Gruesome Living Dead Dolls Roundup (Roundup #4)

Recently, I've been finding myself a bit more willing to bite on LDD entries which I'd previously written off for being too grotesque or gory or shocking. This is generally a bad thing for my already-long wishlist, but I'm more open to explore some more extreme or gross dolls if I think the design has some overall appeal in spite of (or possibly even because of) the nasty parts. There are still some dolls which I put a "no" on for being objectionable to me personally, but the presence of icky stuff is less of a deterrent now. Of course, though, I keep warnings for this stuff, and if gory LDD content can stand alone, then the whole post gets warned. That's what's happening here--a roundup of three dolls that are more hardcore than what I focus on normally. Proceed with caution.

Obvious warnings for bloody and gory imagery.

The First Splatter Star: Hollywood

Hollywood is my second-purchased character from classic-showbiz Series 5 (read about the first here), and kind of feels like the exemplar of the series concept. In name and look, Hollywood is Hollywood. She's a perfect caricature of a classic star actress from between the 1940s and 1960s...she's just also really really bloody down the right side of her head. 

Hollywood died in a car accident set up by a male stalker, which is horrifyingly plausible. Her death method, vague appearance, and death date all correspond to actress Jayne Mansfield, which makes me uncomfortable and I dislike that. What narrowly saves Hollywood for me is that her death is relatively generic and is written to have some different circumstances, and her look feels more archetypal of the bombshell blonde than directly imitating the real person. Those are caveats that Series 5 Dahlia cannot benefit from. [Yet, despite everything I find offensive about Dahlia's concept, I've worked with her variant and have much more nuanced conflicted thoughts about her now. Those thoughts will eventually be published in the long uncomfortable roundup I'm building for a later date.]

Here's Hollywood's chipboard.

The poem says:

Hollywood was a famous glamor gal

She liked to race around with her rich promoter Sal

But late one night this resulted in their death

For the brakes had been cut by a stalker named Seth

Sal and Seth don't exist in any form beyond these words in this poem, and the names only appear to have been thrown in at all for the sake of rhyme. 

Jayne Mansfield also died from head trauma in a car crash and lurid rumors were spread about the condition of her injuries, but her death had no element of foul play or her social life dooming her. Hollywood's death being more sinister can be a welcome departure, though it can play into the sensationalism of the real thing without much self-awareness.

Here's a rewrite to test a version without specifically naming offscreen characters.

Hollywood was known to be the biggest glamor star

She traveled and she dazzled in her boyfriend's shiny car

But Hollywood was coveted by fans who wished her dead 

The brakes were cut, the news was made 

In black and white-- and red

Here's her coroner's report. 

These flat ones are so easy to photograph!

Hollywood died on June 29, 1967, same as Jayne Mansfield. Her 4:07 AM time doesn't correspond. Mansfield would have died over an hour earlier. Hollywood died of head trauma from impact with the steering column.

Here she is out. She's looking a little rough, and that's beyond the ways she's supposed to.

Hollywood's look is big, glamorous, and luxurious. She's the kind of movie-star archetype that would capture the press with all her glitz and presence...and she also has the space-taking big-presence look of of a classic star who'd have certainly become a gay icon and/or common drag impersonation. There's probably at least one real-world queen who's done LDD Hollywood. But I'd be surprised if there were two.

Hollywood's hair is white, curly, and voluminous, going for a glorious starlet effect, but I wasn't immediately impressed. A patch at the top of her hair has yellowed, and the curls are separated into chunks of visibly different lengths that don't blend. I've heard the curl on this doll's hair is susceptible to tightening in heat, and that might have happened here. It looks much more poodle-curled than official LDD photos indicate it should, and the texture doesn't track for a silver-screen queen of the classic era.

 

Variant Hollywood has even tighter curls with her factory hair, and the copy I was eyeing on eBay before it sold would have been a nightmare to tame if I'd have gotten her because she seemed to have gotten extra extra curled, to a vertical degree.

I was pre-warned, but the black feathers from her boa can get caught in the hair when they shed, and they stand out.

I'll try to whiten the hair in peroxide (she needs to be a literal peroxide blonde!) and sun and then ty to tame and even it out a little. 

One thing I noticed here was a larger hole bored into the head. I don't know what this would practically be for, and it's not a diegetic detail because Hollywood wasn't shot in anything except film. I haven't noticed this on any other LDD, not even the Vincent Vaude spare from this same series who I stripped bald for an as-yet incomplete custom character.

The doll filled with liquid when I had her soaking in peroxide, likely because of this hole, so I had to pop her head out to pour it out.

Hollywood's skin is a pale off-white tone that's subtly yellower than her hair, giving it just a touch of flesh hue. She might be even yellower than off-white Dottie Rose.

Her face is painted with an extreme half-and-half contrast with her right side being very battered and bloodied by the accident.

The right side of Hollywood's face is covered in blood that drips and smears from the edges, her red lips look like blood coloring instead of lipstick and streak toward her right, and even her right nostril is filled in with a touch of red.

Hollywood's right eye is made to look severely bruised and swollen shut with squeezed lids, and it's an ugly look, but it feels as ugly as it was meant to be, unlike the similar eyes of S5 main Vincent Vaude which felt fouler than intended. The untouched bright cartoony left eye also lifts the face up and gives it a caricatured appeal. Series 21's Sunday, a girl who believed her angel costume would let her fly, has a similar asymmetric bruised-eye effect, but both of her eyes are shaded and her face is cut and looks more detailed and less cute.

Part of me wonders if Hollywood should have had the glam lashes on the swollen eye too for a bit more outlandish sultry camp factor that would balance her face in a less upsetting way, because the bruised eye really does drain some of the cartoon appeal away.

Like so.

Hollywood's face paint had some obvious blemishes, and some of the streaky paint felt intrusive to the look for me, so I cleaned her up a little with nail polish remover to remove the blemishes and streaks which I felt were depriving her of pop and caricature.

The side of Hollywood's head is covered in multi-tone red paint that cuts off behind her ear, and it drips down her neck onto her torso. Her right arm is also covered in bloody cuts.

A similar extreme bloody-head effect would be done for Series 11's Isaiah, a newsboy who also died from a car impact. His battered side is on his left. 

The LDD picture doesn't show the side too well.

Isaiah appears to be a fairly unpopular doll, but he had one of the coolest accessories in the form of a fully-printed miniature newspaper with Easter eggs about the brand and tying into the eerie story of his papers being prophetic-- the paper he carries, implictly the edition he was delivering at the time of the accident, was reporting him being run over before it took place! To be fair to the sellers, most Isaiahs on the low end of eBay lack their newspapers, explaining the markdown, but I've seen sealed listings (which would be complete) at the same level.

Isaiah has a really cool and off-the-wall Resurrection that has an entirely modern cyber-theme in green with circuit designs and camera eyes. I don't fully get the link unless it's like online news and hacking or something, but he's one of the few Res dolls that might hit that combination of being relatively in-reach and appealing to me.

Back to Hollywood. The most ghoulish and surprising thing about her gore is a sinister creative use of the doll format: the left side of Hollywood's scalp has been painted pink and red before her hair was rooted, so it looks like her scalp has cracked open and is bleeding under the right side of her hair, or else that blood is seeping in from the side of her head.

Typically, the scalp will be painted the same color as the hair to make the coverage look its best, and this holds true for the left side...

...but on the right, the scalp deliberately contradicts the hair for the purposes of showcasing more gore! Maybe the pink section should be unrooted because hair wouldn't be growing out of a peeled gap in the scalp or a brain, but it's a unique idea and I like that her hair is full.

Half-and-half gore is also a trait of S23 doll Jennocide, who has the upper right half of her face eaten away by acid.

Jenn's gore is more outlandish and unreal and fun. Both dolls utilize the hair or scalp in the gore design--Hollywood with a painted scalp, and Jenn with an unusual hairline exposing more of her head than normal.

I think I had initially believed Hollywood was a flesh-toned doll and that did nothing for me, but realizing she was white-toned rocketed her in my estimation. The color makes her much more stylized and makes the gore less nasty and real. Of the S5 mains, Hollywood is the closest to the fully black-and-white film look of the variant set, and I think it serves her very well. The green and red pop really well against the black and white, and I think it suits her as a star actress to look the most black-and-white of the mains. Jezebel is the only S5 character to have flesh-toned skin, and maybe she shouldn't have. It'd work well for all of the S5 mains to be partially desaturated. 

I don't care as much for variant Hollywood because her color contrast has only very partially reversed with the hair and feathers, and while black hair isn't at all bad or inappropriate for a classic star, it's a big change and the rest of her doesn't flip much to white in order to balance it.

I also think the blood loses a lot of pop when the hair is the same color as it. Main Hollywood is white of skin and of hair so her blood really stands out, and I think the variant keeping her hair white would make for a great look against the black blood. In fact, I'm beginning to think I was only so tempted by the copy I saw on eBay because her hair had gone vertical, giving her blood room to pop because none of her hair was backdropping it!

Hollywood's outfit consists of a long puffy black feather boa that simply drapes over her however you please, and a strapped body-hugging black velvet dress with lace trim and more fluffy feathers around the hem, which near reaches the floor. The cut of the dress gives it some bunches over her torso, which feel purposeful enough to look good. The dress is very tight and takes some effort to pull off and on, likely because the material is thicker and less flexible. She still moves in her clothes, but she can't bend her hips far enough forward to sit fully upright.

The boa is the first of two--we've already seen the other on Betsy from Series 23.

Hollywood's boa looks more glamorous and it's puffier when dry. Betsy's is deliberately gaudy to reflect a child playing dress-up.

I found a fun Fciway for Hollywood to wear the boa was over one shoulder, spread out to give her maximum presence.

The boa can also be used to give her some flirtatious mystery...or just to censor her gore for polite company.

The boa is so big and the swivel LDD body has limited enough posing that I didn't find it looking quite right around her neck and tucked under her arms. It can still work, particularly if shrugged off her shoulders.

Hollywood's body is stained by her dress precisely where the bunches were.

Hollywood wears black LDD sandals, and her fingernails and toenails are painted black. 

S5 introduced the platform sandal sculpt to LDD, with most of its dolls having them, and this being their first appearance might be why Hollywood's feel so loose. The pins on her ankle strap don't really pop in, they just slide in, making the attachment very insecure, and Hollywood's shoes are able to fall off if the doll is shaken. It looks like after S5, LDD made some quick tweaks to the sandals so they'd be more secure by the release of S6's Dottie Rose and Calico.

Hollywood didn't have a Resurrection doll, but she did get an adaptation in the second and final wave of LDD Fashion Victims fashion dolls. The line was very short-lived (only eight dolls) and the first wave was grotesquely caricatured and objectified with tiny vinyl outfits, balloon boobs, and an overall porny aesthetic..so yuck. But wave 2 toned it down a bit with a new body and face design and less aggresively sexual theming. Hollywood was reimagined with a short blonde bob parted the opposite way and she has blue-blushed skin that makes her look very different from the S5 original.

Official photo of outfit 1, recreating the S5 dress.

Official photo of outfit 2, a twenties flapper number with the boa, which should probably  be on the first outfit.

The Fashion Victims are an interesting and bizarre (and regrettable) curiosity, but if I investigate them, I'm not picking Hollywood. I do like that her face sculpt has the swollen eye built in, though.

To tackle S5 Hollywood's hair, I tried a little brushing, boiling, and trimming. The hair still needs a lot of manual laying and squeezing down and arranging and might still be too curly, especially behind her, but this is better.

After that, I did an even more aggressive run on her hair and completed a successful peroxide whitening on top. Her hair ended up still huge but not as frizzy, and the silhouette better matched the official LDD photo of her. The curls out of box had their own merit, but classic film divas were all about wavy hair.

If an English-French language barrier isn't present between them, Hollywood and Carotte Morts could probably get along well, with both being performers who died after trauma to the right side of their heads. 

And my three LDD entertainers, with my preferred variant copy of Vincent Vaude standing in for the both of them.

Then I had my first photo idea--what if, in the LDD universe, Hollywood crashed, died, got up and went to an event, and invented the red carpet?

Sadie and Chloe (in the hat) weren't dead in 1967, but Sadie would have been still alive then. Chloe wouldn't have been born or dead by this point, but she filled out the scene.

It took two tries to make a stained fabric piece that looked just right.

And I shot another photo with yellow light to put together a news piece for Hollywood, and this time only used dolls that were dead before she was. I took the aesthetic of the document forward a few decades from Vincent's classic newspaper, making for a more colorful magazine page inspired by the look of 1960s Variety, but written in a more informal tabloid tone. I referenced two other dolls who would be relevant--Hayze because she died the same year and her name is a Jimi Hendrix reference that fits the entertainment sphere, and GreGORY because he's a performer. (I might get him sometime, and he'd work as an extra "honorary" character with the S5 crew.)

Click to read the details in hi-res!

I had a lot of fun with this news piece!

I took some other photos on the "staircase" setup there too.

I tried some pictures with the stained fabric over her like a sheet. That gave me a fun composite image doing a half-and-half of full grisliness and full glam.

And on its side, it looks like Hollywood's spirit looking over her corpse on the road.

This also gave me her movie poster.

I don't know why, but I feel like Hollywood would do something morally dubious liker tackily exploit her own murder in a depraved film she stars in. In the foul world of LDD, it probably wouldn't fall under the scope of "iconic empowering reclamation". Maybe Hollywood is the kind of actor who sees herself as prestige while being very vapid and trashy in actual substance.

Here's an autographed studio headshot.

And then I set up a screening. I took a picture outside on the patio and spilled water next to her for the shot of the film she's in.

And then with a projection effect edited in.

I built the "theater" under my desk and used stacked cardboard LDD coffin lids for the seating. The screen is my laptop folded into tablet mode, though I had to use the version of the photo without the projection effect for the best pictures. 

I wasn't satisfied with this setup, so I tried again the next night and threw in a popcorn bucket for her.

While the addition of  both Agatha to thicken the audience and the popcorn accessory for Hollywood improved the scene, I still wasn't happy with the proportions and placement of the movie screen. The screen is too high and too small. To fix this, I edited this photo more to darken the shadows and painted over the screen entirely to create a blank black background corner. I then imported a second copy of the first take, cut out the screen from the photo and tweaked its shading and contrast and resized it for the darkened scene to look more realistic. Here, I faked the glow around the edge to sell it better. I think this composition looks more believable.

I wouldn't have been able to make this without the practical in-camera shot being made first, though, so I was glad I went to the trouble to do the screen in-camera. It gave me the right snippet to edit into a more plausible layout.

Here's Hollywood looking her very zombie-est.

Here, the screen position/size looks fine because the indistinct staging can read as her walking out of the theater toward the door, where the screen would fit this position.

Is there a metaphor here for the pursuit of relevance and the spotlight? There are many celebrities today you might consider zombies, trying to bring their careers back into prominence after they're old hat (or just old). Is there something tragic here too? What determines an expiration date on cultural presence and acclaim? Or perhaps, is there a celebrity zombie metaphor about losing your soul after getting fame and money? Or just losing your options, trapped in what made you famous and not knowing what else to do? Is LDD Hollywood a queen for coming back undead, is she tragic for it, or is she garbage?

You decide.

I then made a Grauman's Theater cement slab with Hollywood's signature and footprints. For her, I decided to make an imprint of her face in the clay for personalized detail. I used Calico to make the imprint because I thought her yarn hair was less likely to get in the way, but I used the wrong side so the imprint would be the right side of the face. I thought that was good, but it bothered me more over time that the imprint wouldn't be the side of her face that actually hit the ground. I did like the crack over the face to allude to the impact to the person.

My first attempt.

 I wasn't in love with the look of this piece, so I resolved to make and bake another after I got more clay to do it with.

Here's the second attempt. I faked the hair with the yarn being pressed in from Calico, as well as some pipe cleaners. I like the wild shape here. Unfortunately, Calico's yarn got tiny purple fibers pressed into the clay all over!

Because you have to turn the head and press really hard to get a profile effect, some tweaking had to be done before baking to ensure it read as side-face, meaning the nose and lips needed some nudging, as well as the forehead, and I had to wipe out the ear to make the silhouette of the hair look more present.

Then, I added blood paint to finish it, as if Hollywood could have created this celebrity slab by falling dead right into the cement that had been poured for her scheduled ceremony.

I made this slab before the "autograph" photo, so this was what established what Hollywood's signature was and I had to cite it when "signing" the photo so they matched up!

Because all of S5 will be here eventually in some form and I was having such fun with this slab gimmick, I pre-made the slabs for the other three, and I have it arranged so Hollywood is the only one with her footprints in the middle facing forward, while two dolls are angled in to the left, and two are angled into the right. Hollywood is the center of the series and the focal point in a row when I complete the set. See how Vincent is turned diagonal? One other doll will be in the same position on his side, and the last two will mirror on her left, with two on each diagonal framing her.

The footprints aren't precise or deep enough to plug the feet in securely and make these slabs function as sturdy doll stands, so there's no mechanical assistance here. It just looks nice.

I also made a slab in advance for GreGORY because what the heck, he'll be here someday or other. The ventriloquist he takes some inspiration from had one in real life, too. To even out a possible row of the dolls with him included as an extra, his footprints (done by the Wizard of Oz) are in the middle like Hollywood's so both will face forward in the center of the row. There's also one other character I might add to the group and make a slab for, and that can be another front-facing slab so there are three dolls in the middle and four on the sides, and Hollywood gets back in the very center. I'll need a third round of clay to get that one made, though!

Here she is with my other movie-themed horror dolls-- L.O.L. O.M.G. Movie Magic Spirit Queen, and Frights, Camera, Action! Operetta.

So that's Hollywood!

I think this doll was a mixed experience, but ultimately came out for the best. I certainly got a lot of work with her, but the lady's obviously a great friend of the camera. I was disappointed her hair was so difficult and that she needed so much maintenance to clean her up, and I do think the gory half of her face is harder to get past than I expected it to be. Her hair is still too puffy and airy for my tastes. But in the end, I was able to find a lot of artistic inspiration with her and got some very fun dramatic and ghoulish photographs. I love that Hollywood has such a big presence as a doll. I mean, just look at her on the shelf!

I also think her design's high drama and pop work really well for a classic actress, and her gore is shocking and effective. It's still distasteful how close she comes to the real death of Jayne Mansfield, but she's just far enough removed for me not to condemn her. I also had the freedom to distance her in my own ways, and avoided participating in overly grotesque exploitative imagery as such. (I could have pursued a doll car that would fit her, but ultimately chose not to risk my money on an unsure fit and thought it would be too abhorrent to bring in in any way.) I don't know. Hollywood's shock factor is definitely effective because it never quite subsided all the way for me. But if you're willing to lean in, she can be oddly stunning.

Maladyes Babe: Grace of the Grave 

^ That subtitle is a Middle English interpretation of "child of illness". I wanted a medieval flavor. And yes, "medieval" is entirely accurate here (the world is often used in vernacular when it doesn't apply). Grace of the Grave is LDD's representation of the Middle Ages! She's a plague victim of the Black Death, and died at an unknown time in 1347, near where the plague arrived in Europe.

Gross warning!

Grace is my third Series 8 doll after Faith and Angus Litilrott. I had initially found Grace too gross and creepy, but that kind of wrapped back around as I began to appraise her aesthetic and concept as really unique. And she's one of the dolls to collect if you want the unique LDD sculpts.

The copy of Grace I selected was advertised as having a damaged box, and there's a dent in the plastic lid and some veining as the finish layer has peeled and bunched together. I don't mind these, and a worn box suits a grimy medieval doll from some sickly wrecked village.

Here's her chipboard.

Her poem says:

She comes with the plague

And also rotten flesh

She's been dead for a long time
But her sores are still fresh

And a rewrite.

She comes with the plague 

And rot in her flesh

Dead for an age

Her sores are still fresh

I had expected Grace to be loose because her shrink-wrap was off and her coffin had it rough, but I might have suspected from the lack of padding inside for shipping that she had never been unboxed. She was still wired in and her death certificate was on the back of the doll tray.

Here's that. She died at a vague time in October 1347. This poem has nothing to do with the plague.

Grace of the grave is said to wander

And made many on a cold night ponder...

If some dolls die, and then come back

Do they find in death, what in life they lacked?

As with Faith's chipboard depicting her with doll joints, this poem reminds us the character is a literal doll. The theme of this poem is also similar to S8 Hollow's, which discusses her finding the ability to do what she wants in death after a life catatonic. The "she comes with the plague and rotten flesh" phrasing was also a toy reminder, written like copy on the box advertising her features in a grim reversal of a normal doll who would say "comes with a headband" or such. Similar "doll includes:"-style phrasing featured in the chipboard poems for S1 Sadie and S3 Lottie, though those were functional disclosures of accessories they had which you wouldn't see before opening them.

Here's a rewrite.

She rose from the grave and for eons she's wandered

Many who've seen her stared and they pondered

If some dolls die and are then brought back

Do they find in death, what in life they lacked?

I don't know about life age, but in terms of death age, Grace is the third-oldest LDD in the brand. The oldest is Arachne. She's the only doll from BCE times, though not the whole doll applies to the name or date. Arachne is implicitly the original Greek mythical spider, now seen dangling from the eye of a fifties-style undead girl, so only that painted spider is truly the Arachne named and charted in the information. After Arachne is German witch Walpurgis, and then Grace comes afterward. Of the three, Grace immediately looks the most far back in history. Grace and Walpurgis are the two LDDs confirmed to come from the medieval period by their death dates. A couple of other dolls could pass for medieval European but have dates or concepts which contradict the possibility, like Menard and The After. 

Grace might only just get the historical pass on using that name; it was evidently not at all common in the medieval period and came into fashion later on, but I was able to find a site attributing variants of the name to be in use in Italy before 1347...so it's a real squeeze, but it could be historically plausible for Grace to have that name. It'd just be very unusual in her time. Alternatively, it's always possible that most of her identity has been lost to history so "Grace of the Grave" could be a nickname given to her centuries later upon her discovery. We know the famous Australopithecus discovery wasn't really named "Lucy", after all. 

No other LDD has a "[Name] of the [Noun]" naming structure. Gory, disturbing Series 9 zombie Dawn's full name would implicitly be "Dawn of the Dead" per the George A. Romero film, but she's only ever been listed as "Dawn" because LDD wouldn't be able to get away with using the full title on an unlicensed doll and it wouldn't be a very clever reference if the doll simply repeated the whole phrase. If I ever find enough dolls for a second gruesome roundup, one of them could be the big-ticket get of Resurrection variant Dawn, who's the most genuinely cute of her dolls and her vibrant colors fascinate me. I don't need another gruesome roundup to pursue that Dawn, but she'd definitely fit in one.

Here's Grace of the Grave unboxed.

Grace is a nasty, scary-looking doll but I've really grown to like her over time, and her unique niche of medieval horror, paired with her special sculpting, make her stand out. 

Grace's outfit starts with a black wrapped head scarf to make her look like a medieval peasant. It's a very thin fabric and is unfinished at the edges to make it look more ratty and poor. The hood can pull down a fair amount forward over her forehead, but she looks best with it framing her head in a circle. The hood has a point at the back, but I kind of wish it didn't. It's not inappropriate or inaccurate, but I simply like the silhouette better, in her case, with a round hood.

The scarf has a portion that bunches around her neck and drapes lower over her right shoulder, and both tails fall behind her. One of them comes out from inside the hood, while one is outside. The piece is sewn into its current structure and has no way to be removed without snipping threads and undoing the wrap (I don't want to mess that up) or popping out the doll's head.

The hood can still pull down to show her head more, though it's so light it doesn't lay flat against her back. The scarf will just stay around her neck.

Grace is a bald doll, either as a consequence of illness or just as a practical manufacturing choice to make the fit of her scarf look right. Scalpless brain-cavity Scarecrow Purdy also had no hair, but Grace is my first bald LDD with a complete head sculpt.

And Grace has a unique head sculpt to make her look really gross and ill. The head is a bumpy, scabby texture all over, like the skin-problems head of Posey/Faith/Dottie Rose (and Hollow, also in S8 like Faith) amplified tenfold. (Series 8 seriously needs a dermatologist, though Faith's head is actually bumped to depict lake muck, not skin ick.) Most of Grace's head is bumped and rougher, but there are large patches of smooth skin. The sculpt doesn't just cut off behind her face because there are bumpy patches at the back too.

Her body color is a pale grey washed with dark grey and it has a really chalky effect that also brings out the texture. She looks slightly like papier-maché, and I could buy her texture doubling as human illness as well as a material from a really old peasant's doll. This could be a representation of an ancient toy just as much as a person from that time.

The face is the most gruesome part, as it features open sores all over as well as an asymmetrical indented bloody cut extending from her mouth. Her wounds are painted with bloody red paint, and the forehead sores are all bleeding down in single trails. Combined with the texture, you really get the idea that her facial features have been blurred and made unrecognizable by the disease.

Grace's eyes are rendered like normal, then painted over with a layer of glossy red that makes the pupils and irises harder to see and makes her eyes look really sick and blood-filled. Her eyes also have dark grey shading around them. The eye paint looks wonky and her left stares off to the side, but either this is a common problem with Graces, or this is intentional because I've seen it in pictures of other copies.

With her wide cut mouth and bumpy skin, she looks slightly like a toad.

No other LDD ever used this head sculpt, and it's surprising that she got it to start with. Rarely did LDD do one-offs like that, and Grace's look could have been similarly achieved with the bumpy head that existed already, with paint doing some extra work for the mouth. This may not be very evocative of realistic plague, but it's disturbing and works for a caricature of a medieval sick person. Real bubonic plague victims were characterized by buboes, blackened boils that would grow on the infected. Medieval images of plague symptoms aren't in evidence, so Grace seems to be fully invented as an abstract visual, based neither on medical accuracy nor material from the time. She almost looks more like a medieval illustration of leprosy, not plague, though she's more graphic.

A medieval illustration of begging lepers.

The mouth cut isn't explained. I don't know if plague would split her cheeks like that.

Grace's dress is a very simple short-sleeved unfinished fraying muslin piece that just reaches the floor and hides her feet. I think the cream color works beautifully with her black, red, and grey. The dress is covered in streaks of bloody red and black, and on her chest, there's a bloody red handprint matching the shape of an LDD left hand. It's possible Grace wiped this handprint on herself, but her hands are clean, creating the implication that she may have been wading through throngs of bloody dying people who tried grabbing at her for help--perhaps not realizing she was the very one who brought plague upon them and is actively making things worse by being near them.

I popped off her head to check out her body sculpts better, so here's a picture of the back of the dress unobstructed. It undoes with velcro and is not made filthy like the front.

The reason I was interested in her body sculpting was that I'd heard her arms were textured like her head, and this is true--so these are unique sculpts as well!

There are fewer unique LDD arm sculpts than head sculpts. Neither of Grace's were ever seen again, likely because she was a swivel doll and most swivel-debuted sculpts seemed to have been retired in the wake of the ball-joint body and its necessarily different joint molding. I think the only sculpts LDD put in the work to adapt to the new molds were those they felt they could get more mileage from going forward, like the standard face, the devil-horn head, the ripped cheek, and the mild bumpy skin. Sculpts like Grace's bumpy sorey cut face or Viv's split bisected two-piece torso are so specific that it wouldn't be worth modifying them for one or two more character designs max to be able to use them. I do think this head could have been reused, if adapted, for the Pestilence Horseman of the Apocalpyse, but he's the only one. Or maybe you could use it for a moon-themed character. The sores could be craters and the bumps could be the surface of the moon? That's a repaint idea to consider for another day.

Grace's nails are darkened with grey smudging, but look dirty, not painted. Medieval girls in wasteland villages don't get manicures.

Grace's torso and legs are the standard LDD swivel sculpts, but her feet have some dark smudging on the toes. She's a barefoot doll.

My Grace does not stand with the best stability.

I wasn't sure why Grace was looking off to me compared to pictures I'd seen until I realized her eye shading looked over-applied. I carefully wiped her paint to reduce the shading and get her more like pictures of her I'd seen.

Grace's palms have accessory pinholes in them like the other S8 dolls, but not a one of them had an accessory to plug into their hands. The Lost has a rag doll, but that just wedges under her arm.

Here's some portraits.

 

Then I took her outside on the dirt to stage a village plague. Doll #3 of this roundup made an early cameo in a different dress, and S6 Hush also appears as a victim. A large amount of the background was erased and replaced with a photo of a farm setting to make the scene look more real, and the building is a craft birdhouse I scarred and stained which I've had as a prop for a long time, and it's in the background to force perspective and look possibly in scale with the dolls. (The house was briefly featured in my troll-doll introduction post as well.) In truth, it's far too small for them. Isaac's Ole Crow is leg-up dead on the ground under the cross, and Hush's pet Shriek is used as a plague rat. The robe hanging on the cross comes from a loose S29 The After doll ordered for parts.

Here was an earlier take as a separate shoot the day before. 

I didn't like the composition here at all, having just the one other person felt too few for a plague,  and the background replacement didn't work for me. I also thought the fancy dress on doll #3, while old-fashioned, ill suited the setting Grace would be found in. On the retake, I put her in the smock from a loose Butcher Boop I got for parts so she could play a peasant. 

I also did a photo without the other dolls, and edited this for hyper-contrast saturated grittiness and added a new poem.

And the showstopper--there was simply no way I wasn't going to imitate medieval illustration for her. I've dabbled in medieval-art rendering beforehand, but I really wanted this take to be my best. For that, I also knew there was no doing it digitally. This had to be a proper painted illustration. 

Wham.

I stained a Bristol board an aged brown and started working, using Grace on the table as a reference. Medieval art is expressively stylized and I knew that to make the image look authentic was not to be perfectly on-model, but I still needed to capture the spirit and details. Accurate, but not precise. The things I kept in mind for style structure were that the face had to cut off at a fairly flat plane at the three-quarter profile so the far eye was on the edge, and the far eyebrow had to connect to the nose contour. I also kept the eyes outlined only on top and bottom without connecting at the corners. Grace's specific brow shape, coloring, and nasty details were kept, while the texture of her head and arms was done with grey brushing and also pockmark dotting. 

Her arms are outlined black, but her dress is outlined in dark brown in keeping with outlining I saw in illustrations, and the brush strokes were essential to the look. I wasn't worried about Grace looking distorted or stiff, because that's kind of the goal, but I did have to revise the rendering of her hands to make them look right, and that required some conspicuous patches of background coloring over the errors. I compensated by adding more splotches around the piece so they didn't stick out as much. I had wanted to draw Grace in front of a mass of bodies with familiar LDD faces, but the rendering of those figures felt incongruous and distracting. Grace needed to be the focus, and she was also the best-rendered, so I painted over the bodies and turned them into sacks of pale corpses. I still threw in Sadie's eyes in the bag in the corner. I added some scenery with bone-scattered dirt and a white stone village wall.

The poem was worked through the Middle English generator until I found words that rhymed when translated through. Often, modern words get replaced with different words entirely, but I found a poem that worked. In modern spelling, it's:

From plague, Grace, she died the first

Of all these deaths, hers was the worst

The text rendering is more modern and familiar than actual medieval script, and not as polished or formulaic, but hand lettering is not my forte and it gets the job done. 

The border of the piece includes sulfur symbols at the corners, kind of squeezed in poorly on two. 

This illustration isn't perfect, but the figure of Grace is very successful in the medieval mimicry and the whole piece comes together well despite its shortcomings. I'm very happy with the effect.

Here's the piece in full on the wall.

And here's Grace posed next to it. This is a really cool effect. I think the portrait falls in the perfect zone of being absolutely recognizable while being stylized and quirky in a distinct art style from the doll.

It's kind of funny that this was such an outstanding, lengthy labor of love for a doll portrait because I don't know if I'd have considered Grace worthy of the time and care before I got this idea. Not that she's at all a disappointing doll (she's not), but I think this might be more of a manifestation of my extreme dedication to the bit moreso than a specific affection and passion for Grace herself. I'll go all out for a portrait concept if the aesthetic or theme demands it, and that's a big reason I love LDD so much--its huge aesthetic/conceptual range lets me play with many different settings and styles.

Grace could very well have been Series 6's rat girl instead of Hush. Or else maybe she'd like to be friends with the LDD Nosferatu and Victim. The Nosferatu (Count Orlok) doll retains the plague-rat animal motif of the film character, and he comes with a black recast of Shriek as an animal companion.

While I adore Orlok as a horror icon, the rat is probably the most exciting thing to me about this LDD set.

Grace could also superficially pair well with LDD's take on the Horseman of the Apocalypse Pestilence, but bird-masked plague doctors, upon which he's based, are not known to have been contemporaneous with the original 14th-century Black Death, and evidence all indicates their emergence to be well after that pandemic's passing. Pestilence would have to take off his mask and tricorn hat and probably even lose his hobby horse "steed" (those weren't Middle Ages toys) to feel contemporary with Grace. 

There's no other Living Dead Doll like Grace of the Grave. While she's not really her own art style, she's certainly a unique aesthetic in the brand. Her unique sculpts and paint lend her a disquieting nasty creepy texture, and her colors and character design are haunting. Her red bloody eyes and sores and cuts really pop against her pale skin and black scarf, and she successfully feels like a medieval nightmare of illness despite being very simply and also not remotely medically accurate. She's gross, but she's also really fascinating and stands apart. I can see her as a genuinely old toy as well as a portrait of icky illness, and there's something grotesquely captivating about her look. 

I don't love that Grace's scarf wasn't designed to be removed, but I can understand the complexity of the wrap making that difficult. If I was the designer, I'd probably give up and have it fixed too so anybody who undid the sewing and messed up the wrap and couldn't re-create it would have only themselves to blame. My copy is a bit wobbly and I think the eye shading was overdone, but she's otherwise alright.

Here's my three Series 8 dolls together. 

Grace's matte bumpy chalky skin contrasts against Faith's mottled glossy shiny skin. Series 8 just happened to include the wettest and driest-looking LDDs!

It's possible I'll complete Series 8 someday. I definitely want The Lost, and she'll be a big-ticket acquisition down the line, but I'm ambivalent about Hollow. I like her classic antique styling, but she's slightly dull and I don't know why they gave her skin bumps. Hollow is one of those dolls for a bored day after everything else has been checked off, and that's a very long list.

Mirror, Mirror On the Wall: Bloody Mary

This doll comes from Series 17, based upon classic urban legends, and of them all, she might be the most enduring and famous story. She's also pretty much certifiably one of the scariest LDDs ever made. Be warned!

Bloody Mary is the title of a ghost said to appear in mirrors. The common ritual to summon her is to go into a dark room with a mirror (which will typically be a bathroom with the lights turned off) and chant the name "Bloody Mary" three to five to thirteen times, whereupon the face of Bloody Mary will appear in the mirror. And maybe she gets you or something. It's a common game played by kids who want to freak themselves out, and there may be a psychological explanation for the supernatural reports--turns out, staring at your face in the mirror for a long enough time, particularly in low lighting, can cause you to disassociate from the image and perceive it warping into something unfamiliar to you. Mary herself is pretty undefined. There's no consensus on who she is, what she intends, where the story originated, or why she's in your dang mirror. She's just kind of an all-purpose spook to scare yourself with at the end of the day.

Mary's game has also been borrowed for the mechanic of other famous horror ghosts. There's Betelgeuse of the film Beetlejuice, a ghostly swindler summoned and banished by chants of his name three times. (While there's something faerie about that and there's no association with mirrors, he is a ghost so there's probably a connection.) And there's Candyman of the Candyman series. He's based on urban legends as a whole, so he has a hook hand and some incarnations are associated with strangers offering candy, while he's the ghost of a hate victim who's summoned by saying his name five times into a mirror, whereupon he usually tears apart whoever called him. With Candyman, the Bloody Mary link is deliberate and obvious.

I'm shocked that Bloody Mary is actually the very first Living Dead Doll I'm obtaining and inducting into my collection who I'd drawn before in my teenage LDD wishlist. I drew it as a double-sided piece.

I was proud of the leaping pose then.

Of all of the drawn teen wishlist dolls, I wouldn't have put her as my first, especially because she's kind of an outlier for my tastes then, being a screaming, bloody, terrifying doll. I think I was just especially interested in her hair, her pretty dress, and her iconic status in scary-storydom.

I wasn't sure if Mary would be the last doll in this roundup or not because she's expensive, but I needed somebody and a certain listing of her very sparse offerings caught my attention. The doll had a plastic lid printed backward, and I first thought "Oh hey, cool, a factory misprint." And then I looked again and hey, WAIT a minute!

Proof it's legit mirrored.

Take a second if you're not seeing what I saw....there.

Isn't this perfect?

So this was just a factory error; it's happened to other dolls and it has nothing to do with the character. I've seen a Nicholas from S33 listed online with the same error. But oh my god it looks like they were doing a bit here. I mean, of all the dolls for the coffin lid to be reversed on, isn't it just incredibly right that it happened at least once on the horror queen of mirrors herself??? I couldn't pass up the chance to get this doll once I did that double-take. Having a Bloody Mary with a mirrored lid is like a rare character-resonant release variant in my book! The factory whoopsie elevates the doll on a thematic level, and knowing there was a single Mary with a mirrored lid meant I could not be satisfied having one without it! (Her having her mirror and certificate didn't hurt.)

I weighed the possibility if the cover had actually been manually broken open and bent backward by an owner (if not the seller), and one of the corners is cracked, but there's no glue I can feel on the outside and if the lid had been deliberately bent backward from its original fold, you'd see white stress lines in the plastic, so this does look factory.

This Mary was open, but still quite expensive and the factory packaging error isn't evidently a contributing factor. This just isn't a commonly-found doll on the aftermarket. I've seen dolls with fewer offerings, but not many.

I noticed too late that this Mary is missing her chipboard, which is very frustrating to me, but I'll take the novel cover reversal as a tradeoff. I'll keep my eyes open and save some search alerts for Mary and chipboards just in case a loose chipboard replacement ever shows up, but my odds aren't great because this isn't a widely-peddled doll. I messaged the one seller offering several chipboards on eBay because their listing had a photo of Mary's but it wasn't currently listed to buy. I figured it had sold already, but it couldn't hurt to ask in case that was actually still available. (It wasn't.) So my means of completing the coffin without buying another doll copy are very very slim...and definitely not cheap because of it. I hate that that bothers me so much, but it does.

I was thinking of maybe waiting until an occasion with gift money I could offload the chore onto so I didn't feel like I was wasting money I could progress my collection with, but then I remembered that duh, Bloody Mary is a pretty high-fetching doll, and if I got another copy, stole her board and/or swapped the doll because I liked the second copy more, and then resold the spare incomplete, I could effectively recoup most of my loss on the doll and finish this faster. I didn't want to postpone this review for that to get done, because it'd be a little bit before I could do that, but I may try to get that done sooner than later. Maybe that'll be an August task, since I'll be out for vacation at the start of that month and the rest of the month could be used for "chore" buys like art supplies and parts harvesting. Next month, promising a bigger budget, would be better to use for the fullest amount of new dolls (MH and LDD) to work with for July and August, while September can pick up some more advance purchases for Halloween. 

Here's a photo of the chipboard from the seller, wake-the-dead.

Mary's chipboard features her image scattered across mirror shards, which suggests each S17 doll has a fully personalized image to match their story. The design is a bit modern for the character, but she's an enduring ghost and I'd still like the have this to complete the coffin someday. It's such a minor stupid sticking point, but while I don't regret getting that hilariously perfect misprint at all, this is going to be a matter of unease until I complete that coffin!

The chipboard poem says:

Do you dare to stare into the mirror
And see what stares back at you?
They say the legend of Bloody Mary
Will grab and pull you through

Only a couple of tweaks might improve the flow.

Dare you stare into the glass
And see what stares at you?
Call her thrice, and Bloody Mary
Shrieks and pull you through

Series 17's tissue color is brown...and while I appreciate the new color, I'm not sure about its application. It doesn't flatter most of the dolls in the series, who mostly have vibrant colors and graphic flat paint jobs. The only doll it really works for is the Vanishing Hitchhiker, whose look is a bit more drab with brown hair and smeary paint. I don't know if the tissue only flattering the series' aesthetic outlier makes sense. I feel like maybe a pale mint/aqua color could be good for them, or else perhaps a dark purple? Series 34 later on would also have brown tissue, and those dolls really suited it because they were dusty mining-town ghosts.

The death certificates of Series 17 surprised me because they're not death certificates! Instead, they're pieces with tattered cut edges, made to look like old parchment scrolls, and they depict the doll's name and a verse rendition of their corresponding urban legend underneath, printed vertically to give the more verbose poems some room.

The dolls have no death dates due to not being identifiable real people, and there is no information on their scrolls beside the name and their legend poems. These are still tied and rolled in ribbon just like most death certificates.

This poem says:

Stand in front of a mirror
So the ritual chant can begin
Hold a candle to your darkened face
And in a circle, three times start to spin

Call her name each time as you turn
To summon the mad woman's form
Stop and stare into the mirror
As your reflection starts to transform

A crazed and bloody figure
Will claw out your eyes and drive you insane
You will be pulled into the mirror
Never to be heard from again.

You're killing me, LDD. Long poems with no flow?? Ugh.

Bloody Mary

Stand before a mirror
When you want to bring her in
Hold a candle to your face
And, three times, start to spin

Call her name each time
If you want to see her face
By the crazed and bloody ghost
Your own will be replaced

The bleeding ghost will shriek
Bursting from the glass, and then
She'll pull you in the mirror
Never to be seen again

Here she is out of the box.

Bloody Mary's hair looks terrible, and it's supposed to. It's a deliberately messy black shock of hair, with a center part and a lion's-mane shape. The fiber is nothing unusual, but it feels dry and in some places it might have even been deliberately fried just a little to make it unruly and voluminous.

The hair is pretty choppy and doesn't fall in front of her face. It can also be reshaped to a degree, but apparently some Marys have even worse-condition hair that can be sculpted more thoroughly.

The sheer mess makes her look incredibly frightening, like a caricature of a Gothic madwoman. It's most improper for a lady of her apparent time.

This hair looks quite similar to Series 4 Sybil's. Sybil was also an insane black-haired lady, though she was portrayed as an asylum prisoner who lost her mind. Her hair is wild and messy, but looks shorter and less wide in silhouette. I want to hash things out with Sybil in the uncomfortable roundup sometime.

Bloody Mary's skin is stark white, and she's painted to be covered in cuts as if she's just jumped through a pane of glass--i.e., your mirror.

She's a screaming doll with the standard mold, and her mouth is filled with blood that's even gotten to her upper teeth. Her eyes are black sockets with yellow irises and red airbrushing shading around them, and she has very faint angry grey brows, which could have stood to be solid. The cuts cover her face and she has a big cut on her neck, with the blood effect extending pretty far down the doll's torso.

This neck cut is possibly what would have killed her initially, and explains where all the blood in her mouth is coming from. Did this take on Mary die at first from blood loss after crashing into a mirror, obsessed with her reflection in some way? All of the blood on Bloody Mary can be attributed to glass injuries from hopping through mirrors, which makes you wonder--which came first, the nickname or the M.O.?

Paired with the wild hair, this doll's face is terrifying. It feels like the genre of edgy shocking monster faces you'd see exploited a lot as the visual half of the startle in old online screamer pranks! The paint job is extreme, but it also displays variety in technique and texture, combining flat paint, airbrushing, and splatter to very striking effect. I don't adore the blood on her upper teeth or her faint brows, but something about it really works all the same.

I was also completely surprised when I took Mary for her early cameo in take 1 of Grace's photoshoot and brought her back inside because I discovered her eyes actually glow in the dark!

I don't know if it totally clicks with her look, but what a neat surprise. Of all the dolls I'd check for glowing eyes, this wouldn't be one.

So I guess she just had to be one of the scariest-ever LDDs in the dark, too!

Holy $#@!, this doll is a nightmare. I'm obsessed.

Mary's dress is gorgeous. It's always felt exceptionally beautiful and striking to me as a passive observer, and as an owner now, it holds up.

I have no idea what the fabric is called. It looks completely matte and feels like it could be an ultra-fine velvet, but up close, it's shinier and more ribbon-like in weave and appearance.

As a culture, we need to walk away from the "shiny is more beautiful" mentality.

The dress is slightly stiff and makes a bit of a crumply sound when wiggled and bunched. I don't know what it actually is, but I think the intention is for it to be visually read as velvet.

The piece does one of my favorite things by being all one color, but in multiple shades for texture. It's dark red for the body, while some trim on the bodice and cuffs is pinker, while the ribbon "lacing" on her bodice is bright red.

The skirt has two tiers of attached gathering accenting it, and hangs above the toes. The entire dress has a blood-splatter effect, and it velcros in back.

The fashion style is hard to pin down because Bloody Mary is not a concrete figure in folklore and this outfit might not be accurate to any one style, nor might it be complete within this character's context (the doll is complete as manufactured, but the design may indicate a story that Mary lost some headwear and jewelry or other parts that would have once completed this outfit in her madness). While the dress looks plausible, this might ding the bells of a fashion historian who would see it as nonsense. And no knock against LDD, but I doubt there were fashion historians on the design team. The ruffle neck and wide neckline here feel very old and high-class, though the two features might not have coincided--a ruffle and this neckline cut seem to occur separately in the styles I looked at. Heck, I don't even know what country to look at for ideas of what this could have come from. Maybe that's effective, though. I can't tell if this dress is Tudor or Victorian or Stuart or Georgian or medieval or old American! That works for a character who's just an idea and a legend. 

Whatever this dress was inspired by, she feels old and far-off and castle-based in nature, like a landed lady or queen (the urban legend is often associated due to the name with "Bloody" Mary Stuart (Mary I of England). Or else she might not have been as wealthy and aristocratic as that? This doll certainly wasn't a peasant, but maybe she wasn't the highest station. Or else she fell apart and lost her grandeur and poise. I like to think of her as a castle ghost. That's a fun archetype.

Mary wears the pointy-toed LDD boots with no socks. They're cast in black and splattered with solid red blood droplets that match her face blood.

Mary's forearms are covered in blood splatter, but no cut wounds. Beyond her face, upper chest, and forearms, her body is completely unpainted, with no underwear detail either. The dress has stained her, but the stains hardly look out of place or intrusive here due to the color suiting her blood-splattered design.

Mary's left hand is in a gripping shape (she's the second classic LDD with one that I've inducted into my collection, after Betsy) and that's to hold her unique accessory--a small mirror in a pointed frame.

The shape of the mirror reflects Gothic architecture with the pointed arch and columns, and its wooden design reminds me of old church pieces, possibly narrowing Mary's conceptual time period to the early days of Gothic design, from the peak to decline of the Middle Ages. So maybe Mary is another medieval doll, just not explicitly placed as such due to her lack of death date. The mirror has a carved sulfur symbol within the arch. The "wood" part of the mirror is wood-textured but the color is solid dark brown. The mirror panel looks like it might be a sticker, and the image is warped.

While I thought it looked like a table mirror, the piece is not capable of standing on its own. It's too thin on the lower edge and has no feet that could prop it up, suggesting it might be a small wall-mounted piece Mary has taken to carrying. The side of the frame clips into her gripping hand, and she can hold it facing toward her or facing away. The top can also be gripped just barely, but not stably. It falls out that way.

This way isn't secure.

It doesn't make total sense for Mary to have a mirror like this for herself, but perhaps LDD are suggesting some living obsession with a mirror informed Mary's M.O. when she died and became a ghost? Like she was so fixated on this mirror while alive that now she channels herself through them in death? That could align with the other idea that she died by crashing into a mirror, maybe desperately trying to enter it only to be stuck behind the glass as a ghost. Or maybe Mary is unable to see herself in mirrors because she is the reflection, but the mirror she had in life is the exception, so she keeps it around?

While the mirror accessory doesn't make the most sense for her to use once you think about it for a few seconds, it does a great job at framing and explaining the character design when she's on display with it. She's much more easy to recognize when she has it on her, and it's rare for LDDs to get accessories, so I value it. There was actually a listing of both the Vanishing Hitchhiker and Bloody Mary from S17 that I almost wanted to get (I liked both dolls) until I saw that Mary didn't have her mirror. Sorry. I gotta have that. And then the mirrored lid showed up with this copy.

I probably should have bitten on the Hitchhiker/Mary listing and then the Mary I got so I'd have a complete mirror-lid Mary assembled from the two copies, plus a complete Hitchhiker, but I wouldn't have thought of that in time.

I didn't photograph it, but I did check Mary's ball joints to see what kind of plastic they were made of. I already knew from acquiring her in advance and inspecting her that Eleanor (and thus the Series 16) dolls had translucent white pegs which would probably be as fragile as the translucent yellow pegs from series 9-12 at the least, and Mary has the same pegs as Eleanor. The hardier opaque-plastic ball joints were introduced in some series between 17 and 23, then, if not debuting in 23 itself. 

Here's some portraits.

It was fun engineering an in-camera reflection for her mirror here!

Then, the essential photoshoot required a bathroom for her ritual to take place in. So I had to make one. I bought two poster boards with a white grid pattern for the walls of the corner I needed and used nails to hold them together. The real bathroom floor would be the floor of the set. I based the set on the real bathroom for reference. I bought two small mirrors, one I shattered for the pictures of Mary broken out, and cut a hole out for the doll to stick out of, and covered it with the whole mirror, held in by nails.

I then made a sink cabinet out of a cardboard box and some lids, cutting a hole in the top for a clay sink basin. Wooden knobs and a wire bend became the faucet, and the basin got sprayed with gloss. The lid the sink went into became a marble top with a simple paint job and gloss spray, and the effect is way more convincing than I could have hoped.

The lid on top is still removable, and so I used the cabinet to store the mirror shards of the broken piece for the latter half of the photos. The door on the front is fake.

For a toilet, I tried sculpting before seeing that I needed prefab pieces to make it look polished, so I grabbed smaller cardboard box pieces for the tank and base--the tank is the box on its side with the lid on top, and the whole back is open behind there. For a bowl, I wasn't sure what to do until I looked at a faceless white LDD head I had in my parts bin (context on where that came from in an upcoming post, though what I did with the face comes way later.) Turn that upward and it's a creepy doll-head toilet bowl!

I tried to gloss the toilet, but it didn't get a good enough coat. I thought the creepy surreal doll head was fine because I wasn't really going for a normal bathroom anyway. The good mirror had gotten a slight crack and Sadie's going to be the one performing the ritual, so why should it look normal? I then used another box lid as a stand inside the bathroom.

A layout test downstairs.

Because my bathtub is on the opposite wall from the sink, I decided Sadie's is too and I didn't have to build it. We'll just say it's offscreen. I don't have a good box to build a basin in at the right size, and a freestanding tub sculpt probably wouldn't come out to my satisfaction.

I then set up in the actual bathroom. I dressed the scene with some accessories--a cup with a makeup brush and Sadie's knife, a pump bottle I'm playing as soap, and a tube of gel and some nail polish. I had planned to have the white stand perpendicular to the sink like I tested, but some photos required Mary head-on where the stand looked best to the right of the sink, and I figured it looked good enough for the angled photos too.

Then the ritual began.

"Bloody Mary..."

"Bloody Mary..."

Startled, Sadie put on the lights. This didn't help.

With the lights off again, her reflection was totally replaced.

"Bloody...Mary?"

Most of the gore here is just cherry juice splattered and dripped down, while the dots on the wall, some on the cabinet door, and the lines oozing from the toilet tank are paint I applied. I was pleased to be able to utilize the angle and space to bring Mary's reflection into the mirror entirely in-camera. I didn't have the setup to keep my phone in one position so a swap and composite of one shot with Sadie in front and another with Mary reflected would be possible, but I was able to stage it so it looked like Mary was appearing in the mirror without being in the real world, done with single pictures. It's actually nice to not have to cut any pictures together for that effect!

Here's some more portraits of her in the mirror.

This might be my favorite picture of her.

And head-on shots to reinterpret the original two-part drawing I did.

Things cleaned up pretty easily in the bathroom. I'll have to retouch a few spots on the doll sink cabinet and toilet in white to fix them up and undo the blood paint, and the walls can be repurposed. I don't need the mirror shards anymore right now, but might as well keep them in the sink box in case I do another time.

And Mary can be banished into the shards...

I wasn't able to set it up so Bloody Mary looked the same in photos where she was reflected as she did when emerging. That's just the nature of reality, where the doll had to be reflected and visually mirrored to simulate her being inside the mirror. A real Bloody Mary would look exactly the same within the mirror as without because she's not reflecting off the surface while inside, and you could see her as a reflection herself, so she'd emerge seamlessly without any image flipping. If I had reversed the pictures before Mary emerged, it wouldn't help. Sadie is asymmetrical due to her eyes, so sharp viewers might be able to tell from her eyes that those pictures were flipped (though I suppose it would pass for me using the 13th Anniversary doll instead) and I'd have to flip the bathroom itself for the post-emergence photos. Too complicated!

Bloody Mary is not a cute, cartoony, campy, glam, retro, or sweet kind of doll. She flies in the face of character design appeal. But what she is is flat-out scary and she excels in that aim. Through her grotesque, bloody, gory, and caricatured look with messy hair, glowing eyes, a fancy dress and a bucket of blood, Mary feels iconically terrifying as a horror antagonist. Her silhouette is great, her paint work is multifaceted and strikingly frightening and repulsive, and her dress is beautiful. Mary was given some love and specificity to make her easy to engage with and bring interpretive lore to, while also being vague as befits a pervasive urban legend with no set story. Her cut wounds and accessory also do some good work in identifying the character visually and making sure she's not just any old blood-splattered scary lady. Her wounds are lacerations and her accessory is a mirror and her outfit is red and bloodied. I think her concept is communicated quite well. If I'd never seen her and you told me this doll was based on a known character, I'd probably be able to tell you who.

My Bloody Mary is also just that little bit more special because I found a copy with a factory-error reverse lid that just so perfectly fits a mirror ghost that I had to pursue it, chipboard problem notwithstanding. I'll get that sorted at a good time.

Bloody Mary might be my favorite of this roundup, though I got great work with all of them. Hollywood might be the most fiddly due to her hair, and I still don't 100% click with her look, but she gave me plenty of inspiration and great pictures. Grace of the Grave gave me the fewest pictures but I really enjoy her sickly medieval zombie look and I had a lot of fun painting her medieval-style. Bloody Mary is unadulterated horror and she's absolutely terrifying, and I love her for it. I also think her glowing eyes made me love her all the more. It's a big surprise and they were a massive asset for her photos.

And lastly, during the process of writing this post, I devised a new formula for LDD Roundup cover photos and replaced the older ones, since unproduced pictured of coffins on my desk looked boring and not up to my current standard. Now, I'm featuring one coffin from the collection, and I'm prioritizing a unique tissue color so as many of these roundup cover photos will look as different as possible. For Roundup 1, both coffins I got were from the same series, so I just used the first doll's in the group, belonging to Hush. For Roundup 2, I used Lamenta's coffin because she has red tissue while Chloe and Dottie Rose had the same pink as the first roundup cover coffin. For Roundup 3, I slapped a clear lid on variant Vincent Vaude's coffin to use the white tissue color. And here, Mary's coffin is in the cover because she brings in a new color with the brown tissue, but also has a unique lid due to the copy I selected! Also with these cover photos, I put the head of the coffin owner over their chipboard (or the lower half of the coffin in this case) in the bottom middle of the frame. Then I layer the other dolls over the frame to include them as teasers. These cover photos are staged on the floor, making it possible to use the coffin as a surface.

I don't know what my next LDD roundup will be. Maybe another unthemed group with a Series 6 doll. I'm still putting some attention on long-term LDD purchases for planned occasions this year, but this promises to be a good month of extra work hours for me, so I might have more leeway with next month's LDD hunting, able to get Quack and some other advance purchases while also being able to get some dolls on a whim. See you then.