research and planning

1. AY E S H A WA R I N D
RESEARCH ON TOPIC

2. DOLL
• Dolls with “sleepy eyes”, with staring, glass eyes. Dolls with
porcelain faces, with “true-to-life” painted ragdoll faces, with
mops of real hair atop their heads, with no hair at all. One-
hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian dolls, rare dolls with wax
faces. Dolls with cheery countenances, dolls with stern
expressions. Sweet dolls and vaguely sinister dolls. Skinny
Dutch wooden dolls from the end of the 19th century, dolls in
“traditional” Japanese or Chinese dress. One glassed-off nook
of a room is crammed with porcelain-faced dolls in 19th-
century clothing, sitting in vintage model carriages and
propped up in wrought iron bedsteads, as if in a miniaturized,
overcrowded Victorian orphanage.

3. • A fear of dolls does have a proper name, pediophobia,
classified under the broader fear of humanoid figures
(automatonophobia) and related to pupaphobia, a fear of
puppets. But most of the people made uncomfortable by the
doll room at Pollock’s Toy Museum probably don’t suffer from
pediophobia so much as an easy-to-laugh-off, often culturally
reinforced, unease. “I think people just dismiss them, ‘Oh, I’m
scared of dolls’, almost humorously – ‘I can’t look at those, I
hate them,’ laughingly, jokingly. Most people come down
laughing and saying, ‘I hated that last room, that was terrible,’”
Hoyt says. Dolls – and it must be said, not all dolls – don’t
really frighten people so much as they “creep” them out. And
that is a different emotional state all together.

4. • In the 20th century, creepy dolls became more actively
homicidal, as motion picture technology transformed the
safely inanimate into the dangerously animate. Some
evil dolls still had an evil human behind.