This roundup will be long despite the pool being no larger than the group in my previous LDD roundup. Each of these dolls got me more involved and hands-on re: the creative side of things with extravagant photo staging requiring more elaborate props or extended diorama crafting setup, and I made a really outsized number of art pictures here (which I also think include some of my strongest). I think it was all worth it, though, and three is three. I wasn't publishing this at just two dolls. Let's begin!
Daughter of Tears- Lamenta
I had gotten this doll around the time Roundup 1 was published, and I had wanted to squeeze her into it, but she ultimately needed some work and time to fix her up and finish her photo plans, and I had everything else finished to publish the first roundup at the three dolls I had planned first, so I went ahead and published it there because that in itself had been in the making for long enough.
So. Target gift credit, babyyyyyyyy!!!!
Lamenta is a doll who's always kind of haunted me because I've always had thoughts on her, and they've changed entirely. At first, and all the way up to my second/current LDD era actually collecting the dolls, my reaction to Lamenta was simply "What were they thinking???" She looked very weird to me with her flat colors, muted purple bodice, and overall visual simplicity feeling disjointed and bizarre, and especially disconnected from the two earlier characters she was designed to join (explained imminently).
However, re-examining her started to strike me with an odd fascination and appreciation for her character. She was weird and goth and spooky in a way that might actually be very appealing to me after all, and it was sealed once she turned up as third-party offering on Target, sold by the same distributor as the Traveler's Dracula doll. Done. The rest of the gift credit was allocated. A coalescence of gift cards, including two cheap $5 ones my mom gave me from some earlier promotion she'd qualified for, left most of Lamenta's cost covered. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough gift credit to cover the whole thing, and the thrifty sensible side of me (that LDD will rarely cross paths with) really tried to check and double-check old cards to make sure there were no other leftovers to put forward to Lamenta. But then my godmother came in to unwittingly save the day with the arrival of her own gift money for me through the mail, and the remaining $21 was covered! I'm probably never going to get another mint LDD with so little all-purpose money! I wouldn't have done this just for the principle of getting an LDD mostly with gift money; this was a doll I wanted for real, too. But it does feel good to have found a way to get a Living Dead Doll this way regardless.
I touched on Series 26 beforehand when talking about Walpurgis. All of the characters are witches, and three of the five are based specifically on pagan holidays and have more old-style clothing and pagan-themed visual designs. I like witches, but am not spiritual or particularly attracted to pagan witches, and Holle Katrina, a Halloweeny black-and-white-costumed witch based on a fan contest winner, feels a little uninteresting to me. Lamenta, however, is weird and very goth and spooky. I like that a lot. Atypical Gothic witches are very welcome in my collection.
Lamenta is also the third and last of a small subgroup of LDD characters that started in Series 21, known as the "Three Sisters". The trio are witches dressed in ominous black, and all have black hair and white skin, implying they are triplets.
Compilation of official LDD photos of the Three Sisters in release order, edited and captioned by me.
They also stand as direct references to the "Three Mothers" witchcraft mythos from the films of Italian horror and giallo director Dario Argento. His witches are ancient and are directly influenced by Thomas De Quincey's poem Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow from the Suspiria de Profundis collection. As defined by the poem, the Mothers are embodiments of the three chief sorrows that plague humanity: sighs, darkness, and tears, signifying despair, depression, and grief, respectively. The Mothers as named by De Quincey and adopted by Argento for his witches are Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs (featured in Argento's film Suspiria); Mater Tenebrarum, Mother of Darkness (featured in Inferno), and Mater Lachrymarum, Mother of Tears (featured in, fittingly, Mother of Tears). Argento's witches don't really translate the spiritual sorrows as motifs for the way they operate; they're just extremely dangerous supernatural women. The Three Mothers' LDD counterparts are Sospirare (Series 25), Tenebre (Series 21), and Lamenta here (Series 26), all having similar Italian-derived names and shared initials with the Mothers. Tenebre was also the title of another Argento film disconnected from this trilogy, so the LDD might also be referencing that. The LDD witches of Sighs and Darkness were released in the opposite order of the corresponding Mothers' Argento films, but Tears comes last in both the trilogy of films and LDDs.
Most people who know Argento know him for Suspiria, the first film in the trilogy, and that's the Three Mothers film that has fared the best with horror audiences. Its hypersaturated dreamlike tone was influential and it's still a unique experience. Suspiria was radically remade by Luca Guadagnino in 2018 with a very disturbing moody arthouse drama aesthetic, and it's a fascinating film, though not for the squeamish or faint of heart...or Argento, who didn't like it. Unlike the original Suspiria, the full scope of the Three Mothers is referenced in the 2018 film, with the names all being dropped, despite only one of the witches being at hand during the plot. The film still doesn't inherit the thematic roles of the De Quincey Mothers, however, as it is more of a meditation on tyranny, femininity, and motherhood, and explores feminism and political struggles through a witches' coven--or it explores a witches' coven through political struggles!
Of the Argento trilogy, the other two films have had more mixed to negative reception, with Mother of Tears being the least-liked. It's evident the LDD guys have a real love for Italian cult-classic horror, though, since the Three Sisters are not their only tributes. Menard in Series 22 makes reference to the film Zombi 2 with his death date, and Series 25's Asa (pronounced "Ah-za")is directly based on the witch from the 1960 film Black Sunday, name and all.
There's definitely an appeal in the concept of collecting a matched trio of LDDs across multiple series, and the Argento theming does work for me as a horror nerd even though I haven't seen his movies yet. The Three Sisters look really good all together if Lamenta is in the middle. Collecting them all is a goal, but not a priority. I do think Sospirare is interesting, and she would be the next I collected if I decided to pursue the idea. Tenebre is the least interesting to me. I could definitely see myself designating the other sisters to future uses of holiday or birthday gift money, though Sospirare might be good enough to get sooner--just not urgently.
Thanks to the packaging design of their respective series, the LDD Three Sisters ended up each having different-colored coffin boxes. Lamenta's is the most traditional and least exciting in typical LDD black, but the Series 25 box Sospirare has is silver, and the Series 21 box used by Tenebre has the 13th anniversary design, with a 13-shaped sulfur symbol on the back and print to make the coffin look like it's assembled from old bluish wood planks.
Lamenta's shrink-wrap was the softer kind I saw with Agatha.
The tissue color for Series 26 is red, which works pretty well and is very classic. This might be one of the most versatile tissue colors for the LDD array, and I'm a little surprised Mezco chose pink as the signature tissue for the brand, though that might be to their benefit--pink feels more unique. With the S26 theme of witchcraft, I'd probably default to purple or green tissue myself, but these are old pagan and Gothic witches for the most part, so red is okay.
The chipboards are cut and printed to look like old grimoires with the poems written across the pages. This series is a rare case where the doll is not visually depicted in some way on the chipboard itself. I'd forgotten that S26 has the official subtitle "Season of the Witch".
Donovan is calling.
Lamenta's poem says:
The third of three sisters who pollute our worldThe offspring of a witch who had three little girlsLamenta is the most beautiful and holds the most powerHer sweet tears of blood shall rain down like a shower
And a rewrite.
The third of the sisters polluting our world
Born to a witch who had three little girls
Gorgeous Lamenta holds most of the power
Her sticky sweet tears will bleed down in a shower
This time, I noticed a patch of adhesive holding the chipboard on the right side (facing me). This should allow the piece unfold to get the doll out without removing it fully, but at this rate, I end up taking the chipboards fully out regardless. I think the idea of using the chipboard like a gate would work better if the side that's not attached was cut a little shorter so it didn't stress the side that was.
The most recent series I've collected from before S26 is S23. Here's one of those coffins next to the S26 to compare the layout on the back. I saw no differences between the two.
Lamenta's unboxing was smooth, as was repacking the tray in the outer box.
Lamenta's death certificate has the standard graphic design and she died on October 31, 2007. Mother of Tears released in this year in its native country of Italy, though not on Halloween. Still, as this review progresses, you'll see the doll makes an extremely strong case for a Halloween death date due to all of the visual theming I saw in her. I charted the LDD death dates, and Lamenta contributes to Halloween being the most common LDD deathdate when year isn't in consideration. Each of the LDD Three Sisters died on the year their corresponding Argento movie was released, though none on any of the recorded specific days I was able to find for the films' release. Lamenta and Holle Katrina are the only S26 dolls with death years since they're not unified with the others. (Holle Katrina's deathdate is based on the LDD fan contest winner she was based on.) The other three, which are based on pagan holidays, just have the date and month in correspondence with their festivals, but no known death year.
The certificate poem reads:
She will lick the tears right off your faceYour sorrow is what she loves to tasteYour eyes shut tight, on your face a frownIn her tears of blood you will drown
For this poem, I heavily reimagined it.
She sips the sorrows on your face
And channels all your fears
Your dreams of death are what she tastes
She drowns you in your tears
Here she is taken out.
Lamenta's standout piece is her veil, which is made of a spooky black spiderweb lace fabric.
It makes her feel very mysterious, magical, and scary. I was worried about the piece being difficult to use, especially with her delicate hairstyle, but it slides over her head from the front with an elastic fabric chin strap very easily. The strap is tightest and most secure when tucked behind her ears. The band going behind her ears has the added benefit of being harder to see, but doing this does not require sliding the veil on from behind, which would lead to messier hair. The band also has black satin rosettes that go across the top of her head.
While it's designed to fall behind her head, the veil can, of course, flip forward to cover her face.
Lamenta also came with an plastic elastic band around her face that had absorbed some black coloring, but this does nothing meaningful, since the veil has its own strap.
The veil came strapped to Lamenta's waist with an elastic band around her body to keep it flattened down for packaging.
Without the veil, Lamenta's silhouette changes entirely. Her hair is tied in two high side pigtails that have been split into what once were thick tube-shaped ringlets.
Very similar styles were seen on Series 11 Jubilee and Series 19 Orchid, though the bangs on Lamenta are cut into a goth central point. They lay pretty well.
Even though this doll is untouched, it's clear that simple passage of time has made Lamenta's curls go lazy, as they're not very tight or especially tidy now, leading to a longer, less dainty silhouette. It doesn't look awful, and does feel a bit more realistic than the tubes of the original shape, but I did like the springy neat shape she would have had, and the short length of the ringlets made her head look like a giant spider with her curls as the legs! Not sure that was the plan, but I think it was a nice bonus spooky tone to her look. I might try re-curling her ringlets.
Lamenta is my first LDD designed to have fancy tied-up hair anywhere (the Wicked Witch's hair was tied for packaging but meant to be loose), which means Lamenta is rooted only for tied-up hair. If I took her hair down, I'd find only the perimeters of each half rooted to get a tight pigtail without excess volume. That's just how LDD does things. These are display dolls.
While Lamenta is described as the most beautiful of her sisters (corresponding to the portrayal of Mater Lachrymarum), she's very stylized and almost cartoonish, and doesn't look as conventional as the others.
She has eyebrow-shaped arcs of purple dots, and her eye sockets are overdrawn into black skull-like shapes, with her painted eyes taking up about a third of the sculpt to create a very ominous half-lidded effect. The black of her eye is quite noticeably darker than the black of the skull-socket paint. The effect is to delineate her eyes as being truly black as the abyss, while the rest is shown to be stylistic makeup. In a way, it even helps illustrate her half-lidded gaze more realistically by utilizing the spare area on the eye sculpt to look like a lowered eyelid. If her eyes were completely black so you couldn't see the sculpt, you wouldn't get that effect, and I misjudged Lamenta at first because I thought the entire eye black was supposed to look like a void. I can see that they were deliberately depicting makeup, and I can accept that easily. I had thought of repainting her eye black with something darker, but I'll refrain because I see it wasn't a failure in execution that she has two black tones around her eyes.
Streaks of bloody tears run from underneath, and I like that they're asymmetrical, though her right eye has the blood within the black section while her left doesn't. Some red has also gotten faintly smudged under her left eye, and I'll see if there's anything I can do to remove that. Since tears are concrete images unlike darkness or sighs, Lamenta's sprititual sorrow can be easily depicted upon her, and her attribute is identified easily out of her trio. Because she's goth as hell, though, the tears are naturally blood. Lamenta's lips are purple.
Lamenta's face is very flat and graphical in its style and almost evokes a Dia de Muertos calavera design with the skull-like sockets and dotted brows. The facial design is certainly weird, but it feels very classically spooky, and I love the way it almost looks like a mask. In that sense, I guess you can read a little bit of Venice Carnival into her too, tying her back to Italian roots. It's odd how she feels both like a modern goth cartoon and an antique masquerade! Maybe she also reminds me a bit of kabuki makeup too? And with the veil and tears together, there's hints of La Llorona! There's a lot going on with her!
Lamenta's face is not a mask in any way, though. Her whole head is cast in white.
Both Tenebre and Lamenta have vivid blue eyes, and it can be assumed Sospirare would have had the same color before they were gouged out.
Lamenta's outfit is the most colorful of the Sisters'. Her bodice is purple with a black high collar, and features a velour-like fabric for the purple, with two neck ruffles and a faux-waistcoat with a fake panel fold and buttons. Lamenta's sleeves are black cotton and extremely simple, with no puffing or cuffs.
The back of the bodice is purple velour too, but the purple doesn't quite wrap around the top of the shoulder. I wish it did. The ruffles are only on the front.
The skirt section is a black bell with pleated purple velour trim on the hem, and meets the floor at its lowest dip in the middle. The dress is all one piece and velcros down to the waist in back.
The heavy presence of purple makes Lamenta the most saturated doll of her sisters, though the color does coordinate with the paint used for Sospirare's gouged eye sockets and lips.
All of the LDD Three Sisters have Victorian Gothic-inspired clothing. Lamenta's is the least lacy and delicate--save for the veil.
Lamenta has the pointy witchy LDD boots, and I think every S26 character might have them, appropriately. I also think her sisters have this sculpt. No socks on Lamenta.
While her prototype and photo showed her with white uncovered hands, the produced doll has all-black arms, which leaves her hands black.
I'm guessing this is to create the visual of black gloves in a cost-effective way, since nobody will see the whole arm has been cast in black under her long sleeves. And hey, that's a bit of fabric-pigment discoloration she's spared from the choice, too! While Lamenta has proportionally less black going on than her sisters, I think she's the one whose pale white face stands out the most because it's the only part you can see on the doll that's white. That's probably why I'm getting the vibes that she looks like she's caked in makeup or wearing a mask, because that white, paired with her stark face paint, stands out in such a scary, bold way with nothing else but black and purple around it. It's very cool.
Lamenta has some serious stains, including some dotty spots on the head that had me paranoid I was actually looking at mold, so I popped her arms off and set her to soak in a diluted bleach bath to hopefully either clear up stains or kill fungus. Since I decided re-curling her hair was on the table, I didn't worry too much about the shaping of her curls falling even further.
The soak didn't clean Lamenta up, but reexamining her indicated the spotty stains were caused by the veil and are harmless, being the same blue color as her streaky torso stains and lining up with where the netting of the veil was pressed against her in packaging, so I let her out of the bath. I tried wrapping a curl of hair around a stick and pouring boiling water on it, but the shape didn't change. That's alright. I suppose it can still be viewed as spidery, and the hair is good enough as it is. And a part of me would rather keep the hair in a stable declined state rather than have to repair the tighter style over and over as more time passes. I did clear up some of the red smudge next to her blood drips with acetone, which was a big win. I also boiled her bangs a bit, and I think it brought out the point a little better now. The bangs can be nudged a little with a finger to make them shift into the right shape and it takes some fussing, but they're cooperative.
And what mattered most to me about her display was the silhouette of her veil, and, like magic, once I put it back on her, it was falling in the voluminous triangle/trapezoid shape it was supposed to. You already saw it, but what an improvement it is when it lays this way!
Now I'm seeing the real Lamenta!!!
This really gives her presence and makes her feel much more deluxe and lofty, despite the simplicity of the piece. It's a wonderful choice to convey the tone of a grandiose ancient witch, particularly as the chief of her triumvirate.
Lottie's umbrella proved its versatility once again when given to Lamenta. This piece works with a lot of dolls!
Return Sadie's sleeveless coat also worked pretty well. It's a bit larger on Lamenta than it is on the new-style LDD doll body, but it's certainly within her aesthetic.
Lamenta is the only one of the witch Sisters I could see taking advantage of this piece. Tenebre has wings that couldn't attach with the coat on, and it would look visually redundant on her. Sospirare, meanwhile, has a shawl accent that wouldn't fit together with a coat.
And I tried out whatever other portraits I could to show Lamenta off!
I figured she'd look especially good against orange vintage patterning. I think I was right.
Then I staged a library with a bunch of old books.
And I tried some colored lighting for a Suspiria-esque saturated look.
And more pure red and blue.
And a witch of Tears needs her tissues.
Lastly was the big showstopper. For this, I had to construct my own dish/pool out of clay to provide a vessel I could safely ruin with red dye. I decided to go ahead with this because I wanted the photo and I could easily reuse this for another character I want later. I used all the terra-cotta air-dry clay I had, and when I ran out, I ordered more and hydrated what I had with wet paper towels until the rest arrived. I made sure the basin would be watertight and built a short step in so a doll could stand on the edge and be dry. I wasn't worried about it looking lumpy and simple, since it could be a very old or weathered installation and I trusted I could give it a decent paint job to make it look more complete.
An unpatchable crack developed which eventually led to the whole thing splitting in two when trying to work with it while dry, causing a major delay and well over a week of wasted time. However, at this point, I'd already taken Viv out of this roundup and put her in a solo post due to her gory subject matter (she was meant to be the second doll) so I'd need to get a third doll to complete this post anyway, meaning the delay was going to happen regardless. This post has been a bit of a shambles. I guess LDD roundups never get done quickly!
With this next round, I used mostly white clay and added in terra-cotta for the step and some thinner areas. I pinched the basin out of a giant block of clay this time rather than building walls around from separate pieces, hoping that would be more stable, and I built everything on cling wrap which would hopefully prevent the basin from cracking. If the surface it's on was able to contract with the drying clay, I hoped the structure wouldn't meet resistance and crack.
This rendition got a crack, but not one that split and broke it apart, and I patched it with glue before painting the basin. For liquid, I used water with lots of red dye. Something about the bin I carried the liquid in before setting up might have been soapy, because the liquid was milky and bubbled and I had to sop up some of it to try to clean the surface of the "blood".
Here's the setup. It's not quite as spectacular as I had hoped it to be, but the vessel held the red liquid and Lamenta never fell into it!
I had envisioned doing some photo editing to make it look like her tears were dripping into the bowl and she filled it from her eyes. I finally got something passable once I was able to source a water-drip image.
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Eh. It's not really what I wanted, but it would require either more advanced software or practical effects that damaged the doll to get the full visual.
The best photos in this setup were fully practical and played with reflection.
I noticed that angling the light changed the clarity of the liquid so it could either look murky and red or almost translucent or mirror-like. With the clearest reflections, the effect almost looks like a screen or portal or scrying pool, with visions from elsewhere being visible though the water!
It's actually the closeups that best suggest the Gothic antiquity maybe-Italy setting I was trying to evoke. There's something very romantic about a reflection pool, and very horrific about a witch gazing into her own bloody tears.
I then made a poster with an original poem, all inspired by my work with the second doll in this roundup, whose portion and artwork was finished first! I've made several LDD text pieces now, and they're really fun!
I wanted more out of this photo idea, and then I thought of moving to the patio and using my garden table and statuary as columms and such. I set up a new shoot the next day to try this. This time, the dye supply was very low, so the basin ended up with a brighter, clearer liquid than before due to lower concentration, and a broken planter I pulled in got a solution of diluted acrylic paint instead.
Here's the new scene. I gave Lamenta an accessory of a "bloody" handkerchief to give her a prop, and I decided not to wait for night this time, as, while low light would make it easier to block out background elements I didn't want, this was a different feel that could work.
Here's a Roman-style poster I created with one after I found boosted white to look like a museum exhibition photo. I translated the series into Roman numerals and the subtitle into what Google Translate told me was the Italian for "Season of the Witch". Latin would work, too, but I chose Italian per the modern country the Argento films come from. Can't vouch for the grammar being correct, so let's hope it is.
And here's another variation on the flat dramatic movie-poster theme, getting closer in some ways to stylistic elements of the original Suspiria.
Lamenta couldn't be further from Emerald City Walpurgis and doesn't evoke the traditional Halloween witch icon in the way Emerald Val does, yet I think they're in fierce contention for the title of "most classically spooky witch".
Now I just need an orange vintage-artwork witch from LDD! The closest we have is the variant of burned trick-or-treater Ember, which I don't particularly want.
At the end of the day, Lamenta is visually weird at first, and then becomes apparent as perhaps one of the most classically spooky Living Dead Dolls out there. She combines modern and antique goth aesthetics, has imagery recalling spiders, blood, and skulls, and is an eerie formal witch dressed in purple and black with a scary widow-like veil. You get Lamenta, you got your whole Halloween in one doll...though trust me, I want to showcase several LDDs this Halloween to go more-is-more on that. Yet despite her elements of familiar spookery, Lamenta still feels like she's bringing her own unmistakably unique flavor to the table. That's really wonderful.
So. Target gift credit, babyyyyyyyy!!!!
Lamenta is a doll who's always kind of haunted me because I've always had thoughts on her, and they've changed entirely. At first, and all the way up to my second/current LDD era actually collecting the dolls, my reaction to Lamenta was simply "What were they thinking???" She looked very weird to me with her flat colors, muted purple bodice, and overall visual simplicity feeling disjointed and bizarre, and especially disconnected from the two earlier characters she was designed to join (explained imminently).
However, re-examining her started to strike me with an odd fascination and appreciation for her character. She was weird and goth and spooky in a way that might actually be very appealing to me after all, and it was sealed once she turned up as third-party offering on Target, sold by the same distributor as the Traveler's Dracula doll. Done. The rest of the gift credit was allocated. A coalescence of gift cards, including two cheap $5 ones my mom gave me from some earlier promotion she'd qualified for, left most of Lamenta's cost covered. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough gift credit to cover the whole thing, and the thrifty sensible side of me (that LDD will rarely cross paths with) really tried to check and double-check old cards to make sure there were no other leftovers to put forward to Lamenta. But then my godmother came in to unwittingly save the day with the arrival of her own gift money for me through the mail, and the remaining $21 was covered! I'm probably never going to get another mint LDD with so little all-purpose money! I wouldn't have done this just for the principle of getting an LDD mostly with gift money; this was a doll I wanted for real, too. But it does feel good to have found a way to get a Living Dead Doll this way regardless.
I touched on Series 26 beforehand when talking about Walpurgis. All of the characters are witches, and three of the five are based specifically on pagan holidays and have more old-style clothing and pagan-themed visual designs. I like witches, but am not spiritual or particularly attracted to pagan witches, and Holle Katrina, a Halloweeny black-and-white-costumed witch based on a fan contest winner, feels a little uninteresting to me. Lamenta, however, is weird and very goth and spooky. I like that a lot. Atypical Gothic witches are very welcome in my collection.
Lamenta is also the third and last of a small subgroup of LDD characters that started in Series 21, known as the "Three Sisters". The trio are witches dressed in ominous black, and all have black hair and white skin, implying they are triplets.
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| Compilation of official LDD photos of the Three Sisters in release order, edited and captioned by me. |
They also stand as direct references to the "Three Mothers" witchcraft mythos from the films of Italian horror and giallo director Dario Argento. His witches are ancient and are directly influenced by Thomas De Quincey's poem Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow from the Suspiria de Profundis collection. As defined by the poem, the Mothers are embodiments of the three chief sorrows that plague humanity: sighs, darkness, and tears, signifying despair, depression, and grief, respectively. The Mothers as named by De Quincey and adopted by Argento for his witches are Mater Suspiriorum, the Mother of Sighs (featured in Argento's film Suspiria); Mater Tenebrarum, Mother of Darkness (featured in Inferno), and Mater Lachrymarum, Mother of Tears (featured in, fittingly, Mother of Tears). Argento's witches don't really translate the spiritual sorrows as motifs for the way they operate; they're just extremely dangerous supernatural women. The Three Mothers' LDD counterparts are Sospirare (Series 25), Tenebre (Series 21), and Lamenta here (Series 26), all having similar Italian-derived names and shared initials with the Mothers. Tenebre was also the title of another Argento film disconnected from this trilogy, so the LDD might also be referencing that. The LDD witches of Sighs and Darkness were released in the opposite order of the corresponding Mothers' Argento films, but Tears comes last in both the trilogy of films and LDDs.
Most people who know Argento know him for Suspiria, the first film in the trilogy, and that's the Three Mothers film that has fared the best with horror audiences. Its hypersaturated dreamlike tone was influential and it's still a unique experience. Suspiria was radically remade by Luca Guadagnino in 2018 with a very disturbing moody arthouse drama aesthetic, and it's a fascinating film, though not for the squeamish or faint of heart...or Argento, who didn't like it. Unlike the original Suspiria, the full scope of the Three Mothers is referenced in the 2018 film, with the names all being dropped, despite only one of the witches being at hand during the plot. The film still doesn't inherit the thematic roles of the De Quincey Mothers, however, as it is more of a meditation on tyranny, femininity, and motherhood, and explores feminism and political struggles through a witches' coven--or it explores a witches' coven through political struggles!
Of the Argento trilogy, the other two films have had more mixed to negative reception, with Mother of Tears being the least-liked. It's evident the LDD guys have a real love for Italian cult-classic horror, though, since the Three Sisters are not their only tributes. Menard in Series 22 makes reference to the film Zombi 2 with his death date, and Series 25's Asa (pronounced "Ah-za")is directly based on the witch from the 1960 film Black Sunday, name and all.
There's definitely an appeal in the concept of collecting a matched trio of LDDs across multiple series, and the Argento theming does work for me as a horror nerd even though I haven't seen his movies yet. The Three Sisters look really good all together if Lamenta is in the middle. Collecting them all is a goal, but not a priority. I do think Sospirare is interesting, and she would be the next I collected if I decided to pursue the idea. Tenebre is the least interesting to me. I could definitely see myself designating the other sisters to future uses of holiday or birthday gift money, though Sospirare might be good enough to get sooner--just not urgently.
Thanks to the packaging design of their respective series, the LDD Three Sisters ended up each having different-colored coffin boxes. Lamenta's is the most traditional and least exciting in typical LDD black, but the Series 25 box Sospirare has is silver, and the Series 21 box used by Tenebre has the 13th anniversary design, with a 13-shaped sulfur symbol on the back and print to make the coffin look like it's assembled from old bluish wood planks.
Lamenta's shrink-wrap was the softer kind I saw with Agatha.
The tissue color for Series 26 is red, which works pretty well and is very classic. This might be one of the most versatile tissue colors for the LDD array, and I'm a little surprised Mezco chose pink as the signature tissue for the brand, though that might be to their benefit--pink feels more unique. With the S26 theme of witchcraft, I'd probably default to purple or green tissue myself, but these are old pagan and Gothic witches for the most part, so red is okay.
The chipboards are cut and printed to look like old grimoires with the poems written across the pages. This series is a rare case where the doll is not visually depicted in some way on the chipboard itself. I'd forgotten that S26 has the official subtitle "Season of the Witch".
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| Donovan is calling. |
Lamenta's poem says:
The third of three sisters who pollute our world
The offspring of a witch who had three little girls
Lamenta is the most beautiful and holds the most power
Her sweet tears of blood shall rain down like a shower
And a rewrite.
The third of the sisters polluting our world
Born to a witch who had three little girls
Gorgeous Lamenta holds most of the power
Her sticky sweet tears will bleed down in a shower
This time, I noticed a patch of adhesive holding the chipboard on the right side (facing me). This should allow the piece unfold to get the doll out without removing it fully, but at this rate, I end up taking the chipboards fully out regardless. I think the idea of using the chipboard like a gate would work better if the side that's not attached was cut a little shorter so it didn't stress the side that was.
The most recent series I've collected from before S26 is S23. Here's one of those coffins next to the S26 to compare the layout on the back. I saw no differences between the two.
Lamenta's unboxing was smooth, as was repacking the tray in the outer box.
Lamenta's death certificate has the standard graphic design and she died on October 31, 2007. Mother of Tears released in this year in its native country of Italy, though not on Halloween. Still, as this review progresses, you'll see the doll makes an extremely strong case for a Halloween death date due to all of the visual theming I saw in her. I charted the LDD death dates, and Lamenta contributes to Halloween being the most common LDD deathdate when year isn't in consideration. Each of the LDD Three Sisters died on the year their corresponding Argento movie was released, though none on any of the recorded specific days I was able to find for the films' release. Lamenta and Holle Katrina are the only S26 dolls with death years since they're not unified with the others. (Holle Katrina's deathdate is based on the LDD fan contest winner she was based on.) The other three, which are based on pagan holidays, just have the date and month in correspondence with their festivals, but no known death year.
The certificate poem reads:
She will lick the tears right off your face
Your sorrow is what she loves to taste
Your eyes shut tight, on your face a frown
In her tears of blood you will drown
For this poem, I heavily reimagined it.
She sips the sorrows on your face
And channels all your fears
Your dreams of death are what she tastes
She drowns you in your tears
Here she is taken out.
Lamenta's standout piece is her veil, which is made of a spooky black spiderweb lace fabric.
It makes her feel very mysterious, magical, and scary. I was worried about the piece being difficult to use, especially with her delicate hairstyle, but it slides over her head from the front with an elastic fabric chin strap very easily. The strap is tightest and most secure when tucked behind her ears. The band going behind her ears has the added benefit of being harder to see, but doing this does not require sliding the veil on from behind, which would lead to messier hair. The band also has black satin rosettes that go across the top of her head.
While it's designed to fall behind her head, the veil can, of course, flip forward to cover her face.
Lamenta also came with an plastic elastic band around her face that had absorbed some black coloring, but this does nothing meaningful, since the veil has its own strap.
The veil came strapped to Lamenta's waist with an elastic band around her body to keep it flattened down for packaging.
Without the veil, Lamenta's silhouette changes entirely. Her hair is tied in two high side pigtails that have been split into what once were thick tube-shaped ringlets.
Very similar styles were seen on Series 11 Jubilee and Series 19 Orchid, though the bangs on Lamenta are cut into a goth central point. They lay pretty well.
Even though this doll is untouched, it's clear that simple passage of time has made Lamenta's curls go lazy, as they're not very tight or especially tidy now, leading to a longer, less dainty silhouette. It doesn't look awful, and does feel a bit more realistic than the tubes of the original shape, but I did like the springy neat shape she would have had, and the short length of the ringlets made her head look like a giant spider with her curls as the legs! Not sure that was the plan, but I think it was a nice bonus spooky tone to her look. I might try re-curling her ringlets.
Lamenta is my first LDD designed to have fancy tied-up hair anywhere (the Wicked Witch's hair was tied for packaging but meant to be loose), which means Lamenta is rooted only for tied-up hair. If I took her hair down, I'd find only the perimeters of each half rooted to get a tight pigtail without excess volume. That's just how LDD does things. These are display dolls.
While Lamenta is described as the most beautiful of her sisters (corresponding to the portrayal of Mater Lachrymarum), she's very stylized and almost cartoonish, and doesn't look as conventional as the others.
She has eyebrow-shaped arcs of purple dots, and her eye sockets are overdrawn into black skull-like shapes, with her painted eyes taking up about a third of the sculpt to create a very ominous half-lidded effect. The black of her eye is quite noticeably darker than the black of the skull-socket paint. The effect is to delineate her eyes as being truly black as the abyss, while the rest is shown to be stylistic makeup. In a way, it even helps illustrate her half-lidded gaze more realistically by utilizing the spare area on the eye sculpt to look like a lowered eyelid. If her eyes were completely black so you couldn't see the sculpt, you wouldn't get that effect, and I misjudged Lamenta at first because I thought the entire eye black was supposed to look like a void. I can see that they were deliberately depicting makeup, and I can accept that easily. I had thought of repainting her eye black with something darker, but I'll refrain because I see it wasn't a failure in execution that she has two black tones around her eyes.
Streaks of bloody tears run from underneath, and I like that they're asymmetrical, though her right eye has the blood within the black section while her left doesn't. Some red has also gotten faintly smudged under her left eye, and I'll see if there's anything I can do to remove that. Since tears are concrete images unlike darkness or sighs, Lamenta's sprititual sorrow can be easily depicted upon her, and her attribute is identified easily out of her trio. Because she's goth as hell, though, the tears are naturally blood. Lamenta's lips are purple.
Lamenta's face is very flat and graphical in its style and almost evokes a Dia de Muertos calavera design with the skull-like sockets and dotted brows. The facial design is certainly weird, but it feels very classically spooky, and I love the way it almost looks like a mask. In that sense, I guess you can read a little bit of Venice Carnival into her too, tying her back to Italian roots. It's odd how she feels both like a modern goth cartoon and an antique masquerade! Maybe she also reminds me a bit of kabuki makeup too? And with the veil and tears together, there's hints of La Llorona! There's a lot going on with her!
Lamenta's face is not a mask in any way, though. Her whole head is cast in white.
Both Tenebre and Lamenta have vivid blue eyes, and it can be assumed Sospirare would have had the same color before they were gouged out.
Lamenta's outfit is the most colorful of the Sisters'. Her bodice is purple with a black high collar, and features a velour-like fabric for the purple, with two neck ruffles and a faux-waistcoat with a fake panel fold and buttons. Lamenta's sleeves are black cotton and extremely simple, with no puffing or cuffs.
The back of the bodice is purple velour too, but the purple doesn't quite wrap around the top of the shoulder. I wish it did. The ruffles are only on the front.
The skirt section is a black bell with pleated purple velour trim on the hem, and meets the floor at its lowest dip in the middle. The dress is all one piece and velcros down to the waist in back.
The heavy presence of purple makes Lamenta the most saturated doll of her sisters, though the color does coordinate with the paint used for Sospirare's gouged eye sockets and lips.
All of the LDD Three Sisters have Victorian Gothic-inspired clothing. Lamenta's is the least lacy and delicate--save for the veil.
Lamenta has the pointy witchy LDD boots, and I think every S26 character might have them, appropriately. I also think her sisters have this sculpt. No socks on Lamenta.
While her prototype and photo showed her with white uncovered hands, the produced doll has all-black arms, which leaves her hands black.
I'm guessing this is to create the visual of black gloves in a cost-effective way, since nobody will see the whole arm has been cast in black under her long sleeves. And hey, that's a bit of fabric-pigment discoloration she's spared from the choice, too! While Lamenta has proportionally less black going on than her sisters, I think she's the one whose pale white face stands out the most because it's the only part you can see on the doll that's white. That's probably why I'm getting the vibes that she looks like she's caked in makeup or wearing a mask, because that white, paired with her stark face paint, stands out in such a scary, bold way with nothing else but black and purple around it. It's very cool.
Lamenta has some serious stains, including some dotty spots on the head that had me paranoid I was actually looking at mold, so I popped her arms off and set her to soak in a diluted bleach bath to hopefully either clear up stains or kill fungus. Since I decided re-curling her hair was on the table, I didn't worry too much about the shaping of her curls falling even further.
The soak didn't clean Lamenta up, but reexamining her indicated the spotty stains were caused by the veil and are harmless, being the same blue color as her streaky torso stains and lining up with where the netting of the veil was pressed against her in packaging, so I let her out of the bath. I tried wrapping a curl of hair around a stick and pouring boiling water on it, but the shape didn't change. That's alright. I suppose it can still be viewed as spidery, and the hair is good enough as it is. And a part of me would rather keep the hair in a stable declined state rather than have to repair the tighter style over and over as more time passes. I did clear up some of the red smudge next to her blood drips with acetone, which was a big win. I also boiled her bangs a bit, and I think it brought out the point a little better now. The bangs can be nudged a little with a finger to make them shift into the right shape and it takes some fussing, but they're cooperative.
And what mattered most to me about her display was the silhouette of her veil, and, like magic, once I put it back on her, it was falling in the voluminous triangle/trapezoid shape it was supposed to. You already saw it, but what an improvement it is when it lays this way!
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| Now I'm seeing the real Lamenta!!! |
This really gives her presence and makes her feel much more deluxe and lofty, despite the simplicity of the piece. It's a wonderful choice to convey the tone of a grandiose ancient witch, particularly as the chief of her triumvirate.
Lottie's umbrella proved its versatility once again when given to Lamenta. This piece works with a lot of dolls!
Return Sadie's sleeveless coat also worked pretty well. It's a bit larger on Lamenta than it is on the new-style LDD doll body, but it's certainly within her aesthetic.
Lamenta is the only one of the witch Sisters I could see taking advantage of this piece. Tenebre has wings that couldn't attach with the coat on, and it would look visually redundant on her. Sospirare, meanwhile, has a shawl accent that wouldn't fit together with a coat.
And I tried out whatever other portraits I could to show Lamenta off!
I figured she'd look especially good against orange vintage patterning. I think I was right.
Then I staged a library with a bunch of old books.
And more pure red and blue.
And a witch of Tears needs her tissues.
Lastly was the big showstopper. For this, I had to construct my own dish/pool out of clay to provide a vessel I could safely ruin with red dye. I decided to go ahead with this because I wanted the photo and I could easily reuse this for another character I want later. I used all the terra-cotta air-dry clay I had, and when I ran out, I ordered more and hydrated what I had with wet paper towels until the rest arrived. I made sure the basin would be watertight and built a short step in so a doll could stand on the edge and be dry. I wasn't worried about it looking lumpy and simple, since it could be a very old or weathered installation and I trusted I could give it a decent paint job to make it look more complete.
An unpatchable crack developed which eventually led to the whole thing splitting in two when trying to work with it while dry, causing a major delay and well over a week of wasted time. However, at this point, I'd already taken Viv out of this roundup and put her in a solo post due to her gory subject matter (she was meant to be the second doll) so I'd need to get a third doll to complete this post anyway, meaning the delay was going to happen regardless. This post has been a bit of a shambles. I guess LDD roundups never get done quickly!
With this next round, I used mostly white clay and added in terra-cotta for the step and some thinner areas. I pinched the basin out of a giant block of clay this time rather than building walls around from separate pieces, hoping that would be more stable, and I built everything on cling wrap which would hopefully prevent the basin from cracking. If the surface it's on was able to contract with the drying clay, I hoped the structure wouldn't meet resistance and crack.
This rendition got a crack, but not one that split and broke it apart, and I patched it with glue before painting the basin. For liquid, I used water with lots of red dye. Something about the bin I carried the liquid in before setting up might have been soapy, because the liquid was milky and bubbled and I had to sop up some of it to try to clean the surface of the "blood".
Here's the setup. It's not quite as spectacular as I had hoped it to be, but the vessel held the red liquid and Lamenta never fell into it!
I had envisioned doing some photo editing to make it look like her tears were dripping into the bowl and she filled it from her eyes. I finally got something passable once I was able to source a water-drip image.
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Eh. It's not really what I wanted, but it would require either more advanced software or practical effects that damaged the doll to get the full visual.
The best photos in this setup were fully practical and played with reflection.
I noticed that angling the light changed the clarity of the liquid so it could either look murky and red or almost translucent or mirror-like. With the clearest reflections, the effect almost looks like a screen or portal or scrying pool, with visions from elsewhere being visible though the water!
It's actually the closeups that best suggest the Gothic antiquity maybe-Italy setting I was trying to evoke. There's something very romantic about a reflection pool, and very horrific about a witch gazing into her own bloody tears.
I then made a poster with an original poem, all inspired by my work with the second doll in this roundup, whose portion and artwork was finished first! I've made several LDD text pieces now, and they're really fun!
I wanted more out of this photo idea, and then I thought of moving to the patio and using my garden table and statuary as columms and such. I set up a new shoot the next day to try this. This time, the dye supply was very low, so the basin ended up with a brighter, clearer liquid than before due to lower concentration, and a broken planter I pulled in got a solution of diluted acrylic paint instead.
Here's the new scene. I gave Lamenta an accessory of a "bloody" handkerchief to give her a prop, and I decided not to wait for night this time, as, while low light would make it easier to block out background elements I didn't want, this was a different feel that could work.
And here's another variation on the flat dramatic movie-poster theme, getting closer in some ways to stylistic elements of the original Suspiria.
Lamenta couldn't be further from Emerald City Walpurgis and doesn't evoke the traditional Halloween witch icon in the way Emerald Val does, yet I think they're in fierce contention for the title of "most classically spooky witch".
Now I just need an orange vintage-artwork witch from LDD! The closest we have is the variant of burned trick-or-treater Ember, which I don't particularly want.
At the end of the day, Lamenta is visually weird at first, and then becomes apparent as perhaps one of the most classically spooky Living Dead Dolls out there. She combines modern and antique goth aesthetics, has imagery recalling spiders, blood, and skulls, and is an eerie formal witch dressed in purple and black with a scary widow-like veil. You get Lamenta, you got your whole Halloween in one doll...though trust me, I want to showcase several LDDs this Halloween to go more-is-more on that. Yet despite her elements of familiar spookery, Lamenta still feels like she's bringing her own unmistakably unique flavor to the table. That's really wonderful.
In Six-Feet Deep Trouble: Chloe
For a while, this was meant to be the finale third doll of this roundup, but she ended up being the second when I pulled Viv out to be her own post, and she was the first whose review portion was complete, even as I came back to add a few more art photo ideas! It's only fair, though--last time, I said there was a certain doll who'd probably end up in roundup 2. With Viv set aside, that doll can do just as I promised and be my third.
Chloe is from Series 12 and is reportedly one of the most popular LDDs...and evidence supports this; essentially nobody is selling her, and while her price is always pretty high, there aren't many options in that range to go around, either. Compare that to the glut of cheap Vincent Vaudes I see on eBay. (I think he's statistically the least popular LDD. Maybe enough to tempt me into working with him.) There are other dolls with only one listing (and those make me antsy to grab them soon, even in cases where their review timing would be much later), but I don't think all of those scarcer items accurately reflect popularity. For Chloe, it makes complete sense to me that there's not a wealth of options, but some of the scarcer dolls on the aftermarket don't feel as easy to explain given my impressions of what was hot and not in the LDD community. However, it works out the other way, too--there are a few dolls I think ought to be valued way higher for what they are, and that gives me a chance to grab what I consider a decent opportunity.
Markets don't always align with my understanding of an item's demand, but the popularity of Chloe is easy to grasp. Chloe is very cute in a non-malicious way, and very spooky without gore--she represents a pretty accessible form of horror and has some real charm. Series 12 has another fan-favorite with Frozen Charlotte...who I also agree is sweet and great and I also want her! (The third major LDD fan-favorite might be Series 8's The Lost...who is also on my list. Call me basic.)
Chloe's story is that she was buried alive, something previously used for Series 1 OG character Posey, but Posey feels more zombie-themed than Chloe, who portrays more of the horror of being the buried victim in such an incident. The story doesn't seem to have a lot to do with her abstract spooky visual design, but I like her. As mentioned, you don't see her much at all on eBay, only her Resurrection dolls, and the only S12 copy that's stayed up for a while isn't with her box and has different (better) hair than the doll would have come with out-of-box. I wanted the original so I could try working with her while keeping the silhouette she was designed with, and an opened but complete listing popped up just when I was thinking about using Viv's coffin for a Chloe photoshoot and I decided to check again. I knew to take the opportunity because another Chloe option wasn't likely to come soon and could very well demand more cost-wise. I just prepared myself for a difficult set of bangs.
I have it on record from old writings that during my original LDD phase, I was not impressed by Chloe and didn't get the hype, dismissing her as cute enough but nothing special. I think maybe my sense of charm has now caught up to my sense of horror, such that I recognize and embrace simple and cute character designs much more readily than I used to.
Chloe then arrived. While she may not look like much, I hold her as a key acquisition. She was in opened condition, but had the full box and certificate and chipboard.
The Series 12 coffins have no printed side handles, unlike the most recent prior series I've collected from (S8). The back of the coffin also has metalized red print, which I'd first seen far later in S23. Apparently, the change to metallic red on the back happened much earlier than I'd expected. Maybe it even happened as early as S10, though I'm only guessing because S10 had metallic red print on the clear coffin lids as a one-off flair denoting the tenth-series milestone. I'm in the market for S10 Arachne someday, so she'd help me narrow things down.
Series 12 has that more common pink tissue, and I swear the majority of LDD series have different colors--I've just been grabbing several dolls from the pink series! The S12 chipboard theme depicts personalized skulls for each character. I actually think Chloe's chipboard looks very clean and striking. It's just a black background with red borders and text, and the illustration. It's a slick composition.
Chloe's chipboard poem is atypically written in first-person, which adds a degree of pathos and horror to her story of live burial. Chloe's two Resurrection dolls follow the innovation of Resurrection Cuddles and are electronic push-button talking dolls that speak three pre-recorded phrases. Resurrection-variant Chloe speaks this chipboard poem as one of them, while the main Res Chloe recites her death certificate poem among her phrases. The variant doll speaking the first-person poem feels more effective to me. The poem reads as follows:
I lay here alone in this place so gloomy
It's dark and it's cold and not very roomy
My mind is awake, but my body is lead
So this is what it feels like once you are dead.
I only saw a couple of clumsy spots. Here's a tweak.
I lie here alone in a box very gloomy
Dark and so cold and it's not very roomy
My mind's up and racing; my body's like lead
So this is the way that it feels to be dead
I don't know if any other LDDs have first-person poems. Chloe's chipboard could be the only one.
The S12 death certificates are not an interesting new style. Chloe's, however, was valuable for resolving an entry in doubt on the LDD death timeline I constructed. On the website, her death year was ambiguously listed as May 3 in the abbreviated year "/06". Going off Chloe's old-fashioned style and the way "/03" on the site for Calico referred to 1903, I assumed Chloe's death year was 1906. I was wrong. She died on May 3, 2006, the same year the doll was released. If you swapped hers and Calico's centuries, they'd both make more sense, since Calico is a modern body-mod girl and Chloe is a vintage girl who died of a mistake that was far more common and more possible long ago. But this is the authority, so I've since corrected that date on the timeline post.
This poem reads:
Claustrophobically confined six feet under
Chloe couldn't move and started to wonder
"If I'm stuck down here, will I survive?"
It was then she knew she was buried alive.
This poem doesn't roll off the tongue, and it doesn't make sense that Chloe would realize she was buried alive after asking how she'd survive being stuck underground. Here's a rewrite.
Choked and cramped in a box six feet under
Chloe thought and she squirmed and she wondered
"I'm stuck in a grave--do they know I'm alive?
Then she started to sense that she couldn't survive.
Chloe's death certificate doesn't really work as an in-universe document because her death certificate would have to be erroneous, right? It would have had to declare her dead on a date that wasn't true because she was alive when carelessly processed by doctors and the coroner/morticians. However, if you want to squeeze it into a diegetic context, this certificate could have been written after Chloe was discovered to be buried alive, and then was dug up, upon which her actual death was discovered and a new certificate, accurate this time, was issued. I'd hope under the conceit of these being Living Dead Dolls that Chloe was able to rise undead and go about her merry way upon her exhumation. Posey was able to!
Unfortunately, Chloe made an abysmal first impression. I took her out of the box, tried to straighten her right leg, and heard a snap as it fell out of her socket. That put things on quite a sour note to start, and she's balancing on the leg for these photos, which became far hastier than expected in my anxiousness to evaluate and solve the problem. Fortunately, she's a simple doll and has less to go through.
Chloe has a very stark palette consisting primarily of black, white, and red, with just a bit of grey for dimension in her face paint. She's one of many LDDs with a black and red palette (also including Viv), and it's worked many times. There are multiple dolls I can see myself getting in this color range, like the aforementioned Arachne.
Chloe's hair is black and wavy and waist-length, meant to puff out around her a fair bit. She has bangs which are meant to be flat across her forehead, but these are thin and floating off her forehead. I was getting dread flashbacks to S3 Lottie, who needed her hair tied down to her head before boiling and even that wasn't perfect. However, I'll accept a bit of messiness and thin or split bangs on this doll, since the official photo of her sells it pretty well as part of her look.
The other Chloe on eBay right now has hair that looks thick and tidy, and it's nicer, but it doesn't look like Chloe to me.
Chloe's skin is white, and her face is very spooky.
Her skin is stark white and she has no eyebrows. Her eyes glance upward, and her eyes and mouth have a really eerie sketchy black branching design that's very stylistic, and there's a subtle grey layer under the black for more dimension. Her lips are light grey under the linework. This stylization feels like spooky-scribble art styles seen in things like Tim Burton drawings or David Firth's disturbing Salad Fingers animations. I don't know what this faceup is meant to convey, but it's definitely creepy. She still looks pretty sweet and cute, though, with a wide-eyed expression. Chloe's eyes are also done over with some grey to make them look more shadowed. I think I'd prefer if her sclerae popped white or were fully black, but this is fine. It does have the neat effect of making her eyes sink into total darkness at distances or in low light.
Resurrection Chloe's face and hair are very similar to this doll's, though her hair looks a lot neater and more competently-rooted, and her bangs are pointed. Her biggest facial difference is the increased branching effect around her eyes and mouth. She's cute, but I don't find her to be as haunting. She's one of those Resurrections that sticks a little too close to the original to be worth owning alongside the OG (though she's great as a substitute for those who missed the original), and I think her red patterned dress and smaller bow reduce her visual punch and make her much less striking. Her skin might also be less starkly white.
Resurrection-variant Chloe's face mixes the branching linework with overt skull contouring in a really striking way, and her face looks quite a lot like the skull on the S12 chipboard--I'd wager it's deliberate!
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| The lighting doesn't make it clear, but both of her eyes have red pupils. |
Costume differences aside, I could read that edition as a portrayal of the same doll as S12, just at a later stage of decay, and I think variant Res Chloe indicates that the branching effect on S12 is a depiction of light decomposition. I really like the Res variant edition, and she'd be a great companion to this doll. She feels very Victorian Gothic and I'm thinking about squaring her away as a gift to self for a later date. She's not a priority project or review, but it could be smart to secure her in advance.
S12 Chloe's outfit is very simple and childlike and reminiscent of the basic retro S1 Sadie and Sin dresses, so I almost expect her to have a swivel body, despite knowing she's ball-jointed! It's a tight-necked black dress that's one color all over with no extra panels or frills, and the neck features a huge bright red velvet bow around it. The huge bow and overlong sleeves make her look younger and cuter and more doll-like.
Interestingly, the dress has a strip of hook velcro on the back, but no loop velcro to match it because the dress material is clingy enough that the velcro just hooks onto the bare fabric!
The dress is very cute, but Chloe's colors make it feel very gothic and ominous, almost like a feminine take on Billy the Puppet from Saw!
The dress material is a felt very much like, if not the same as, S1 Sadie's, and the edges are finished (unlike S1 Sadie's).
Chloe's outfit also includes red-and-black striped tights. They feel very witchy, but also generally retro and striking, and the stripes work perfectly with her look.
Her shoes are black Mary Janes.
Chloe's outfit reminds me a lot of one of my most treasured toys--a child-size Folkmanis puppet witch with sleeves that go over your arms so you become her hands! The witch, who I named Jessica after a childhood classmate, has a similar simple black felt dress and matching tights.
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| Demonstrating one of the arm gloves. She also has a hole in the back of her head to move her mouth, but you can't move both arms and her head as a solo puppeteer. Someone else has to move her mouth or other arm. |
Jessica was giant to me back in the day, but now she feels tiny!
Chloe has no accessories. It would have been fun if she had something she'd been buried with to convey that she was sent to her grave ahead of time. The LDD bouquet of flowers in red with black stems (ideally with a gripping hand) would have looked good, or perhaps a stuffed animal she loved would have been nice.
When I took Chloe's outfit off, it confirmed what I had expected--her ball joint peg had snapped outright rather than coming out of the torso hip socket like Betsy's.
And I could understand why, too--the joints were cast in a hard translucent yellow plastic that would inherently, chemically be more brittle. I know that by S23 (and hopefully well before), the joints were cast out of opaque black plastic. I can imagine Mezco caught light of this after other incidents and switched to opaque plastic as a result, which means Chloe's joint breaking probably has little to do with the doll's age. If it was a problem I encountered due to the doll plastics being old, then I imagine the problem might have continued for a longer time than it did, but breaks must have happened even with newer dolls for a switch to have been made at all. Right now, my sample range is small enough that I can't say how long these brittle joints were used on the ball-joint dolls. I'd need to handle more dolls from between S12 and S23 to get a better idea.
Betsy and later dolls having opaque black plastic joints benefit from it, since the plastic type is inherently sturdier and, as I witnessed, a hip ball that's too tight will get the peg twisted out of the torso socket instead of snapping the peg in two. Chloe was going to be a much harder repair than Betsy. Mezco never should have tried making the joints out of this material, because it leads to a worst-case scenario in a joint problem.
Chloe has some stains from her dress and her tights.
I first tried using superglue directly, popping her leg back on, but that didn't address the problem of the ball being stuck and too tight inside the leg socket, and the leg just broke off again. To try again, I cut away at the ball cup in the leg to loosen the socket a little, and bored a hole into the ball and the fractured peg inside her hip and glued a small chip of wood in both ends to serve as a small peg and hopefully stabilize the joint reattachment.
Cutting away at the cup would hopefully lead to the leg moving on the ball once everything set, and I tried to be fairly generous with the surgery so it was plenty mobile and there would be no risk of breaking the glue and undoing the repair when I tried to move Chloe's leg. I didn't want the leg so loose it was turning freely with gravity, but it had to move. I then re-tightened the leg by working glue into the joint slowly so it set and thickened in the path of motion without locking the leg in place.
I don't know where the leg joints changed plastics, but I will be more careful with dolls from the earlier ball-joint series. I might start checking the arm balls (wouldn't require removing the arms or stressing the joints; there's a gap) on S13-S22 dolls to see what's going on and verify the plastic type before doing anything that gets the legs messed up. In the event of a tight ball on a doll with brittle joints, I might be able to prevent a break like this by really really heating a stuck leg and popping it off, trimming the socket cup, and putting it back on after another heavy heating. This Chloe damage doesn't turn me away from wanting S12 fellow Frozen Charlotte, but there might need to be more caution taken with her.
I also treated Chloe's hair. Her bangs seemed to boil down really easily, and I gave her a shampoo. I also trimmed some over-long hair to the right of her bangs, which looked like a cutting error. It wasn't long enough at all to blend into the long part of her hair, so I cut it to the length of her bangs.
The leg repair seems pretty successful. It definitely doesn't move the same way, but it's mobile, holds a pose, and doesn't seem likely to fall off. I resent that the repair had to be done and that her shoes were loose on top of everything, but Chloe finally passes muster...and I do love her.
Her hair is still wet here, but this was the first reward--my first look at Chloe looking good.
And here's her hair dry and some dark portraits. She's extremely darling in her eerie little way.
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I'm actually really glad Chloe came late enough to be a ball-joint doll. She gets so much character out of a simple head tilt and I default to displaying her with her head at an angle.
Chloe's a bit more grim and moody than the more cartoony Sadie and Lottie, but she still forms a nice group of cute vintage kids with them.
Chloe actually aligns pretty well visually with Lamenta due to their dark clothes and white skin. It's startling how much older Lamenta ends up looking next to Chloe, and the boots make her taller, too. On her own, Lamenta felt like a childlike LDD, but with Chloe, she looks like a grown-up LDD.
I then took her for a second boil for her bangs, strapping them down to her forehead, and tried a fabric-softener run on her hair. I also moved to re-wave her hair with pipe cleaner curlers and more hot water since her hair came out looking more straight and voluminous than wavy. Then those waves needed to be boiled a little because it was too wavy...here's her hair after the tweaks.
And I put together some optional accessories for her. I found an old stuffed bunny and tied a (sloppy) matching red velvet bow around its neck, and decided Chloe would put Return Sadie's fancy flowers to good use, since I don't use them for Sadie. Since they're wire, they bend very easily into a handle loop.
And I assembled my major showstopper photo. I'll show the final first because this was a journey and I don't want to show how it was done right away.
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| I wrote this haiku about Chloe years ago during my first LDD phase. |
And without text.
I'll be entirely honest and admit coming up with this photo concept increased my desire and resolve to get Chloe at least tenfold. I'd had this visual and plan in the back of my mind for almost two months prior. The photo concept made Chloe an inevitability, and I'm glad that inevitability came sooner than I expected. Thank Motor-Oil Viv and her gross expendable coffin for getting me to check up and find the doll on offer!
So how did I do it? Over an hour's worth of experimenting.
I knew I was going to build a cross-section of dirt and to cut open a coffin to show Chloe underground. Cutting the coffin was easy, but I needed a cardboard box to make a frame. Here's that.
I cut off the top side so there would be an open "ground level" to stage more on top of.
Then I trimmed it more so the inner depth was smaller--I wanted to not waste heavy dirt pushing the coffin to the front of the box.
Then I tried digging up and packing in dirt, first vertically, and then trying it horizontally with the goal of packing it solid enough it could be turned upward. I tried putting in cardboard scraps to reduce the pressure on the coffin lid from the weight, but this was still too heavy and the box corners were losing structure from being trimmed once more to get rid of additional excess space...not like this was realistically going to be strong enough anyway.
There was just no way with how heavy the material was, so I decided to grab a smaller cardboard box and use it to fill in more space above Chloe, and very carefully packed wet mud over the surface to make it look like it was all solid earth above the coffin--it's mostly a veneer. I put it on a garden table so I could get a good angle more easily, and sandwiched the big box between two heavy pots to keep its sides straight. A big patio bin was put behind to serve as a clean backdrop to edit out later. That all finally worked well enough. I then staged the dolls. Chloe lies on her back, bending her neck up and looking at the viewer to convey the moment of realization. I selected Lamenta, Agatha, and the Wizard of Oz (sans lab coat) to be her mourners, due to their grim and/or formal grown-up attire, and I used Return Sadie's tombstone turned backward with a red bow tied on it. Lottie's umbrella, ever useful, lies on the ground, as does the shovel hand of Bones Jones.
I put the bunny and flowers in Chloe's coffin with her, but I realized too late that the way I staged them did not show them off properly at the angle I was using. I would have had a longer photo session with this setup, but after I took a couple of photos, the filler box was falling forward out of the frame and collapse was imminent, so I quickly took the toys out and cleaned everything up before that happened. So I worked with what I got. Here's the base photo I used.
The depth ended up perfect. I was worried Chloe wouldn't look far enough "underground", but if anything, she might be too deep because the space is taller than a Living Dead Doll!
If we're measuring with Chloe as an LDD child, then she could be six feet deep, but if we're considering the same doll height also applies to an adult-styled LDD character, then she might be more like seven or eight feet deep! Scale is relative when LDDs have been played both as children and grown-ups!
In editing, I had to black out a few spots where the blue filler box still showed through the dirt, and I had to manually erase the black bin backdrop to replace it with a sky because background-remover tools didn't recognize the bin as a separate layer to erase. The lighting on the Wizard was flat and dim, so I added some more white to his sleeves, and tweaked the photo until I hit a really neat hypersaturated/over-contrasted look for the picture that felt very fake and gritty and nostalgic in just the right way, evoking the staging of countless old toy-photo vignettes in advertising, including early LDD. For the sky, I tried putting a blue sky in, but that didn't quite work with the lighting in the photo, and I realized, for LDD and Chloe in particular, that a scary red and black sky was the only way to go. Here's the result again because I'm obsessed.
The extra layer with my original poem was done because I thought the composition would work well with the vertical nature of a poetic stanza (or a haiku, in this case), and it puts the piece in line with the text compositions I made for my Sadies and Dedwin. This one, however, took far more effort to create!
Not only am I in the club of people who have fan-favorite Chloe in their collections, but I'm also only a little bit hesitant to say I've created the coolest photo of Chloe that exists. Are there ways this could be done better? Absolutely. (This could have been improved with a sturdier coffin and frame, or maybe even a small wooden bookshelf to fill with dirt instead so I'd have more time to work with a stable setup, better staging of Chloe's props, a more professional backdrop that wouldn't require the digital solution, etc.) But has anybody with those better means done this photo yet? No. And for something made with no budget or studio, I'm very happy with the result.
Res-variant Chloe could give me an easier time with a similar concept if certain ideas I'm thinking of come to fruition.
I did another piece later because I wanted to get the most of that red sky stock photo, so I assembled a collage-style piece with another original poem and similar color/lighting editing using an earlier picture of Chloe and stock images of dirt and a gravestone.
The resolution on the sky photo was low and creating blocky patches when scaled up so much, but it was the perfect backdrop, so I realized I could use the blur tool to smooth it back out!
I wasn't totally done with photos while I was outside taking the burial picture. I decided to use the hole I created while harvesting dirt and risk it by burying Chloe for some unburying photographs. The green branches provided a nice contrast to her reds, and that helped make the photo click together in a lack of moodier lighting.
I also liked the unburied photo in mostly black-and-white.
She was quickly washed. Fortunately, fresh dirt is pretty easy to deal with.
While Resurrection-variant Chloe's face is incredible and her outfit is beautiful, I do think the original doll has such a strong iconic element with the big red bow. It was the perfect visual to draw out through the bunny and tombstone, and it's a visual signature for the character which the Res dolls don't live up to.
And I still wasn't done. I had lots more inspiration--for one, I started playing with the clear lid of the coffin, using Viv's Nohell lid piece to paint "dust" onto.
And then I swapped her into Lamenta's red-tissued coffin for photos based on her color palette...and things took a slight turn for the David Lynch. Can I help it if Chloe looks tailor-made for the Black Lodge?
It was fun taking portraits with backdrops in each of her four colors. And here's a portrait you might see on her wall at home. I thought it was a great spooky gag to orient it sideways in burial position!
While I felt like I was buying into the hallowed V.I.D. collection of the LDD catalogue with Chloe, her brittle hip gave me my least pleasant introduction to an LDD so far, unbecoming of her status as a treasured favorite in the brand. The plastic choice was unwise, and so her over-tight right leg caused a time-consuming and precarious repair job when the peg snapped. Her hair needed a lot of revisions due to her bangs and wave, which was fine, but then her shoes were too loose too, and that made things feel outright demoralizing. I think Chloe's design is very charming and spooky and I am glad to have her, but I really wish her manufacturing was better on multiple counts so I'd have been spared the grief. At the same time, I do have to concede to the fact that these are risks you take with older dolls, and that the insult would have been much greater if Chloe was new or more recent. And I got copious artistic inspiration with this doll and made many wonderful pictures--much more than I expected. I had thought she'd be the star of this roundup due to her stature in LDD circles, but that opinion had started to falter when she put me through so much maintenance and repair. However, after all these great art photos, it's unquestionable that she is a star of this group like I'd thought she'd be. She more than proved herself.
Ultimately, old LDDs are worth as much as the owner thinks, and the semantic and aesthetic value had to some real lifting on poor Chloe. Fingers crossed that other dolls I want in her time range, like Frozen Charlotte and Arachne, won't give me such problems.
Maybe I'll get her Resurrection variant as a Christmas treat.
Last Day in the Sun: Dottie Rose
I said she'd probably be in this roundup, and I'm glad I was able to hold to it when a spot opened back up. LDD Series 6 wasn't grand enough to earn a standalone series of posts, but I kind of want to make it a consecutive through-line in these roundups for now because they're easy acquisitions and I like them all.
Dottie Rose is the third of my top three of Series 6, and was formerly the number-one Series 6 doll on my wishlist. I believe she is also the first LDD I've gotten who I seriously wanted back in the phase when I first fixated on them as a teen. I think I also liked Agatha back then, but Dottie Rose was a big contender on my purely-dreaming wishlist back then.
[Hush and Calico as seen in Roundup 1 are currently standing as the other members of my S6 top three, or perhaps just my "favorite half" of the series because they're not in any particular ranking, but that all can change. Isaac is a fun novelty doll, Jinx has that sixties retro appeal that'd fit her in with Sadie and Lottie, and Revenant is classically spooky in a great way. I'd love to see how things change as I get more--they already have, in a way, because I might actually seek out Jinx next despite initially putting her at the bottom of the series!]
Dottie Rose has a name that very literally describes her aesthetic--she's polka-dots and pink. She's a thoroughly 1950s-looking gal who died due to a deadly photosensitivity, or sun allergy. As with Hush, Dottie Rose's animal was directly involved in her death--she was forced to leave the house and enter the harmful sunlight to chase after her poodle Hun after it got outside. As such, Dottie Rose is very pale from staying in the dark, and has blisters on her face from the sun exposure that did her in.
I always liked Dottie Rose's look...or at least, half of her dolls'. In a highly unusual and still unexplained move, (reportedly) half of Dottie Rose's dolls were released with harsh eyebrows like Series 3 Lottie's or Hush's maybe-eyebrows, and half were completely browless. I guess the designers just couldn't decide which suited her better, and this dichotomy was referenced by her Resurrection dolls--the main had brows, and the variant didn't. I think the design works best without eyebrows so she looks really eerie and soft to match her aesthetic, so I made sure to get a browless doll.
Despite the word that half of her dolls were browless, the browless Dotties are certainly harder to come by and the aftermarket creates the impression they're in the minority of copies, being listed in fewer numbers and generally at a higher price when compared to browed Dottie Rose listings of comparable setup. Perhaps this simply indicates a market bias, though--people could just generally like the browless Dottie Rose more and so fewer owners are willing to sell that variant.
Finding a complete browless Dottie Rose I could also justify buying was actually pretty challenging, but I eventually checked my "recently viewed items" tab on eBay to find one listing that wasn't popping up in search and was less painful than the other one I could see. I was glad. I didn't want the doll I wanted now to be out of the realm of reason due to the price. S6 dolls on the aftermarket have generally seemed to jump up in price a bit recently--when I bought Hush and Calico, everybody could be found at a $40 level complete, while now that seems to be $50 or $60 for Jinxes and Revenants. Hm.
My copy came deboxed but fully complete. Her opaque coffin lid was on the box for shipping, and it looked pretty beat-up. When I took the lid off, I almost thought she was missing her clear coffin lid, but of course it was just squeezed inside the opaque lid like those pieces do when the coffin is fully closed. You could stage a really pointless magic trick by making the clear lid "vanish" just by putting on the opaque lid of a coffin over the clear one and taking it off!
Nothing new to say about the S6 packaging, though Dottie Rose's coloring flatters the S6 pink tissue the best. Her chipboard photo has her own eyes, and depicts the eyebrowed version of the doll.
Again, though, both versions are given visibility (the browless doll is photographed in the LDD archive), so it's not really like there's a "canon" version of this doll that's more correct. I wonder, though, if maybe the browless doll being on the site created some bias or expectation that this was the way Dottie Rose should look, and browed collectors felt let down by getting the copy they didn't expect or want? Otherwise, I can see the browed version just being less popular based on its own qualities.
Dottie Rose's chipboard poem is a brief couplet focused on the character and their pet, just like the other chipboard poems in S6:
Dottie Rose and her pet poodle Hun
As dead as they are, they still have some fun
This says very little to me. I'd add a little more about their story.
Pale Dottie Rose and her poodle dog Hun
A poorly-matched pair for a run in the sun
It's never been clear if "Dottie Rose" is a Southern-style compound first name or a separate first name and last name. Her poems just refer to her as "Dottie", but that could be a nickname for short. I like to see the name as a compound first name myself, with whatever surname she had being left unknown. It makes sense given her fifties theme, since names like Mary Jane and Betty Sue and such were popular during the era, and "Rose" is a more typical first name than surname.
Dottie Rose's death certificate discloses that she died on February 26, 1904, a time well before her visual aesthetic's vogue. Like with Hush, her winter death time doesn't make much sense with her costuming unless she came from somewhere very warm.
Dottie Rose's certificate poem says:
Dottie was highly allergic to the sun
But she loved sundresses and her pet poodle Hun
Late one morning Hun ran out into the day
Dottie followed fast, dieing [sic] on her way
Here's a meter tweak.
Dottie Rose couldn't go out in the sun
She wore her light dresses in shade with her Hun
But then the dog ran out and caused her a fright
Dottie chased Hun but she fried in the light
Here's the two unpacked.
With her wide bob and polka-dot halter dress, Dottie Rose feels like a chic retro housewife archetype (I don't know if she'd have actually been married), almost like a mix of Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors and Lucy Ricardo.
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| Ellen Greene as Audrey, sporting the exact same hairdo as Dottie Rose. |
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| Lucille Ball as Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy, wearing a distinctive polka-dot dress. |
While the doll's colors, poodle, and dots feel very fifties, her hair, with the wide rounded bob and bangs, feels more distinctive of the 1960s. But of course, neither are true to the nineteen-aughts.
Resurrection Dottie Rose might feel even more sixties to me, with her wavy black hair in center-part feeling slightly like Mary Tyler Moore. Res Dottie's main doll alludes to the angry-eyebrows half of the S6 copies, and is bleeding from the mouth.
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| The brows are a different shape from the original, though. |
This is one of those Res dolls whose identity would take a minute or two to correctly guess, she's so different, but I kind of like her.
Res-variant Dottie is firmly fifties, with a poodle skirt, blouse, and saddle shoes. Her colors and hair make her better resemble the original doll with her emphasis on pink, and she also represents the browless copies of the S6 doll, since she doesn't have any under her sunglasses. Like the way Res-variant Hush (Hush and Dottie were both Res'd in Resurrection XI) had a rat costume to reference her original pet, Res-variant Dottie has a poodle skirt decorated with her specific poodle Hun!
Variant Dottie is more faithful to the original and I like her more than the main Res, but her vibe feels more like a teen diner chick who would hang out with the greasers--she feels like a younger character than the other two Dotties.
Something tells me both Res dolls might actually be improved, as far as being takes on Dottie Rose, if they swapped clothing. Variant Dottie would thus have the same pink hair and black dotted dress idea as the original, while main Res Dottie would have black hair and a pinker outfit for a fun reverse color balance. The hairstyles would also map well onto the opposite costumes. Unfortunately, this would be a very very costly experiment, and apparently variant Dottie Rose is sewn into her shirt or it's otherwise not designed to come off, so it would be a big hassle even trying to swap their outfits. I definitely plan to get a Resurrection doll on the blog sometime, and to compare a Res to an original, but I'm really leaning toward the first being variant Chloe if nobody else comes up beforehand. Most Res dolls are well out of reach, but there are some I would abandon standards for.
Revenant was the other S6 doll with a Resurrection, though hers came earlier than Dottie Rose and Hush's--she was a Res VII doll and she neither included nor referenced her original pet in either of her Res variants.
Of the Series 6 dolls, Jinx, Calico, and Isaac were not Resurrected, and Calico and Isaac are the only S6 dolls without any subsequent doll releases. Jinx got cast as the Cheshire Cat in the Alice doll series, getting two dolls (a regular and a variant) out of it.
Now back to the S6 Dottie.
Her hair is pink and her skin is pale, creating a very similar color palette to Monster High's rendition of C.A. Cupid.
The pink and black on Dottie Rose create a very classic fifties-chic tone. I love the color combo, but another take on Dottie that was more purely pastel, playing on the classic fifties combo of pink and sea-foam green would have also been cool. I think the black is very purposeful, though, since it creates a contrast that makes her fit the goth tones of the brand and connotes the darkness she has to live in for her safety. Her aesthetic has also just recently become acceptable for Halloween festivities due to the push in recent years of pastel spooky Halloween merchandise. With that, the entire cast of Series 6 can easily be used for Halloween decor...which I might just do!
Her hair is styled in a round curved bob that widens out and bends back inward toward her neck. Her hair and bangs have gel to maintain their shape, though I don't anticipate it being necessary for the effect and I plan to wash it out. The hair doesn't look super polished and tidy as a representation of the human hairstyle, but I like the way it works for Dottie Rose the doll and I don't want to try boiling it flatter.
The hair has a lot of flyaways and isn't super soft. It might be like Lottie's.
This roundup has offered a good snapshot of LDD bangs. Dottie's are decent. They're not flat or thick, but they lay better than Chloe's (or, evidently, Frozen Charlotte's) did six series later, so the manufacturing was spotty for a good amount of time. I think some dolls before Chloe had okay bangs, like S11's Jubilee, but Lamenta comes from a period where LDD seemed to really have bangs locked down, where they were always thick and laid flat. I don't know where the trend of good bangs started, but Lamenta likely benefits from being made after it did.
Dottie Rose's face is extremely striking,
As a lady who's never out in the sun, Dottie Rose's skin is dramatically pale, though it's not paper-white. It's a yellowish off-white tone. Her eyes are ringed by very dark circles that fade out and really pop out of her face, and her irises are pink just like her hair, creating a very nice stylized color scheme. The irises are entirely pink, too--the outlines and pupils are just a darker shade. They're not black. It's possible with the pale skin and pink eyes that Mezco were attempting to allude to albinism with her look, but while that would make you sensitive to sun, it wouldn't be rapidly deadly or grisly the way this doll is designed. I think Dottie's pallor is more likely just to communicate that she keeps to the dark for her own safety.
Dottie Rose's head has bumpy texturing and some subtle pink paint on the bumps to depict her skin breaking out into blisters from the sunlight damaging her.
Mildly gross warning.
The blisters indicate a more plausible diagnosis for her sun allergy-- blistering and rashes from sun exposure are known as a type of porphyria, the cutaneous (skin-related) variety. This couldn't realistically have been the cause of her quick death, though. While attacks of other porphyria types could be life-threatening in a very short span of time, photosensitivity doesn't track as one of them. I also wasn't able to find any kind of condition where it would be plausible for a short period of neighborhood sun exposure to kill someone before they could even return home. It's also a miracle, in a time before this could be genetically pre-diagnosed, that Dottie Rose ever lived past early infancy with such a dire condition. I believe Dottie Rose is loosely based on cutaneous porphyria and her dying quickly just by going into the sun for a bit is an extreme exaggeration. However, it's in keeping with the classic horror theme of LDD that a person could be confined to the darkness and snuffed out almost immediately by sunlight.
Dottie Rose may also be loosely influenced by the horror film The Others, which stars a mother and her two photosensitive children who are kept in the house for their safety, before ghosts start to show up.
I would not be inclined to call it respectful and it certainly isn't realistic, but Dottie Rose could perhaps be considered a very uncommon form of disability representation if you really squint at her sideways. I challenge you to name another doll with porphyria!
I'll be honest--I could do without the whole blister aspect aesthetically, as I find it genuinely very uncanny and uncomfortable, but Dottie Rose does give me the opportunity to compare her head sculpt to Faith's. Faith used a bumpy head to depict clumps of algae from her lake drowning, and I wondered if it was the same bumpy-textured head that would have debuted with S1 Posey. Dottie Rose having the same bumps would indicate that Faith and Dottie both used the same sculpt, which would have been the one Posey debuted because LDD wouldn't have reason to develop a new one otherwise.
The two bumpy dolls do line up, which is clearest to see with the bumps on their left cheeks (lower right in the image). Dottie Rose actually taught me the bumps extend to the nose. I never noticed this on Faith because her nose bumps aren't painted over with the more opaque green like the other bumps are.
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| Same sculpt, and gotta be Posey's first. |
It's cool how Faith so creatively reinterpreted the sculpt to be clumps of lake muck rather than skin problems.
Dottie Rose's lips are lined with black but have pinkish violet paint in the middle to make them look ombre'd, which is very pretty. My copy has some flaws. Her right eye looks more narrow and angled than her left, and the airbrushing under the eye has a light patch that breaks the shadow. Her chin also had some yellow discoloration I wanted to see if I could remove.
It can be hard to notice, but her nostrils have also been defined with dabs of pink paint inside!
The browed Dottie Rose has eyebrows similar to Lottie's, and there are multiple reasons I find the browless doll more effective.
First is the inherent sense of tragedy to Dottie Rose's story that makes a malicious look feel disjointed. Dottie Rose deserved neither the life nor the death she was handed-- she had a lifelong condition that severely limited her activity, and she was killed by it, all for trying not to lose her dog.
Then there's the fact that I find the subtlety to feel far spookier here. While Dottie is retro enough for the browed look to read as 1950s-60s pulp-horror camp, I think the eerie browless version really suits a sweet lady forced to live in the darkness all her life. She becomes the mysterious recluse on the street, the creepy misunderstood neighbor no one sees--she's the Boo Radley on the block, if you will.
When I put Dottie Rose in conversation with my other pale LDDs, her skintone feels like a fairly plausible flesh color, and not even necessarily a dead one.
Betsy (whose skin is the same as Chloe or Lamenta's colors) is pure white, Lottie is a bit yellower, and Agatha is greyish yellow, while Dottie ends up looking like a relatively realistic depiction of a light-skinned person who's gotten very wan from a lack of sunlight. She's very eerie and her eyes are unusual, but Dottie Rose actually passes for human-colored when compared to other very pale LDDs.
It's a highlighted irony in the poems that Dottie Rose favors sundresses despite not being able to survive in sunlight. Perhaps now that she's dead, though, there's no issue. The dress here is a halter style which ties behind the neck quite easily, though the strings are quite frayed.
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| I've elected to trim the strings a little shorter so I don't need to tie a bow. |
The fabric is slightly stiff black cotton with white polka dots that feel very fifties and give the doll the front half of her name. The lower back of the dress velcros as you'd expect. The dress looks and feels absolutely proper for the period. It's just a shame the neck straps aren't so tidy. Of S6 so far, I'm still most impressed with Hush's clothing, but Dottie Rose's comes second.
Dottie Rose's fingers and toes have pink nails, and her shoes are black LDD sandals just like Betsy's. All of the S6 girls I have so far have had painted nails!
Dottie Rose's feet are peculiarly mismolded such that her left leg is quite literally shorter than her right. The leg isn't at a different angle or anything; the two are just different lengths. I wonder how this even happens. A mistake in extraction before the vinyl has fully set?
She can stand up stably, but this is annoying and not really something I expect I can improve or fix. I'd try putting a shim in her shoe to lower the platform to the ground more and even her out that way, but that wouldn't work with the shape--the shoe would just pop off. Otherwise, I'd have to extend the platform of the shoe itself, but that'd take an invasive modification. I think I can just deal with it because she does stand okay.
Hun the poodle, as mentioned before, is an oblique reference to the 1950s fashion trend of poodle skirts which was made explicit through Dottie Rose's Resurrection variant. Hun facially resembles Shriek, the rat paired with Hush. It's an evil-looking snarling poodle with a huge fluffy mane and a bloody face and collar, creating the grisly suggestion that Dottie, too, was munched on by her animal after she died. Otherwise, Hun might just be an extremely aggressive animal and is an evil zombie.
The top puff of poodle fur looks to be a separate piece glued in, with a seam all around it.
Because Hun's fluff is a solid sculpt, my plans to leash the dog had to adapt. I'll tie it around the dog's waist since the neck won't do.
None of the S6 pets have official word on gender and none have human names, so I've had to write about them more ambiguously. It's possible Hush's pet Muzzy is sexless or artificially intersex after the way it was cobbled together, but the other pets have no information you could go on. I defaulted to male for Shriek, but Hun could be a vicious girl or a very bad boy.
Now, I've already evaluated Dottie Rose as a tragic figure, but evil as the dog looks, we should evaluate this under Hun's perspective. If Dottie Rose was never able to go out in the sun (possibly beyond any shielding allowing her to leave the house), then it sounds like Hun could have been starved of a great deal of outdoor time, including natural doggy bathroom breaks and socializing and exploring that are healthy for a dog to experience. That's no way for a dog to live, and Dottie Rose's situation could very well have created a neglectful environment for Hun. That would make Hun's run outside into a sympathetic flight for a dog desperate to enjoy the outdoors. This could even make Dottie Rose's death partially karmic--for attempting to own a dog when her situation made her unfit, the dog led to her death by doing what dogs do.
But of course, it'd be just as easy to say Dottie Rose did accommodate her pooch properly and typically did protect herself for sunlight outings, and this was just a horrible incident where the dog got out by accident (dogs can do that regardless of how well they're cared for) and she couldn't prepare to leave the house if she wanted to catch the dog. We just don't have enough official context.
I took Dottie Rose down for a hair wash and treatment, but no boiling so the shape will survive. I also scrubbed her face a bit and attempted re-bending her left leg to move the foot out to the side so her stance would even, but no luck.
I'd ordered an unofficial white faux-leather trench coat for Ken dolls ages ago in a misguided attempt to use it for Monster High, where every boy doll was too small for it. I was glad of it now, though, and I tested it on a Living Dead Doll while I waited for Dottie Rose to see if it would work well to stage her in protective clothing for days she had to go out in the sun. Fortunately, it seemed perfect if I just trimmed the sleeves. I had a hat to spare from the Viv project which I could color white to suit Dottie Rose, and some black gloves to spare whose fingers could become gloves or sleeves for her protection. And the Spirit Queen glasses jumped from Calico to Viv now to Dottie to complete the look. I also made Hun a noose leash from white yarn. I was delighted to have everything I needed to create this outfit without needing to order or buy a thing, and to have it all prepared before Dottie Rose even arrived. I didn't want her to be a money or time sink that held up this post any longer!
Here she is, fully shaded from the sun to give Hun a proper walk. I like to think the best of her and imagine this was something she did so her dog would have a good life, up until the tragedy when Hun got out without permission and she couldn't prepare.
Her toes are exposed this way, but I wasn't itching to borrow the black tights padding Chloe's shoes just for a quick photo.
I know that I essentially reinvented Marcia Greyman for this look, but shush. It's a good aesthetic.
I liked putting it together, but I don't see these pieces getting stored in her coffin as part of her stock. I don't see myself using them often enough for that. I am gratified to have somebody to have justified the Ken coat staying in my bin for such a long time, though.
Here's some color portraits.
I then took some photos of her sheltered inside. For a proportional scene, I constructed a windowed living room wall with a cutout poster board. I threw in a curtain from a fabric scrap subject to a failed red-dyeing attempt. Its weak unintentionally-pink dye and dotted pattern made it perfect for Dottie Rose. While my initial vision was for her room to have black curtains, I think the pink standing out on the black interior works well and lets more light through to make the contrast of the light and dark stronger and making the window feel more like a forbidden pleasantry Dottie Rose can't enjoy.
I put this wall on a bath mat to form a white rug and added some furniture elements and shone a light from the back to show her taking cover in shadows. I know Dottie Rose wouldn't functionally need to live in darkness and that electric lights would be fine for her, but the horror and drama and caricature of the character suits the impractically dark interior. For an objectively crappy cheap diorama, the scene works really well. The lighting does the work and sells it wonderfully.
Of course lighting-dominant photos translate beautifully to black and white, but that last photo also highlights for me that Dottie Rose really gives me the vibe of a fifties or sixties horror film that never was. Her look and story of having to shelter in the dark feel like they came from a retro horror movie that doesn't exist. I don't know what it is, but I'm so fascinated by her story. I feel like you could spin a social commentary about domestic suburbia, almost like a Shirley Jackson thing where Dottie Rose unpeels the dark side or cracks in the suburban fantasy, but it's also a story about disability and tragic chance, and the exaggerated sunlight threat opens itself to dramatic visual chiaroscuro.
Then I got the idea for something really surreal. It required Bristol board cut out in a silhouette. Some slight editing sells the weird visual better, adding a shadowy blur.
This turned out better than I expected. It's such a confusing visual, which is the point! I think shooting it with a cutout and real, practical depth made all the difference.
And the big piece-- staging her death. I've long had the image in my mind of her collapsing dead while running down a picturesque neighborhood sidewalk. So I decided to stage that!
I could have used the real walk outside, but I didn't want to be a complete weirdo where I'd be seen and in the way, and making a proportional sidewalk for the doll would sell the idea better. That allowed me to come up with added specificity and depth to the pictures--I had the idea of having one of the squares being a piece she signed and put a handprint in when it was new and drying, and cruel circumstance led to her dying right in front of her signature, reaching futilely into her own handprint. I had a strip of fake grass that was just large enough to shoot LDD with as a top-down backdrop. All of these pictures were taken on my bedroom floor!
These first two shots looked daylit enough...
But then I put an overhead lamp on to create more shadows and communicate more that the light is what's killing Dottie.
I never thought a piece of sidewalk would be one of the coolest things I've ever made for a doll, but I'm so proud of it!
I started with just a smidge of clay left over from the second round making Lamenta's basin. I managed to roll it flat and thin enough to build three pavement squares out of it, which was perfect. And then I had the idea of adding Dottie Rose's signature and handprint from when the sidewalk was drying cement. I figured there would be nothing more poetically cruel than her dying right there, and the hand imagery feels spooky. In that way, the doodled sidewalk becomes her own pre-engraved headstone. I don't know if "suburban gothic" is a pre-existing tone, but whatever it is, it's that. I imagine Dottie Rose would have been buried right under that cement slab, with perhaps an epitaph chiseled in afterward.
The actual handprint itself is an LDD doll hand, since there was no other way to get the effect besides doing the real thing, but I enlisted Lamenta to make the print in Dottie's stead. The air-dry terra-cotta clay can stain light vinyl and I didn't want to risk it. Lamenta is the only LDD I have with black-cast hands, so she was a good guinea pig. She got rinsed right away and there's no apparent discoloration, but I couldn't have guaranteed that with another LDD.
I then realized the stones needed a gritty surface to look more believable, so I crumbled some dried clay over them and sealed it with spray paint. This worked fine for the plain stones, but the one with the carving started to lose definition in the name when painted, and trying to re-carve it just crumbled the piece and tore off the spray finish containing the grit layer, so I restarted. The signed slab in the photos is not terra-cotta air-dry. I used an oven-bake clay for the second take, which was firm and smooth and took the handprint beautifully and carved legibly like absolute butter. The clay leaves no color behind on things, so the Dottie Rose doll could have made the print herself, but I stuck with Lamenta for the job just to be absolutely safe. I added a fake crack to the square as well so it looked more complete as a solo piece or headstone, because I now fully wanted to have this piece kept around after the photo session as an accessory for her. I'd gotten the oven-dry clay to begin with for a project attempting to sculpt a doll wig, but was foiled by being unable to take the hair off the head without ruining the shape (plastic wrap underneath didn't help me either). For a piece of carved pavement, however, the medium was perfect. The Crayola air-dry clay doesn't ever seem to get entirely solid or strong, or else I was too hasty to finish it this time. The oven clay felt a lot better. From there, I then sprayed sealant onto the stone and added crumbles for texture, sealed that with another layer, and painted the stone. I had tested mottled dabbed colors or dark washes in the signature, but the handprint this time was so shallow that I didn't want the carvings looking way darker, and the stone looked best with just a flat beige tone. I also added pink splat on the stone for a bit of icky detail. Going off the visual of her Res doll, I decided Dottie Rose is losing blood or other sickened fluids from her deadly stint. The doll herself lines up with it more like she bashed her head, which could be a more realistic death--weakening from the light and the run and tripping and falling into a lethal head wound.
I wasn't sure about the other two stones of the pavement which were made with the air-dry because they were thinner than the replacement signed stone and their grit looked too chunky, but I went ahead and used them to save time since they were never the focal point of the picture. I only need to keep the signed stone, anyway.
Here's the grave built with it. I think this is a perfect visual gag, and I think this could be an awesome Return Dottie Rose accessory if she got brought back.
This tile is getting a place of honor and safety in the back of her coffin, under the doll tray.
And lastly, two poem pieces.
I really love Dottie Rose, and she was worth years of waiting and a higher price. I find her look and story to be so magnetic and ripe for suburban horror fun.
Here's my three S6 dolls together.
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| Hush and rat Shriek, Calico and amalgamate animal Muzzy, Dottie Rose and poodle Hush. |
Dottie Rose pairs very nicely with Hush in particular. They both use black and pink colors, but in some opposite places (Hush has black hair and pink eye shading, Dottie Rose has pink hair and black eye shading) and both have very haunting and gorgeous face paint with mesmerizing airbrushing and a repellent cuteness to them. Their pets align closely in terms of stylization, and both were killed by their attachment to their animals. Of the three, I think I'm still most visually magnetized and impressed by Hush, but Dottie Rose is so charming and gave me bigger photo achievements. While the other S6 dolls are nice, I can't imagine having such extensive photo work with them.
And everybody in this roundup.
This trio of dolls ends up going very well together. All of them are very pale and have a similar setup of black, white, and a signature color for a striking palette. Lamenta has blue and red as additional colors setting her apart, though, while Dottie Rose's palette is set apart because her skin isn't pure white. The three don't have everything in common, but they kind of harmonize.
Other comparisons: Dottie Rose is the only swivel-joint doll of the three and the only one with molded texture, and while tame, is technically the most realistically gory of the three. Chloe is the only doll here who feels styled as a little kid. None of the three share a shoe sculpt!
Of these three, Lamenta is definitely the best-made and Chloe had the worst quality of all because her hair isn't great and her hip broke. Dottie Rose is in the middle- flawed, but more agreeable and not requiring the grief Chloe put me through. Aesthetically, there's no favorites. Each doll is doing her own thing really well and I got a wealth of visual inspiration from each. I also can't say I prefer this roundup to the last one. Chloe is a major acquisition to be sure, and I really all of the dolls here, but I liked the last group of three too! The place I definitely call the edge in Roundup 2's favor is the photos. I had some demanding, demanding shoot concepts this time, but that made everything so worth it and I got some fantastic pictures with the sets I built.
The last thing to mention is that I've extended my shelf space in the closet, which expands the cast I can display and extends the time before I have to put some dolls in storage! I just added two shelves on the center wall, and while they don't quite connect to the side shelves (I wish they did; every inch is valuable!), they do add a lot of room.
The added shelves aren't as deep as the original ones, so fragile top-heavy Return dolls absolutely can't be risked on them and they have to stay on the side shelves, but the new shelves are just deep enough to hold a classic topple-worthy LDD in front of their coffin. The new shelves are also longer than the side shelves, so I can easily display a maximum of six dolls in front of coffins on one of them, whereas the side shelves can only hold four dolls with their coffins behind them. I'm letting the lower middle shelf hold my S23 coffins for now because of this! I'm now displaying the dolls chronologically ordered across the three walls before they carry down to the next shelf, so every series doll I have right now is on the top level. The Oz dolls and Return doll(s) keep their section, and the corner dolls are angled out a bit to segue into the middle shelves. I'm very glad to have the extra space, and quite pleased with myself for figuring out where to add some and installing the shelves solo!
I've already got plans together for my next roundup (all boys!) and have two characters (and three dolls!) lined up and on their way, though I expect the third character will be purchased and the project will be finished in June. I have plenty else to work on for the rest of May. There's Minifigures Series 26 (in progress), some bizarre dolls I found from that insidious new Chinese shopping platform, hopefully Return Eggzorcist (though I haven't heard word from Mezco yet and she might ship later), and there's new Monster High G3 releases I could jump into once they're in stock.
Until next post. Get ready to go to space!
Wow on those photos, you did so much raw building this round. Best Lamenta shot, to me, was her reflection in the pool of tears. Haunting, but serene, and it gives her a regal air.
ReplyDeleteChloe was my fav doll of the three, and that buried shot worked great. What a nightmare! You're right that's she's one of the sweeter ones, she's spooky, but nothing says malicious. That skull faced variant is more questionable though, looks amazing, but lost some innocence and youth.
I didn't notice the blistering on Dottie until you pointed it out, I agree using it for algae was creative and a good call! Ditto on the lack of brows. Completely changed her face. Not bad, but very different.
Loved all the movie posters too, that last one really captured that era of illustration. The Lamenta one could be a real horror poster.