growing up, cartoons often featured that one episode that dealt with
a doll or a puppet that could move or talk.
As much as we love dolls to play with and puppets to entertain us, we also seem to have
an equally uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty around them.
And this isn’t a rare trait.
Dolls and puppets are creepy.
We see this idea perpetuate in many forms of media, take Slappy the Dummy from Goosebumps
for example- or Annabelle from The Conjuring.
Actually- it’s a really prevalent idea in pop culture.
We’ve seen lots of evil or creepy dolls and dummies in:
*clears throat*
The Twilight Zone The Simpsons
Puppet Master Demonic Toys
Johnny Bravo Small Soldiers
Child’s Play Teen Titans
Dolly Dearest Magic
The Doll Master Rugrats
Dead Silence Darkwing Duck
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Doctor Who Yu-Gi-Oh!
The Night Gallery Coraline
and Ghost in the Shell
…to name a few.
The haunting work of Ito Junji even delves into this:
But is their portrayal in pop culture the reason we fear these human-like inanimate
objects?
Or does it go much deeper than that?
Indeed, why are dolls, puppets, and even mannequins creepy?
To start off, let’s organize our thoughts a bit.
A villain like Chucky or the Commando Elite don’t incite the same kind of fear that
villains like Billy and Anabelle do.
What’s the difference?
Well for starters, Billy and Anabelle don’t talk.
In an interview for the film, Annabelle, director James Wan pointed out the main difference
between the idea of a killer doll and a psychological puppet:
“What makes ventriloquist puppets creepy and scary, is not the fact that they chase
you, with knives in their hands.
It’s the fact that all they have to do is sit there in a chair, and you walk by it at
night to go get a drink, and you think to yourself- did those eyes just follow me?”
It’s the thought of something that shouldn’t be moving, indeed moving while we’re not
looking.
Villains like Chucky are already very animated, and we know what to expect when we watch a
killer doll film like that- so it falls more in the category of killer doll slasher rather
than creepy doll.
Sure it’s scary- but it doesn’t quite mess with your psyche the same way something
that your brain thinks is moving might.
Anthropomorphism and the uncanny valley are both subjects I’ve briefly mentioned in
previous episodes of Darkology.
Anthropomorphism is our human tendency to give human-like characteristics to otherwise
non-human entities.
Often times, it’s with inanimate objects, and many children’s programs do this.
Take show’s like PeeWee’s Playhouse or Dora The Explorer for example.
As children, we often do this naturally- and the thought of our toys coming to life is
a rather fun and welcoming idea.
And typically, it’s fine.
The way they’re portrayed in pop culture is often cute and non-threatening.
But of course, as we grow older, the line between what is supposed to move, and what
is supposed to stay inanimate becomes very clear to us- and putting moving eyes on something
doesn’t always grant an inviting effect.
Then there’s the uncanny valley, a truly intriguing phenomenon that haunts our subconscious
thought when looking at something like a motionless mannequin or a ventriloquist dummy.
The uncanny valley is a hypothesis developed by Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor, during
the 70s.
It’s a theory surrounding the idea of inanimate humanoid objects like mannequins and robots
seeming too lifelike, and at the same time, being so clearly not the real thing.
The word “uncanny” means strange, mysterious, and rather unsettling- and “valley” refers
to the massive drop in our emotional response from one of a positive empathetic level, to
one of extreme distaste once the appearance of something approaches a point where it seems
too real, but isn’t.
A famous Austrian neurologist also touched upon this subject back in 1919.
Sigmund Freud, also known as the founder of psychoanalysis, theorized that the “uncanny”
was that feeling you get when someone is both familiar and alien to you at the same time.
For some reason, when faced with this uncertainty, we elicit a very powerful response of repulsion.
A seemingly perpetual sensation of fight-or-flight.
Something in our brain tells us that what we’re looking at is confusing wrong, and
we don’t like it.
We see it often in CGI-realistic actors but the prime real life perpetrators of this effect
are humanoid inanimate objects like dolls, dummies, and mannequins.
And there are names for our fears of these types of objects.
Currently, our term for the fear of dolls is called pediophobia.
Pedio coming from the word paidion which in Greek means small child.
It’s described as an unwarranted, irrational and persistent fear or worry of dolls.
Then there’s pupaphobia, (pupa being the Latin word for doll) the irrational fear of
puppets.
But both of these are just specific phobias within the overriding category of yet another
phobia.
But more on that later.
While we’re on the subject, where does the extension phobia come from?
The word phobia itself is derived from the word phobos which in Greek means fear or deep
dread.
It is based on the spawn of Aphrodite and Ares in Greek mythology, being the very personification
of fear itself, rather than an actual character in the myths.
But here's a fun fact, in the legends, Phobos had a twin brother- Deimos, which means terror.
“Deimia” doesn't really roll off the tongue nearly as well though.
So back to where pediophobia and pupaphobia fall into the same category.
This next fear is known as automatonophobia- the fear of humanoid objects falsely representing
sentient beings.
Within the realm of automatonophobia, you might find the likes of mannequins, marionettes,
ventriloquist dummies, wax figures, and animatronics.
They resemble humans both too much and yet, somehow not enough at the same time.
We humans are very good at observing hundreds of different minute details in a face.
And as realistic as some of these representations are becoming, we are still able to tell the
difference between a real person’s face, and an animatronic or CGI-rendered one.
Okay so we know on some level, the sensation of dread from their uncanny realism has some
scientific backing.
But what else is there?
In an interview with ABC, Becca Hisle, a porcelain doll-maker from Texas who has been in the
business for over 30 years, blamed Hollywood for the reputation of dolls as demonic figures-
though even she admitted that porcelain dolls were eerily lifelike.
She’s quoted as saying:
“They look real.
People get spooked because they don’t like the eyes, and they’re too lifelike.
The black eyes do look real.”
While scientists believe that a specific phobia can develop as both the result of genetic
inheritance and environmental conditions- we still don’t know just how much of an
effect either plays in a phobia developing.
What’s theorized is that as with many specific phobias, automatonophobia, and more specifically
pediophobia and pupaphobia, develop in part, due to a severely traumatic experience at
a young age.
If you look at how dolls are used in voodoo witchcraft, you might grow to believe dolls
(in this case the personification of ill-will) to be associated with evil- and by extension
over time, believe that dolls themselves are evil.
Perhaps you had an experience where an older sibling or a kid at school (or a certain YouTube
channel) once told you a scary tale of a doll coming to life and unconsciously carried that
deep-seated suspicion into adulthood.
Or perhaps along with the rest of us, you were exposed to the concept of inanimate humanoid
objects coming to life through what you saw on the television.
At the end of the day, I do think it has a lot to do with that struggle of the uncanny
in our psyche.
If we were to see the doll moving and talking on its own, like with Chucky, yes that would
be horrifying, but at least then our attention would be focused on grabbing the nearest protective
object as our brains fill us with adrenaline.
With silent and motionless lifelike dolls, it's the curious and chilling moment where
you're staring at it dead on, it's not moving and yet, you can't shake the feeling that
somewhere behind those glass eyes, something's staring back at you, leaving you in a state
of perpetual dread.
Perhaps staring into those soulless, dead eyes left a lasting impact.
Speaking of dead, I think that’s another part of why we find these humanoid figures
creepy.
The ending to a certain episode of the cartoon, Courage The Cowardly Dog, featured a scene
where most of the cast was turned into lifeless puppets and in a macabre fashion that the
show was known for, ended on that note.
Courage was left with hollow shells resembling his family, but they were nothing more than
lifeless husks.
Perhaps we find dolls and dummies creepy because in some twisted way, they remind us of corpses.
But what about the moving toys and dolls in the Disney Pixar’s Toy Story series?
They embody the example of what should qualify for pediophobia and yet, they’re not scary.
Even the rotten neighbor, Sid, has toys that are rather scary looking, but end up being
friendly- embodying the saying, don’t judge a book by it’s cover.
In the context of the story, we have the perspective of the toys and see things from their point
of view- and we empathize with them.
On top of that, none of them are really evil or sinister characters, trying to murder the
family-
so not all dolls are bad.
Right?
In a museum in Key West, Florida, there lives a very old doll named Robert.
Rumor has it that he is haunted by a mischievous spirit.
Those who take his picture without permission are rumored to fall victim to a terrible stroke
of bad luck, with frequent tragedies occurring.
And many have written letters to the doll, asking for forgiveness in apology for taking
his picture without permission whilst visiting.
Not everyone seems to agree on the exact nature of Robert the Doll...
What do you think?
/ But what do you think?
As with many specific phobias, the fear of dolls can be overcome through hypnosis and
more practically, desensitization.
Overexposure.
So treat yourself and some loved ones to a horror movie about a creepy doll every once
in awhile.
Take a second to appreciate the hard work and craftsmanship that goes into making a
puppet.
Question your fears and try to understand why you might find something scary.
And as always, thanks for watching.
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