A Living Dead Dolloween, Part 1: An Exclusive Entry

This Halloween season, we're going all in! I completely skipped out on any blog activity last October because other projects were occupying my holiday (and I decorated my room so thoroughly I deprived myself of studio space!), but I can't let that stand for a second year. Halloween is my most activated time and the holiday fuels my spirit like little else. I had to bring that energy here and spread the celebration.

And what better way to celebrate than with an overview of Living Dead Dolls' Halloween-themed history?

While many, many Living Dead Dolls are fantastic decor for Halloween just due to the nature of the brand, LDD has designed several dolls specifically to celebrate the holiday, including three series of five dolls dedicated to the theme and five exclusive-release solo characters. While I have no intention of ever collecting every Halloween LDD, I did want to look over each release in bits and pieces. I can save more Halloween LDDs for next year, but for 2024 I chose two releases from each lane (exclusives, and each of the three series). I dipped in over the preceding months to make a few acquisitions ahead of time to have them good and ready. 

For a prelude of sorts, treat yourself to my Series 6 reviews (for convenience, compiled and recut into one post here) if you haven't caught them beforehand. I discovered over the course of the reviews that it was an obvious Halloween collection in its own right, just not explicitly branded as such. I collected S6 over the past months and deliberately made sure it would be finished in September before this Living Dead Dolloween project kicked off so it could be a lead-in.

And as to the content of the Living Dead Dolloween itself? Well, there was only one way to start.

We're Going As Sweet Little Girls: Hemlock and Honey

Hemlock and Honey are a Living Dead Dolls exclusive two-pack who appear to be the first LDDs explicitly based upon Halloween itself (regardless of whether they released before or after Series 6, S6 is not overtly branded as a Halloween set). The two are inversions of a typical trick-or treat affair. Rather than normal kids dressed as monsters, they're undead horrifying ghouls dressed up as sweet living girls!

Scary imagery warning.

I've been interested in these dolls for a long time. Each has her own aesthetic monster appeal, and the gimmick of the masks with wigs attached was unique in the brand. Halloween masks became a staple of the three LDD main series explicitly based on the holiday (16, 18, and 32), but the ideas of masks that pass for normal and masks with wigs attached, were never repeated. 

What's interesting to me about this two-pack is that...nothing about the concept requires it to be a two-pack? They're just two friends and two variations on the same theme, but that hardly demands both to be released. There's nothing about the concept of a zombie trick-or-treating as a living kid that demands more than one doll. It feels like these were a two-pack just because that was how LDD did exclusives most often in this era of the brand. All the same, I'm very glad this is a two-pack. More is more in this case!

I'm always intrigued by the exclusive LDD releases, because my main source of info, Joshua Lee on YouTube, primarily just reviewed the numbered-series dolls or exclusives which formed a series of their own (in the case of the Oz collections). He owns or did own some of the old exclusive dolls, but never covered them on his channel, so I'm going in more blind in this territory!

My copy of the Hemlock and Honey set had low-quality photos and an obviously yellowed plastic lid, but the dolls looked complete with buckets and shoes and their masks had no obvious damage, so I went in because the price was the best I'd seen for them.

Hemlock and Honey are my first LDD two-pack, which surprises me. I'd went into this era fairly certain it would be the other H&H, the conjoined dolls Hazel and Hattie. Like many other two-packs, Hemlock and Honey come in the double-wide coffin, which only featured for two-pack dolls in the exclusive side category. All series dolls were solo, and the Resurrection IV dolls, adapting two previous duos from the exclusive range, had unique boxes, not coffins. The double-wide box is exactly the same in basic construction save for the proportions. The logo on the back of the opaque lid strikes me as just a tiny bit too far to the left to be centered, but it might be an optical illusion. Or maybe it's rotated a bit too far downward?

Here's the window, which is yellowed. It doesn't look great, but also doesn't bother me and the color kind of suits the look of the dolls.

And without.

Once they arrived, it was clear the dolls had been unsealed but never unboxed. Hemlock and Honey were wired in. Interestingly, their pumpkin buckets are in the front, not in a packet on the back, and they were packaged with their masks on. None of the later Halloween LDDs with face coverings were factory-packed wearing them. I wonder if the masks having doll hair was a contributing factor to being left on the dolls. That could be tidier than leaving them loose in the back or in plastic packets.

The box is black with pale thin orange tissue, good for Halloween. This combo (with a more bold orange) was also used for the three Halloween series to follow...and Gluttony and the freak-show Series 30, which were not Halloween releases.

The side of the coffin has the handle print that debuted in the series around S5, suggesting these dolls released close to that group. I knew already they were pre-S9 releases because they have swivel joints and obviously pre-date the gripping hand which would be used with every later release that featured pumpkin treat buckets. While the gripping hand debuted in S12, I had no reason to believe these were ball-joint LDDs who came just before that point, and I was right. These are swivel dolls.

Hemlock and Honey's chipboard depicts the dolls unmasked in extreme contrast, rendered in duotone orange and black. It looks like Hemlock has a hair silhouette of stringy bangs in this image, which does not represent the doll well. She's bald, and she can't wear her wig without her mask.

Their poem is short and simple, a dark take on the old Halloween rhyme:

Trick or treat

Your blood smells sweet

Give us something dead to eat

Apparently, the two dolls were also known (or were planned to be known) as "Trick" and "Treat". I think their official final names are more interesting and they make it easier to remember whose is whose. The names form a duo of "poison" and "sweets" in the same way as, I don't know, "arsenic and lollipops". I think the names form an elegant and mysterious phrase that perfectly communicates their story of being killed by poison candy (a classic urban legend playing on stranger-danger parental fears). "Hemlock and Honey" also sounds like the name of some old apothecary or a witchy novelty boutique store!

The logo on the chipboard attributes Hemlock and Honey's exclusive carrier as Marz Distribution...who I've never heard of, and who may very well be defunct today based on my attempts to find out who they were. They certainly don't seem like they were a brick-and-mortar business, so maybe they were an online collectible retailer space like Entertainment Earth today? I wonder how Mezco and their retail partners figured out who got which dolls as exclusives. Most of the exclusive LDDs seem to be just doing their own thing, so they don't generally seem chosen for X or Y brand for any clear reason. Only Misery and Tragedy felt especially tailored to the brand they were carried by, being very classic goth alternative characters sold by Hot Topic.

In my excitement about these dolls, I completely forgot to take out their death certificate before the review session, so I had to circle back later. Here it is, published in the right spot of the review for your benefit. The girls died on Halloween (October 31) 2003, an important piece of context, because this marks exactly when they released (their death date matches the real-world release date)! They were the first Halloween dolls to die on a Halloween, which is the most common calendar death date in the brand. October 2003 appears to be the very same month Series 6 released, so there really is no telling which, between Hemlock and Honey and S6, dropped beforehand, and I wasn't wrong in feeling unable to say. Also means I wasn't wrong in reviewing Series 6 first. I'm not really breaking the linear timeline of LDD Halloween releases in doing so!

While Hemlock and Honey were both the first and last Halloween-themed releases in the exclusive format for many years (until 2016!), they started a consistent pattern of the Halloween-themed exclusives dying on the very Halloween of the year they released. The exclusive solo dolls between 2016 and 2018 seem to have all died on their respective years' Halloweens. The Halloween dolls in the time between (within Series 16, 18, and 32) had varying disparate death dates, and while several were October 31 dates, the Halloween series dolls didn't tie into the year of release like the Halloween exclusives all do.

The poem says:

One gloomy night gathering candy

Their poisoned sweets were unforeseen

Left to wander the streets forever

They treat every night now like it's Halloween

And a rewrite.

That dark and gloomy autumn night

They met some tricks inside their sweets

Their masks, they hope, will spare you fright

Forever haunting, street by street

Unboxing the dolls was normal, but their pumpkins were tricky by being wired into the front rather than in a packet on the back. The buckets have long twists and are placed between the legs of the girls, meaning they have to be pulled out and the bucket has to slide down between the legs before the bucket can really be tackled.

Here they are removed. Menacing, aren't they?

We'll start with Hemlock, who left-to-right framing, the chipboard image/name pairing, and an official note on the LDD archive (thanks!) all clarify is the girl in the blue dress.

Both dolls' greatest novelty is their mask/wig pieces dressing them up as living girls. 

Hemlock's mask wig (the hair is rooted into the mask) is a slightly unrealistic strawberry blonde color that's quite saturated and not very natural-looking. I believe this might be the very same color as Bad Bette Jane (Wrath) from Series 7, but Hemlock would have come before Wrath if S6 released in the same month. The hair is actually quite honey-colored despite this not being the doll named Honey! And Honey's wig is white like hemlock flowers! 

Hemlock's wig hair is loose and long with curved-out fluffy bangs in the front that are really very good for an old LDD. Dolls before and after Hemlock have had very tragic bangs.

Here's the back of the doll out of the box.

The hair on the mask is pretty decent quality for LDD and combed out nicely even before washing. It's a little uneven in cut, but feels nice.

A later comb and conditioning revealed those accursed frazzled ends most old LDDs seem to have. Ugh.

I suppose I should have realized ahead of time, being rooted with hair and all, but the mask piece is actually vinyl, not thin fragile plastic like the LDD fancy hats and other Halloween masks. Vinyl was the right choice just for the hair rooting, but I really appreciate the sturdiness it offers too, and it mimics a typical LDD's face better.

Through these masks, Hemlock and Honey are the only LDDs with any sort of removable wig mechanic. Every other LDD's hair is rooted in.

The faceup of the mask is basic and the shape and style is based on the classic LDD head sculpt. The face has pink lips and yellow eyebrows which match the hair, rendered in multiple strokes in a way not many LDD brows are. The eye cutouts are oval shapes like many LDD eye paint designs, and match the physically molded shape of the eyes on the classic sculpt. The cheeks are blushed and the eyes have no makeup--just lots of lashes like S1 Sadie's. The face looks softer than most LDD faces because these masks are attempting to look innocent and sweet. There's an element in the fictional concept of dressing as a generic sweet little girl, but on the toy level, which LDD often indulges as literal, there's also the element of the girls putting on literal "doll faces" to blend in better among sweeter toys. You could imagine them as imposters on a shelf trying to fit into a cheery playroom.

Hemlock's mask lip paint is a little flawed, and there's a dark spot on its left cheek that I couldn't remove. The only way I found to fix it was to make it a feature--I later painted a black dot over it to turn it into a beauty mark.

Hemlock's mask rests on her face so her eyes underneath don't align great with the eyeholes, as the mask cutouts are lower than the doll eyes. I suspected, because she's a screaming doll, that her lowered chin was pushing the mask down too low. I could pull it up over her eyes more...

...but her chin isn't covered.

Here's the interior of the mask. The roots are visible, and the elastic is black cord looped through in a way that it creates parallel lines.

The dolls were packaged with only the outer "line" of the elastic around the dolls' heads, but the masks sit more snug when you pull both lines around the head.

I think the head sculpt and outfit make Hemlock's mask and head look a little bigger on her than Honey's does on her, but the underlying head sculpt is probably distorting the mask a little too.

You can adjust and misalign the masks a little to make the dolls' gaze look oriented in a certain direction, which is fun.

Let's see that monster face!

Hemlock's true skin color is bluish-green with additional yellow-green and dark mottling, a color nicely aligned with her botanical poisonous name. I definitely believe the idea of poisoned candy killing this doll. I really love this muted green tone. It's one of my favorite LEGO colors, and it used to be my bedroom color in a previous house. This tone felt a bit like Alison Crux when I was looking at it alone, but Alison is conclusively blue when placed next to Hemlock and they're not similar.

Hemlock is a bald doll, which is not common in the brand to start with, and even less so for female LDDs. She has a neutral screaming mold with no divergent sculpting on the teeth. Her teeth are yellowish and the interior of her mouth is red. Her eye sockets are blacked out with airbrushed shading and only her right has a glowing red and yellow iris, making her look like a zombie who fully lost her left eye.

Hemlock's dress is a vivid greenish blue color and has a similar 1960s children's cut to Series 1 Sadie and Sin, with the torso and sleeves being loose and long, and there being a pointed white collar at the neck. 

Hemlock also has white buttons sewn down the collar section and lace trim on the hem. Her dress is intentionally aged and dirtied with stain effects. Her piece looks fancier than Sadie's due to the more complex construction and tailoring, but both feel authentically plausible for a doll as old as the 1960s. Hemlock's sleeves don't account great for her lifting her arms, making the body of the dress a little rumpled when she does so.

Under the dress, Hemlock has white footie tights and black Mary Jane shoes. She's fairly stable in her shoes.

Hemlock isn't cartoony in the same way as Sadie or Lottie, but she feels like a warped old doll in her own way. Her bald head gives her a baby-doll look, while her dress feels very retro and her saturated skin even connotes cheaper plastic toys of the era, even if you'd never see a doll in her color.

Hemlock and Honey were the first dolls with the pumpkin treat buckets, and because they come from the swivel era before the ball joints and gripping hand debuted, they use a different style for the handle, utilizing the pinhole system with pegs to put in their palms.

I was honestly surprised to see they had a peg connection. I had kind of thought the buckets were not really designed to be held well at all and had to just hang around the wrist. I thought too little of LDD in making that assumption.

The buckets are hollow at the top with a carved jack-o'-lantern face and handles that plug in and ostensibly should rotate, but don't always due to wonky molding and flexible plastic. That's the case for these two. The accessory pegs face forward to plug into the palm while the hand is lowered at the doll's hip. The buckets can go into either hand on either doll. The effect isn't the most convincing or elegant, and while the later buckets paired with the gripping hand have their own limitations, that was a more effective solution and allowed the buckets to display effectively with the arm in more degrees of rotation.

On these dolls, S16 and S18, Resurrection and Lazarus Resurrection Calavera, and USA-variant Sweet Tooth and Vesper, the bucket is orange, while it appeared in other colors for all three Jack O Lantern variants (white, purple, and black with an orange face), the other Sweet Tooth variants (white and green) and the other Vesper variants (white and red). This makes orange the most common color, followed by white, while the rest were one-offs. The orange shade here is lighter with darker orange shading between the ribs of the pumpkin shape. 

The bucket handle with the peg might have also been used for the different bucket shape that featured only in the two editions of the Jack and Jill nursery-rhyme duo.

It looks like the handle could be the same piece, and the dolls are clearly flat-handed, requiring a peg for Jack to hold his pail of water. I don't know if these dolls or the Halloween girls came first, but I suspect their release times were close. Both sets obviously came before Series 12 and the gripping arm and Jack and Jill look like swivel dolls pre-S9.

Both of these trick-or-treat dolls had some seriously stuck joints I had to crack back into motion. These girls have been motionless for so long!

Hemlock, sans mask, was on the cover of the "Art of Living Dead Dolls" book alongside Resurrection Deadbra Ann.

I'd be interested in the content and origin of this book. I also don't know when in the brand it released, though I know it was before the end of the classic era in 2018. All I know is that Resurrection V would have been out, thanks to Deadbra Ann on the cover.

Coffee-table books on media can either be an overview entry point or the most informative resource available on the artisitic process. I'm probably at a point in my LDD investigative journey and fascination now where, unless this was written with lots of insider info from Damien Glonek and Ed Long and featured prototypes and creative concept discussion, I may already know and may have already shared a great deal of what the book could offer.

Now let's look at Honey.

Honey's mask has the exact same coloring and faceup as Hemlock's, suggesting both in-universe and out that the mask was a shared base rooted two different ways. 

I don't know if the girls are meant to be sisters due to this resemblance, or if the similarity is meant to make the masks look more artificial, generic, and creepy.

Honey's mask hair is low side pigtails, center-parted and wavy without bangs, and pure white in color. Her pigtails are held by elastics and tied over with yellow ribbons.

This hair might be slightly less pleasant than Hemlock's wig, but neither are the softest ever.

Honey has a little bit of her own hair, too. Only on the back of her head, she has sparse short plugs of white hair that matches the wig color, suggesting that this mask is a reflection of her original living appearance and not just a generic little-girl mask. Honey is one of the LDDs with the sparsest rooted hair.

Despite the certificate suggesting the girls died from poisoned candy, that only seems plausible for Hemlock. A poisoning would explain nothing about Honey's disfigurements, even in cartoon logic.

Honey's true skin color is a mottled brown shock with some yellow and orange tones, and she features black cracks and holes in her head while the left side of her lower face is destroyed and most of her teeth are exposed. I don't know what LDD's conceptual vision for this zombie design was, but if I had to explain what happened to her, I'd say she was immolated. She looks crispy. While her coloring is similar to someone with dark skin, Honey dresses as a White girl and her surviving hair and wig colors corresponding implies that her mask is made to match her original appearance. As such, this brown coloring very likely has nothing to do with her original skintone and is either prolonged decay discoloration or burning damage. She's my first LDD with the ripped-cheek face mold featuring exposed teeth and torn flesh on the left side of the mouth, though her right lip also has tooth paint to make her look more disfigured. This sculpt debuted on Doom of the wedding Died & Doom exclusive two-pack and, shortly after, made it series debut on S2's Deadbra Ann the prom queen. The sculpt is typically used for a bloody ripped-open effect, but here it could be part of a burn theme, if that's what LDD were going for. S18's Ember, a trick-or-treater explicitly burned for wearing a witch costume, would also use this sculpt, but with a very different paint job that looks more realistic and not at all crispy and carbonized. 

The blend of brown, yellow, black, and orange paint tones is somewhat similar to later Series 22 zombie Menard, but he's more clearly earthy and decayed and emphasizes the yellow over the brown. I think Honey could just be heavily decomposed, but she's not as soily as Menard if so. Or else she was burned after all. Long decomposition or quick fire are equally convincing explanations for her facial damage, hair loss, and unnaturally dark color. 

I checked by pulling her head partially out of its socket, and it looks like her body cast is actually the yellower tone you can see, and the brown is all paint. 

Honey's eyes are black sockets with white irises and outlined white pupils. Her mask aligns easily over the eyes and her closed-mouth sculpt means her chin is not in conflict with the shape of the mask.

Honey's costume is a pink gingham overall dress worn over a white tight-necked tee. The straps are not super tight and don't make an X in the back. Like Hemlock, this costume looks aged and dirty on purpose. Honey's dress is pretty translucent and clearly shows that she's only wearing a top that ends above her waist, and her dark body color comes through. It's more obvious and distracting in some lighting setups, but not all.

The shirt isn't super well sewn to her shape, and rests with some upward bunches that don't pull down.

Honey wears classic white LDD socks and an atypical pink cast for the Mary Jane shoes. I really like them.

I love the special color, but these are not very tight and she rocks inside them.

Honey's paint job is a full-body workover because her costume shows enough of her limbs for the full body being painted not to be a waste.

Here's a quick mask swap.

Then I took some photos of them. They're a two-pack, yes, but they have such inseparable duo energy to me that I didn't take a single portrait of them apart. 

Because they're the earliest trick-or-treaters in the brand, they're also the earliest trick-or-treaters this Dolloween--that is to say, this series will be abstractly set over the course of a single Halloween night, at later and later times with each entry. These are the characters out and about during the earliest hour of the Halloween night--4:00 PM.  I just got my Halloween things out to set up the house, so I put a treat bowl chair on the porch for them to raid. Since the actual candy for trick-or-treaters isn't purchased yet, I used the ancient candy corn we freeze and reuse purely for decor, plus a few chocolate wafer bars.

If you saw them at your door and thought they were normal little kids...well, they can't resist giving a good scare every now and then!

I really liked this hungry-looking photo of them, masks up in the bowl.

And walking away, their disguise becomes clearer if it wasn't before. Even if they didn't offer any tricks, you'd still be wondering just what came to your door.

I really like these dolls. Their costume design is retro but in a nostalgically timeless way, their rooted-hair vinyl masks are a really fun feature which was never quite imitated again in the brand, and their zombie designs are wildly distinct and each interesting. It does bother me a little that Honey's design is so vague, and she probably could have flipped the color balance to be mostly yellow with brown splotches and been just as good, but I think the dolls are both strong. Their creepy disguised-as-human theme is really fun and they go so well in a Halloween setting. I don't think Honey's costume is really nicely made since her overall piece is so translucent and her shirt is so awkward and her shoes are loose...but I still really like her design. The pumpkin buckets aren't the best design idea, but I know they're just a victim of an earlier release, and later dolls did better. And there's no winning between the two. Hemlock and Honey are a two-pack who properly complete each other. Despite their shared theme, more is more in seeing two designs for it, and you can't have one without the other. They're peas in a decrepit pod.

Living Dead Dolloween will continue with the next LDD Halloween release, where I'll look at some of what Series 16 had to offer!