Creepy Dolls: From Precious Playthings to Harbingers of Death (London Online)

In the gothic and horror imagination, inert things are often literally or seemingly vivified by being ascribed properties of the human. Human-like avatars of the creepy and the weird, objects such as dolls, puppets, dummies, automata, and waxworks facilitate key narrative, cultural, and socio-political discourses pertaining to identity and personhood. By stressing the permeable boundaries between self and other, uniqueness and anonymity, the living and the lifeless, these entities become haunting symbols of liminality and powerful harbingers of loss and death.

Using an intermedial, intergeneric, and transdisciplinary approach, this illustrated lecture will focus on the figure of the doll and propose an investigation into the ways these humanoid bodies operate in gothic and horror cinema. Drawing on ‘thing theory’, as developed by Bill Brown and Elaine Freedgood, we will first explore the difference between objects and things and will then trace the use of eerie dolls from early film to contemporary horror flicks. In so doing, we will look closely at how unsolicited animation is depicted in order to distinguish between gothic and horror films in their use of this familiar trope. We will analyse the disruptiveness that in/animate agents foster in the narratives and the manner in which they activate Masahiro Mori’s ‘uncanny valley’ to represent subjectivity in crisis. The unsettling presence of the doll disturbs or subverts the normal subject object relationship and articulates themes as varied as mental instability, trauma, ageing, and consumerism. In this part, we will look at such films as Bunny Lake is Missing (1965), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962), Dolly Dearest (1991), and the Child’s Play franchise.

We will then move on to consider the negotiation of agency and femininity through acts of ‘dollifying’, by which I mean both the ascription of human faculties to inanimate objects and the subject’s acquisition of doll-like qualities. The nefarious implications of this process, along with its (paradoxical) potential for empowerment, will be discussed with reference to such films as the eccentric British gothic horror drama Corridor of Mirrors (1948) and the horror musicals The Devil’s Carnival (2012) and Alleluia! The Devil’s Carnival (2015).

For centuries, creepy dolls have toyed with our collective imagination. But why are we drawn to them? What can the doll’s association with transgression, doubling, and monstrosity tell us about ourselves and the postmodern societies in which we live? By the end of the class, students should be able to answer these and other related questions.

Please note these are live events – they cannot be downloaded and watched later, so please be sure you are available at the time and timezone the classes are being offered in before registering.