A Living Dead Dolloween, Part 2: A Series 16 Showcase

Now for our first Halloween series examination! 

Series 16 follows from Hemlock and Honey and follows their lead pretty closely. This means most of the dolls have a face-covering mask like the trick-or-treat zombie girls did before, and they all have the same pumpkin bucket mold, but now have gripping hands that  allow them to hold it well! The broad difference is the range of horror archetypes in Series 16, as well as a theme where a couple of characters are monsters dressing as themselves--a ghost in a ghost costume and a werewolf in a wolfman mask.

Series 16 would pretty shortly after be followed by Series 18, which follows the same conceptual formula so closely that it's truly just S16 part 2, down to both series having the same variant-set gimmick with orange-and-black-themed palette swaps. 

S16 consists of Eleanor, a sheet ghost who's an actual ghost; Pumpkin, a Michael Myers-esque slasher killer with a plastic mask over pumpkin face paint; Isabel, a gothic grand lady with a mundane-styled masquerade mask covering and replacing her missing eyeballs; Mishka, a werewolf girl in a werewolf mask; and Squeak, a girl in an accidentally-creepy homemade pig pajama costume who was poisoned by her candy. Pumpkin is a reference to slasher films (primarily, John Carpenter's Halloween, but with a touch of Friday the 13th in his machete) while the line's overall themes of monsters hiding in the trick-or-treat crowd and urban legends of tampered candy remind me of the anthology horror film Trick 'r Treat, which would have released just the year prior and was an underground cult classic due to its being denied a theatrical release. 

This following Series 16 group photo has to be realistic concept art or a very edited photo of early handmade proof-of-concept prototype dolls-- there are loads of differences. Eleanor seems to be flesh-colored, her sheet has wider eyeholes, and the eyes underneath look more like S15 variant Bathory's. Squeak's mask is very different, with the released mask looking more plastic and low-detail on purpose, and her mask is more flesh-colored while her pajama suit is more white. On the doll, they're both pink. Pumpkin's mask is different and his coveralls aren't blood-splattered. Squeak, Mishka, and Pumpkin's hair, which the produced dolls have, isn't seen here. Isabel's hair is parted rather than with bangs across the forehead, and doesn't appear to have a bun or the rear ponytails the doll has. She also has no buttons on her bodice, and she looks stark white, not just pale. I vastly prefer this hair for her, though. None of the dolls are depicted with gripping hands or pumpkin buckets, save, perhaps, Isabel, whose right arm is out of view.

I wanted three dolls from this series, but the third, the variant doll of Mishka, was an unrealistic expense who would shut me out of other collecting this season, so I decided to leave her out and settle for two dolls. I eventually ended up quite tidily with two dolls from each series, and I can, thinking very far ahead, envision a symmetrical selection of two dolls from each Halloween series to discuss next year, with one from each pair being a variant, so it might just work out perfectly that I held back a little. Here, we're just looking at Eleanor and Isabel. I showed similar restraint with Series 32, where I also wanted three but stayed at two. Conversely, I kind of pushed myself to reach a total of two characters with Series 18 coming up, as I had the least interest in that cast. The exclusives also have two releases in discussion as bookends to the LDD Halloween chronology I'm sampling, but with Hemlock and Honey, we've already seen that one of those exclusive releases includes two dolls.

Warning for squeamish themes of graphic eye trauma/self-mutilation with Isabel's discussion.

Trick or Sheet: Eleanor

Eleanor ended up as my first S16 purchase and my first buy for this entire Dolloween--she came well ahead of time in June this year after I got some gift money at the end of May. This isn't the first seasonal LDD item I secured in advance for this year, since I got the Xmas Carol Minis for December even earlier, but Eleanor's occasion arrived first. 

Because it's good practice to inspect an acquisition when new and because my monkey brain is curious and subject to temptation, I gave Eleanor a look over and then packed her up in her ghost shroud. I then folded in August to fully unpack, review, and work her over alongside other dolls, but chose to leave photo art for any of the Halloween dolls to be during the month of October itself. 

Eleanor new would not have been shrouded and her bucket would have been attached in the back, as well as, I'm assuming, her shroud. For display purposes, she looks best boxed up in full costume, but for securing the doll and inspecting the doll while sealed, the sheet would be a bad idea to have on her while packed. None of the S16, S18, or S32 dolls came boxed with their face coverings on.

As with Hemlock and Honey's box, the S16 coffins feature Halloween orange tissue in black coffins, though the S16 tissue is darker and more classic Halloween. 

The Series 16 chipboards show the dolls in full cover being answered at a doorway for trick-or-treat, with the hands of the horrified resident warding off the doll in a first-person view. The cut of the chipboard features an arch in the middle raised from a flat plane, perhaps in imitation of a tombstone silhouette.

This imagery closely resembles the prototype image/concept art of the full series. Eleanor's face and skintone have clearly been corrected in this render to match the final doll, though the sheet still looks more loose and drape-y than the real thing and the eyeholes are still wider. Her right arm is also still depicted as a flat hand with no bucket accessory. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a photo edit to change the prototype illustration's eyes and body color, because even the folds of the sheet seem to match. Now I'm very curious about Isabel's chipboard!

Eleanor's chipboard poem says:

She awaits beneath your covers

And behind each closed door

Hidden under her burial sheet

She is the ghost of Eleanor

"Eleanor" is hard to fit into a rhythm, but I think I found something.

A figure passes by your eye

A chill you've felt before

You try to sleep, but on she creeps

The ghost of Eleanor

Here's Eleanor's death certificate. She died on October 31 (Halloween, naturally) in 1961.

This poem says:

Listen to our poor little Eleanor moan

As she wanders looking for home

She sounds like haunting strings on a violin

Won't you please welcome this ghost girl in

And a rewrite.

Our poor little Eleanor moans and she groans

Wailing in search of the place she called home

Her shrieks like the aches of an old violin

If she comes by, would you please let her in?

Here she is unboxed. 

While most of the S16 dolls have masks of some form, and three are thin plastic full-face masks, Eleanor's face cover is naturally a white Halloween ghost sheet! The goofy, cheap-looking cliché originated from the idea of specters wrapped in their burial shrouds, so appropriately, as a real ghost gone trick-or-treating, this sheet costume is Eleanor's old shroud. It's a very simple piece, cut and sewn on a single-seam fold with eyeholes, but has no real sleeves or attachments to her arms. Despite the simplicty, I'm fairly impressed by the drape and presence of this piece. It works really well at giving her volume and drama, though it can be tricky to work on her arms, and the top likes to ride up above the top of her head, especially when her arms are raused and push the sheet up more. I wish this piece had a higher thread count and more weight and flow on Eleanor's body, but it works okay as it is. Maybe you could implement a chin strap hidden inside to keep the sheet pulled downward on her head so the eyes would always align right, but that could be fiddly.

Here's the shroud removed.

Eleanor's variant doll has an unchanged shroud, which makes her differences less clear while wearing it. I think LDD could have made it black or orange there...but that would likely run the risk of staining her, knowing LDD. 

It's quite a stark contrast when you whip the sheet off, because Eleanor is truly scary underneath! I love that she can be cute Halloween kitsch or genuinely frightening ghost horror depending on how you display her. 

Eleanor's hair is black and center-parted, but doesn't fall in front to frame her face. It's deliberately thin to look stringy and sparse. This is achieved by rooting only at the top of the head in a much smaller circle, and letting the hair fall down to cover the rest so it looks really stringy. Part of it on her front left ended up rooted behind the line of the scalp paint, which looks a little sloppy.

A similar technique was done for The Lost in Series 8, possibly with even less hair. I think the dolls with the sparsest rooted hair are Honey, the original Scary Tales Beast, and Ember. Eleanor's hair thinness is more subtle and might not be obvious from most pictures. She has fried ends.

I'm really surprised this hair isn't white, since a more solidly white ghost under the sheet would feel more classic Halloween, but I like the depth and dimension the black/white contrast gives her as a more serious horror figure. This does give her some identity in her archetype, too, as Revenant in Series 6 and Banshee in Series 27 after her are both white-haired ghosts. Banshee is the most classic all-white ghost design, but her variant changes it up a lot with green skin and a black dress. That's a doll I could honestly see myself getting both editions of. The main is such a classic ghost, but the variant feels more distinctively like an Irish banshee spirit to me. Resurrection-variant The Lost is similar, but her mime-style makeup makes her less ghostly.

Resurrection-variant The Lost.

The upper skull portion of the face paint, above the black line, glows in the dark!

It does help to manually pull Eleanor's hair back behind her a little before putting her sheet on, just to make sure none of it hangs over her face and peeks into her sheet's eyeholes.

Eleanor's face uses a screaming mold which is unusual because it has no upper teeth. The mouth is also filled in entirely with black to make her mouth look extra hollow and slack in a wide ghostly moan.

Dusty S34 doll Tommy Knocker uses the same toothless "gaping" variant of the screaming mold for the exact same ghostly idea. The Girl In Black from Series 29 has a blacked-out ghost face, but it looks like she does have upper teeth, meaning Eleanor and Tommy are the only ones without them.

There's actually something of a rectangular recess in the mold where the teeth would normally be, but you have to turn the doll head-down and look up under her lip to see it. 

This made me realize the screaming head is actually a modular design rather than a series of full mold variants, and has been all along. The teeth are always a separate piece, and only they change between screaming face designs, which allows the unique molds to be smaller when it's only teeth being cast, and that also allows the screaming base to be more consistent. On the upper jaw, we've seen small even teeth on various dolls, pointed central rat teeth on Nosferatu (Count Orlok) and Resurrection Lilith, all-sharp teeth on Tina Black, long (pejoratively, "horsey") teeth on Viv, canine fangs on vampires and Salem and the Big Bad Wolf, and candy corn teeth on Sweet Tooth. The lower teeth are always the same humanoid shape since those are built into the screaming head base sculpt. Checking other dolls, yes, there is a seam indicating every screaming mouth has the upper teeth plugged in as a separate piece! This may have even started just for the purposes of color-blocking, since it would be harder to paint the upper teeth accurately and completely if they were part of the head mold, or else they made the mold harder to cast and extract, but then LDD realized they could change the teeth out in different shapes for different characters. Or maybe, since the first screaming doll was vampire-fanged Lilith and not a doll with the normal teeth, LDD always knew she wouldn't be the only application of the screaming face and gave themselves an easy way to modify the head with plug-in teeth for more mundane characters! And for Eleanor and Tommy Knocker, they just left the tooth element out! Clearly, this system survived from the early dolls to the transition to the ball joints, where a second version of the screaming mold needed to be cast for the new body construction--but certainly only a second mold, since there wouldn't need to be a new ball-joint head mold for every tooth variant! I'm guessing the teeth molds never needed updating at all. 

(There was probably a third version of the head cast for Resurrection dolls, who have inset eyes and would need built-in eye cups.)

Series 13's scary Evangeline and Series 14's grotesque Dee K. are two screaming mold variants where the whole head was a new piece--Evangeline for a shattered-face effect (her teeth are still a separate piece, but not because the head mold was reused--it wasn't) and Dee K. (teeth not separate) to depict an upper and lower jaw stretched open by blocky teeth in braces. 

Eleanor's eyes are black sockets with pale irises looking upward, and wrinkles and veins are painted on her face and neck in blue. Her eyes are surrounded by concentric circles and radial lines that look like wrinkles and shading or a vague spiderweb or cracked effect. Most of the lines are powder-blue, but the lines in her sculpted screaming creases and the parallel creases which are only painted under her eyes are darker. The vein painting is pretty cadaverous, but the white skin and blue paint and flat linework gives it a cartoony stylization that makes it more pop-spooky, rather than ugly in the way S5 main-edition Vincent Vaude turned out. 

His face is more muddy and real and vacantly dead while Eleanor's looks more clean and stylized and aware--even if her face is slack, her eyes look entirely active and focused.

I'm a little surprised Eleanor has pupils and irises at all, since blacked-out eyes would work with her blacked-out mouth to create a three-hole classic ghost face in a more creepy manner. It looks really good mocked up, too.

I'm guessing LDD didn't do this for the benefit of her costumed effect. To make her literal monster nature a bit more surprising, it helps to have more humanoid eyes peeking out of the sheet. And there is an appealing grotesque uncanny nature to her eye design that makes her pretty interesting, even if the black empty eyes would be more classic and clean. I can go to Tommy if I want that.

Eleanor is not a cute little girl at all, but I think the ghastly look is successful and appropriate. I thought from photos that this face paint looked really bad and it was kind of a deal-breaker until she started to grow on me. In person, it's even better. If this was a fainter, streakier paint job like I thought it was, I wouldn't like it. The flat look is great, though.

I don't know if these are very common outside of where I grew up, but she reminds me a lot of those decor figures with the vertical oval mouths. 

I never saw the charm in these.

The effect was weird if not creepy on them, but for Eleanor, it's appropriate!

Eleanor's irises got me wondering if any part of her was designed to glow in the dark. The eye color is suspiciously close to luminous white. I had to test it out...but unfortunately, they don't glow. That's how it shakes out. The doll you expect to have glowing eyes doesn't, and dolls you would never check for that, like Bloody Mary, do. 

Eleanor's dress is simple, but connotes very old and European attire and makes her look very much like the resident of a haunted castle, Hamlet-style. I'm pretty sure this dress corresponds to no actual concrete European historical fashion style, and the look the designers were going for might not even be European. The vertical detail on the bodice makes my ignorant eye think of Tudor buildings, but actual Tudor dress didn't look like that and evidently featured wide collar-exposing necklines pretty universally, not cover-up dress collars like this. Eleanor doesn't look fancy enough to be royalty, but she certainly could have been on the court or worked as a servant to royalty from where/whenever this dress reflects. I actually really like the idea of Eleanor being that old of a ghost and sticking around to trick-or-treat, but of course, that doesn't seem to be the case going by her deathdate. She works great with Bloody Mary from the very next series, though, as both are ghosts with antiquated clothing styles you could see in a castle.

I think I like Mary more and more each time I bring her out.

Even if Eleanor officially died much more recently, I like that her design under the sheet is so antique, even Shakespearean, underneath. It makes her more versatile.

The collar itself has a wavy black ribbon trim around the neckline, and then folds over her front and back in a rectangular bib shape. 

The bodice has vertical black lines as trim, while the sleeves are tight and unornamented. The dress is so closely tailored that it's a little tricky to take off. This dress looks nice, but it's a little too translucent over her dark tights and I don't like that you can see them through the dress. This doesn't feel like a deliberate ghostly effect. 

Eleanor wears black footie tights and Mary Jane shoes, the latter of which clash with the style of her dress and make her look more like a costumed trick-or-treater. Were she meant to be a ghost several centuries old, I'd have put her in the round-toed boot sculpt. Eleanor has the same issue some other dolls with this shoe have where her feet are too loose inside them and her balance is poor. She's wanting for more padding to tighten her shoes.

The Series 16 dolls were the first to use the gripping hand with the pumpkin buckets, and it's a good solution, but not perfect. The direction of the hand's grip means the arms have to be lowered for the buckets to hang in a way that looks natural. If there was a horizontal grip arm mold, the dolls could hold the buckets facing forward and dangling from an outstretched arm. That would also help with making accessories like lanterns or key rings viable. This is something that new-style LDDs would easily work beautifully with, since their arm and hand joints would make more poses with a pumpkin bucket possible. 

The grip on Eleanor is also pretty tight and the handle is flexible, so it's not super easy to turn the rotation of the handle once it's in the hand.

Eleanor's bucket is a solid orange vinyl which is darker than the Hemlock and Honey buckets and features no painted shading. The only paint is the black carved face. This bucket reminds me more of classic blow-mold plastic pails than the Hemlock and Honey design due to how flat and simple the look is.(How incredible would an actual tiny blow-mold be???) The vinyl of this bucket might feel a little squishier than Hemlock and Honey's, and the hole looks wider on top, though I think the piece is the same mold.

On the handle, there's a small circle in the same spot where the palm peg was on Hemlock and Honey's buckets.

I wonder if the mold was not replaced or modified and instead the pegs were surgically removed from the handles in all post-Hemlock and Honey releases? That doesn't seem super plausible, but this does seem like an artifact in some manner from the older version of the bucket handle.

Eleanor's variant has a black dress and orange eyes. This looks cool and I especially like the eye color for her, but this is overall less appealing to me. Switch her hair to white and maybe we have something.

I had some fun playing her for more eerie paranormal horror photos where she emulates spooky mysterious creepypasta and found-footage photographs. Her face is disturbing enough for it!

She also suits black-and-white classic-movie drama.

And against an orange background in her sheet, she's quintessential Halloween charm.

I then borrowed some decorative bricks lining my house's path to build a castle wall for an interior diorama. These pieces were very heavy, but an attempt to sculpt a wall out of clay didn't hold up and I didn't have time to waste if this month's project is to stay on track. Spare house tiles stored in the basement made for a good floor. Some props got thrown in later.

I first took photos of Eleanor in her sheet.

And without.

Here's some pictures of Eleanor done with the Pepper's Ghost effect. (Surprised they didn't make a ghost character named Pepper.)

Her hair and clothed legs being black means they don't reflect well!

Then I had fun with lighting her blue against the scenery, making her look like the source of the colored light.

Then I went for full cold blue lighting.

I got some cool photos with her "floating", held up by her hair being pinned between bricks and spread around for ghastly effect.

Then I got some creepy photos of her crawling around like she's possessed. The second one, on the wall, was purely balance and taking advantage of ledges and gaps in the bricks.

The sheet looked good empty over the light, too.

Then I thought about that elastic modification for her sheet. I tried one loop, but found it too tight, such that it visibly pulled down the top, but the second size was right. Here's how it got attached (the sheet is flipped inside-out here).

Then the band goes around her face, tucking behind her ears to be secure.

It actually doesn't make a half-bad veil if you stop here.

But properly, you flip the sheet down over her body after the elastic is on. This is how it looks...

...but the eyeholes can easily be aligned with a little tweaking.

And now, when Eleanor raises her arms, she doesn't push the hood up off her head!

This is still a fiddly arrangement that you have to manually adjust, but adding the chinstrap did make the sheet more versatile. And you can still put the sheet on without using the strap if you want to have fun whipping off the shroud.

I took a few more pictures of her to play with lighting and the dynamism of her shroud. She can get very skinny and "armless" with the fabric tucked away right:

And with her shroud clipped behind her tight, you get a creepy impression of her true appearance.

Here's the two Halloween ghosts I have from LDD now (as mentioned, I consider S27 Banshee's main doll to also count for this niche. S32's Ye Ole Wraith is the last in this archetype category and I'd really like to have her, but I can't see her fitting into the review structure or budget for this year's project). 

I love each for their aesthetic identity and execution thereof, but Eleanor ended up the more dynamic doll for me. Neither has the best hair quality.

I also realized Eleanor would look good with a Jacob Marley-style Victorian corpse's chin tie. Her jaw is already slack, so it's not really serving its purpose, but it suits her.

I'm keeping this as an option for her inside her coffin.

Eleanor might be the exemplar of the costumed-monster concept LDD explored in their Halloween releases. 

She looks like a very classic, iconic Halloween ghost-costume decor figurine with her sheet on, but with it off, she's undeniably a horror doll...and yet, even then, her face design walks that line and manages to look retro and cartoony enough to feel endearing and classic-Halloween in its own right! I love how multi-tonal the design feels, and she suits multiple styles of decor and display. While her sheet is full of loose threads, her dress could stand to be more opaque, her hair isn't smooth and tidy, and her shroud was improved by the addition of the elastic, I still quite like the doll and got some really fun work with her. 

She's a versatile way to get in the spirit. (Pun intended.)

Masquerade Danse Macabre: Isabel

Repeat warning for slight blood imagery and uncomfortable horror themes of self-inflicted eye trauma.

I've always had mixed feelings on Isabel. I thought her grand Gothic masquerade design was compelling and she had a neat gruesome spooky concept with her humanoid masquerade mask replacing her gouged-out eyes (and there's even more to it than that!), but I also felt like her design didn't click.  

Photos of concept art and prototypes motivated me to check the doll out and see if I could elevate her hair in any way.

This next picture is evidently a physical prototype copy, still missing buttons, and still possibly pale white, with her hair arranged differently or brushed out--but this hair looks like it might be achievable on the right produced doll. The variant Isabel doll seems to have pretty voluminous side locks from pictures of her produced copies, maybe because that doll isn't as gelled as the main edition. That gave me hope that any Isabel's silhouette could be fixed up.

Also much better to me.

Hair looking like this would rocket Isabel from a cool iffy doll to a very strong design in my eyes. Alternatively, puffing up her bun somehow would improve her just as well.

My copy was sealed, with a yellowed window.

Isabel's chipboard photo matches the produced doll better than Eleanor's. She might still be a bit paler, her mask handle is black instead of brown, and her hairstyle in back may not match the doll's bun. She still doesn't have the buttons on her chest.

The poem says:

She arrives at your door

Wearing a mask of deceit

For what lies underneath 

Is her Halloween treat

And a rewrite.

She's standing at your door

With a mask before her eyes

What's she hiding underneath?

A Halloween surprise!

Isabel died just before Halloween in her time--October 30, 2005. This is not actually the year Series 16 released and is not a meta-reference as such. Series 16 is reported to have released a few years after Isabel died, being a 2008 release. I have no idea what determined the choice of Isabel's deathdate. Perhaps a movie featuring masks or eye trauma dropped on that day, but I can't be sure.

Her poem says:

"Do I really need these disgusting eyes?" Isabel cried.

"I am much prettier wearing this disguise". Isabel sighed.

And with the sharp end of a stick, Isabel pried.

And with one last bloody flick, Isabel died.

The quotations have no place on the last two lines on the certificate because they don't sound like dialogue. I like the use of a refrain, though.

"Must I bear these awful eyes?" Isabel cried.

"I'm better fit by this disguise." Isabel sighed.

And with a pointy sharpened stick, Isabel pried.

Losing sight with one last flick, Isabel died.

Isabel seems to have suffered a pathological dysphoria, and might even be diagnosable with the (understandably extremely controversial) BIID--body integrity identity disorder, where someone with the condition firmly believes a part of their body is wrong and unwanted, that they need to incur a disability, and may end up self-harming to rid themselves of the body part. People with BIID are easy to ridicule and resent since their disordered thinking manifests in a desire for disability, and most disabled people did not choose or want the conditions they live with.  However, BIID does appear to be a real disorder and not a healthy or rational person's mentality. And the reality is that many disorders are not sympathetic in nature, but the people with them still deserve help. I don't know if discussions about BIID hit the mainstream when Isabel was made, but she could fit that pathology. 

Isabel's unboxing had a few unusual features. There's a hole cut in the back of her tray to give her bun space without being squished. 

Her accessories and certificate are each in their own packets.

Her skirt also seems to have been sewn down to control its volume with some temporary threads. I cut these from the back.

Here she is unboxed.

Isabel has black hair in a relatively complex style, but it frankly looks terrible out of the box. She has curved-out bangs and gelled side locks in the front framing her face, a bun on top, and two thin ponytails flowing behind her head. 

The side locks are rooted on top of her head in a small center part and are meant to sit by the sides, but they are stiff with gel and floating off the head. The bun is more substantial than I thought it would be, but it's still not as big as her updo ought to be, in my opinion.

It looks like it may have been a deliberate creative choice, or perhaps just an arbitrary manufacturing difference, for variant Isabel's side locks to have significantly less or no gel, because all record of her variant copies shows the hair on the sides being looser. 

It's obvious her style is aiming for some fancy ballroom shape between rococo or Regency and Victorian in tone, but I just don't find it to have adequate presence. If her hair were big and piled and curly, paired with the side locks and the ponytails, she'd look amazing. Either that, or the bob-style silhouette. The bun is too small and humble. So I was eager to see what, if at all, could be done. If I could give her the look of a more top-heavy updo with the hair she has, that would be a success just as good as brushing out the sides. I was nervous because Isabel surely had very thin rooting, likely just around the perimeter of her head, but maybe with the right combing and gel?

I honestly would have loved if Isabel's hair was the same dark red as her dress. That might look a bit more in tone with the grandiose style of her costume. The black color doesn't have a lot of impact with her realistic flesh tone and black in her dress, but red would feel more fanciful. Or else white would have a lot of antiquated and stark impact against her black and red, though I think her skin would also have to be white to really sell that.

Isabel is one of three dolls with the gouged-eye sculpt, and she's the second of them, after Tessa in Series 12. (The third and final doll with this sculpt is Series 25's Sospirare, one of Lamenta's two sisters.) This sculpt has recessed empty eye sockets with black-painted interiors and turned-out rings of flesh on the edges, likely depicting puffy injured eyelids. Isabel's specific paint job on this sculpt is probably the most viscerally uncomfortable and uncanny to me, with her eyes bleeding only out of the bottom and the top having a gritty-looking dark wash. 

Some of this paint looks errant, having created a spot on her nose and a streak above her left eye socket. The eye sockets can be poked into, but they're not cutouts that go into the doll's empty head. They're recessed cups. The interior is painted black.

Forgive this horrific photo to demonstrate.

Isabel's lips are a muted dark pink with lined paint texture that makes them look dead.

The head also has some other texture bumps and artifacts which may not be entirely intentional. It's cast in vinyl, but the texture may be reflecting that this head was originally sculpted in a different medium from normal. It's kind of cool.

Isabel's skintone is a pale flesh color, and while I thought she looked good with a very stark pale tone in the prototypes, I can acknowledge that this color is successful and makes sense. It suits her just as well as a whiter color, and it doesn't harm her image as an old fancy doll gone twisted.

Isabel's dress is fancy, but not overly complex. The bodice is mostly unadorned and has a high neck cut. The bodice and underskirt are both made of a brocade-style fabric in black with red designs, while the rest is made of a shiny black fabric that isn't satiny--it has a bit of stretch and can feel rougher depending which direction you stroke it. The shoulders are puffed, while the sleeves are tight. The skirt is mostly covered around the sides, with another panel hanging down in the middle. The bodice has two black skull buttons sewn on, but they don't look exactly even. The dress also has a lot of loose threads when opened, and when pulling her arms through the sleeves again, her fingers found a couple of gaps to get caught on. The skirt can have a lot of presence, but it doesn't have any petticoat layers of tulle inside to puff it out, and it probably should.

Isabel has a rare right-arm sculpt with a gripping hand and a bend in the elbow at just under 90 degrees. 

Of course, she's stained to heck, and this includes where her hands touched her skirt.

This bent gripping arm was introduced for the male half of the two American Gothic doll adaptations (the character in the Grant Wood painting is actually the father of the woman, not the husband, but who knows what LDD thought he was) and it suited the pitchfork-grabbing pose imitated from the painting. Otherwise, it's been used for Sanguis in Series 19 after her (paired with a paper hand fan), and I don't know who else, if there is anyone.

The bent arm has no non-gripping equivalent, and realistically, why would it? Functionally similar (but visually different) divergent "posed" gripping arms (both sides) were featured on LDD Presents Leatherface, sculpted to a heavier body type and arranged to let him hold his chainsaw. He might be the only LDD with a gripping left arm. I'm still very curious how that doll was put together and what his body sculpt is like.

Isabel's mask is designed like a masquerade domino mask on a stick, but the depiction is of a pretty typical LDD pair of eyes on a section of face, as if this mask is filling in a gap and re-creating the face she lost when she lost her eyes. It's a fun surreal idea, and hits on a similar bizarre comical note of the dead dressing as alive which was used with Hemlock and Honey. I think it's even weirder in an amusing way with Isabel! 

The mask is a pinker color than Isabel herself, and the eyes depicted are fairly typical LDD eyes with harsh brows and pinkish pale brown irises that have a colorless effect in context. 

The handle of the mask is shortened for the doll's proportions and is made to look like brown wood. The handle is thicker than the grip of the hand shape, so you have to clip it in at the top of the stick and then push the stick upward in her hand.

The real fun part of this mask, though, occurs when you turn it around. On the back of the mask are score marks and red wedges poking out, suggesting that the eyes on the front are Isabel's real eyeballs which have been fit into the mask after being torn out. Those red wedges are her optic nerves!

 What's even more special? Those fit into her eye sockets. You can press her mask into her face to fully complete the face disguise and give her back her eyes!

I've always taken it as Isabel finding a way to make her eyes optional, like glasses she can take off and put on again. It's very cool.

However, the poem saying she liked the mask better than her eyes could suggest that the mask eyes are not her own? It seems clear that the eyes have been implanted, though, so maybe Isabel changed her mind and replaced the mask eyes?

There's no firm squeeze or pop when attaching the mask on her face. The piece just presses in gently and fits pretty easily. I kind of wish the blood drips were either shorter or longer because they're peeking out below the mask in a very halfhearted manner, and either longer drips visible under the mask, or the blood being completely hidden, might work better.

The big disappointment with Isabel is in her articulation, because she is not designed to hold the mask and wear it in her eye sockets at the same time. Whenever she's wearing the mask in full, a stick is dangling down her right side, and if she's holding the mask, it's off to the side away from her face. Ever After High cleverly sculpted its masquerade stick masks in the Thronecoming line with an angled handle that let the doll hold it in front of them while the pole slanted back and placed the mask over their face. But the EAH dolls also had more arm joints. I don't think Isabel's eyeball gimmick would be compatible with the inset movable eye system of the Return LDD doll engineering (the eyes could maybe be individually movable if attached to her mask?) but the body articulation of those dolls would make the mask play better between display states. 

But then I thought of something. With those big puffed shoulders and those tight cuffs...it might be entirely possibly to pop Isabel's arm off the shoulder and have it detached inside the sleeve, whereupon the mask could be connected to her face while the hand on the arm (moving free and held inside the sleeve) is still on the stick. I wanted to see if it passed or if it looked distorted and bad.

Sure enough, it's possible. 

This pose does throw her shoulder behind her torso a fair bit, but it doesn't look wildly distracting and her puffed sleeves help disguise it. 

I'm glad there is a way to display her in this fashion, even if LDD didn't really intend for it. In another costume or with the fully-extended gripping arm sculpt, this would not be possible. 

Isabel's mask gives her the strange honor of spawning what appears to be the only LDD Minis doll with a handheld accessory. Most of the Minis only imitate the core doll, excluding accessories or props, but because Minis Series 6 was based on Series 16 and all of the S6 Minis miniaturized the costumes, Minis Isabel ended up with a mini version of the mask that had a loop handle to fit around her fingers.

Mezco photo of the Minis Series 6 variants, copying the S6 variant set, since this picture shows the Minis Isabel mask. Isabel has the wrong hair color to reflect her S16 variant; she should be ginger. The only in-hand photos I saw of her showed this was not a prototype thing and the final doll has black hair, incorrectly.

S16 Isabel's bent gripping arm is not sculpted to the benefit of the pumpkin bucket, and since she has a handheld accessory to hold besides, the bucket feels a little lost on this doll. However, it can, uniquely, slide over her arm and ride on the crook of her elbow like a purse so Isabel can go along with both accessories on her right. It even suits her grand-lady aesthetic to carry the bucket this way. You don't even have to put the bucket on first. The handle can fit around the mask while she's holding it. 

Isabel is wearing the pointy boots with black socks that sit entirely inside. The boots on her are a softer plastic than some other instances. 

Isabel's variant changes her hair color to orange ginger, while her dress changes the red brocade for a yellow/orange version, and her mask has more orange tones too. Her lips are black, but I think her blood should have probably changed to black too?

I've gone back and forth on this variant. She's a little too yellow to feel properly goth or even fully autumnal, and even the overtly ominous main doll looks more like a plausible antique than this palette does, but this color scheme is really compelling and stands out in LDD, and I'd be curious to see what's up with the hair seeming looser, and if this variant has better hair quality or presence. She's a maybe. I respect how tonally different she feels, and if the factory variant is better out of the box than the factory main, I'm all for it.

I was going to write a post about fan LDD designs I'd come up with, where I'd show some ideas I came up with and redraw some pieces of fan designs from my teen days, but that never got out and I didn't have quite enough material before the phase passed, but I did want to share my designs for a potential Resurrection Isabel. Both of these originated in my teen years, so I'll show the original drawings first, then the remakes.

To reimagine Isabel, I went for a less Halloweeny gothic tone, and aimed more for the style of Venetian masquerade, and made her look more like those masks or a porcelain jester doll in turn. Her eyes were placed into a handle-less golden owl mask as an ironic statement of how foolish her decision was.  I kept the basic structure and color of her hair the same, but made her front locks into waves, put her bun more on top of her head, and thickened her ponytail. Her skin became stark white and she got simple face paint of stark-red bloody sockets and black lips. Her outfit became a fancy purple and gold affair with lots of ruffles and golden eye-patterned fabric on the torso and underskirt. I also gave her long black gloves. Her eyes, placed in the mask, became green. I was inspired by Resurrection Tessa having her Res glass eyes come disembodied. For Isabel, the mask would attach to her face to restore her eyes, but the glass eyes wouldn't come out of the mask.

During this era, my LDD drawings were intentionally not based on the doll proportions, and I was curious to see what she would look like if I tried to draw her more as a plausible classic Living Dead Doll produced as a toy. I made a few changes as well. I made the eye paint much simpler, with single blood drips on each eye and a less messy shape to the red, and I simplified the outfit a lot to make it more plausible for production as a toy. Her arms became all black to depict full gloves because the short-armed doll proportions made it look less proper for there to be uncovered arm between the glove and the sleeves, and I reworked the skirt a lot to make it look nice without being excessively complex. I put a Princess Peach-style waist trim of red on, which I thought balanced the color well, and I made the overskirt smooth, but added gold bows on the lower edge. The eye pattern on the dress got simplified and more legible, and the mask got some tweaks as well. I no longer implied sockets around the eyeballs, having them tightly fit, and I changed her eyes to blue. With this brief exercise in modern fan art for the brand, I made a collage-themed recreation of the misty forest background the LDD archive photos use to lean into the hand-drawn piece cut into the piece digitally and emphasize the fan art nature of the pieces.

I wrote a new poem for her back then (I've been doing fan poems the whole time!) and fine-tuned that poem in the current era for better meter and flow.

She wanted away with her hated eyes
She thought she could be blind
But once she had plucked her peepers out
She wept and changed her mind.

Because I was really into the work, I also designed Isabel a variant edition, designed to look more elderly, reserved, and ghostly. This version of Isabel has her eyes implanted into lorgnette spectacles rather than a mask. I was entirely inspired by a contest-winning cosplay of Tessa (debuting the sculpt Isabel uses) which used this idea, but I think I forgot when I made this piece that the idea had come from there. The addition of lashes and brows on the spectacles to give her more personality with them on was all me, though.

From the LDD website costume-contest archive.

When I first drew these, the main fan Resurrection was better, but I think I might prefer the variant after reworking!

When redrawing the design, I actually ended up changing fewer elements than I thought I would. More work was done in the subtle changes, because I realized my color choices and basic vision were all strong, but the proportions and small details made all the difference. I made her hairline quite high and unflattering to make her look older and more doll-like, and tightened the ringlets by her ears. I had kept the two rear ponytails of the original Isabel, but this time I made them more visible by draping them forward over her torso. Her face "paint" changed to be ultra-simple--dark red drips only under the eye like her original doll and black hollow sockets--nothing else. This makes her look more ghostly and mask-like and creepy. I think both Res Isabels would use the same clean-socket hollow-eye mold as Thump and Res Tessa. 

Her outfit got some changes on the torso. I decided to change the structure to a black torso with gold vertical pleat frills on the chest since that looked more complete and polished than the gold all-patterned torso of my first take, and I changed the sleeves to be more austere, with huge folded puffs and tight black cuffs. The skirt was largely unchanged, save for some shaping. On this rendition, I changed the pattern to be bleeding gashes so it would be different and separate from the droplet buttons on her chest. The glasses and eyes stayed the same except for the proportions. I had to draw the eyeballs back in digitally, since the free background remover I used on the drawing likes to take out white areas that aren't in what I designated as the background, and emptied out her frames. 

Here's the (edited) poem I wrote for variant Resabel.

Isabel thought her sight would be 

A paltry price to pay

To cast off the eyes she loathed to see

In mirrors every day

How lovely to wear them as you please

And want again to see!

An elegant specter, my oh me

Who haunts All Hallow's Eve

Mezco, hit me up. 

Back to the Isabel that exists. I was unhappy with her hair, so I took her bun down and tried an alternative, folding the ponytail over itself so it would fan and stand up. The bangs got boiled and flattened more than I wanted. This setup has character, but I was doubting the result. It wasn't the look I quite wanted, and the hair was messy and fiddly. The red ribbon I tied around the base suited her, but perhaps if she had a bigger piled style, she wouldn't need more color up top. Her hair is rooted just around the edge of her head, so there's no curling this into a pile. 

Then, Isabel's dress shoulder ripped when I tried popping off her arm inside again, and I began to despair for her. 

I could repair this, but I was now outright unhappy with this doll, and I wanted to commit to a new head of hair to save her. Isabel was a sloppy doll with a not-quite-there design and felt not at all worth the high aftermarket price, and I wanted to get her value higher with a makeover. Finger crossed.

If the variant's brocade is sturdier than the main's, then I definitely want her.

I stripped Isabel bald (took less time than most due to her rooting) and tidied up the stray dark wash in her faceup and repaired her dress elbow with glue, making sure the sleeve remained open for her arm.

For her hair, I bought a black BJD wig I could harvest from. I first tried doing it all in hand-cut glued pieces of hair, but then tore it off and cut the untouched bangs section of the wig out and glued that on so she could use the pre-made bangs. The hair was smooth and combed well, but was difficult to wrangle for the gluing to make the pieces and attaching to the head. Eventually, this whole attempt fell apart entirely. The hair was too difficult to work with, and I wasn't confident about its texture, so I was really lost.

But hey. Remember Pink Chick? 

I'd had this O.M.G. doll lying around disused for months since I reviewed her two-pack and harvested her boyfriend's clothes for Jackson. I never sold her, and she now looked like my next best shot for hair if I dyed her. She was the only doll I had already with a large full head of hair I felt was expendable. Without her, I'd have to buy another doll or wig. Her hair length was sufficient for Isabel's rear ponytails (brushed yarn would not be), the texture was soft and nice, and I felt sure I could get things more ordered in the creation and gluing of pieces to make this go right.

Here's the dye. I could clean up the head and repaint her, but that's not an urgent project.

This time, I was much more liberal about gluing down the hair sections I cut and laid down, and even flipped the wefts over and glued the back sides and let them dry again in cases where it looked like they would fall apart on the back. I glued the hair down, starting with the features of the rear ponytails, which I tied off with red ribbon to separate them, and the bangs. The ponytails and bangs were glued flat down, with the end of the bangs piece being further back on the head and the glue carrying to the forehead so they couldn't flip upward off the scalp. The rest of the hair was glued in a ring that laid on top of the ponytails and bangs I had already put down, blending them in. Isabel's side locks now have the effect equivalent to being rooted with the bangs in a single row on the forehead, rather than coming down from a part on the top of the head. The pieces of hair for the updo were all glued with the ends facing inward so the hair would look more seamless when pulled upward into a tie. No glued weft ends in sight! At the last stretch, I had to fully separate the hair which would be pulled up and the hair in front and back which would hang down, so I tied cord around her neck and those hair strands to keep those sections down and separate. All of this work was essentially just to get back to square one, and I now realize I should have probably left all of Isabel's rooted hair on and glued a few wefts inside her scalp to maximize the updo instead. But I was unhappy enough with her factory hair quality. 

With the top hair all tied off with an elastic, I then thoroughly saturated the top hair below the tie with a couple of rounds of fabric glue to fix it in shape. I never want Isabel's style to be undone, especially not after all the work I put in, and if the elastic falls apart as it's wont to do, only the curls would be released. In order to keep the ponytail out of the glued section, I tied it vertically to a table leg with cord. After that, I then put pipe cleaners in her ponytail to create a mass of curls and dunked it in boiling water. That didn't work, since I forgot that I got my best curls by twisting, not rolling, so I did that instead and finally got a good piled shape. This then got sprayed to keep it that way. Here's the result.

This process was messy and unrefined, and the result looks like it. The hair is a little patchy and untidy, the dye isn't a rich, pure black, the glue can be distracting...but the silhouette is better. Yes, this was a lot of work for small changes, but the bigger pile of curls fits her Gothic ballroom aesthetic better, and I think the new hair's bangs fit her better and far better sell the visual when her mask fills in her face.

But of course, taking this photo with the dislocation trick caused the other side of the sleeve to tear away from the bodice even after being very careful. What the hell, LDD?

Because the brocade fabric on Isabel's dress is so unforgivably fragile, I really cannot recommend the genuinely appealing trick of popping out her shoulder for display where she's connected to her mask by face and hand alike. Honestly, you're probably at risk of damaging her dress any time you try to take the sleeves off her arms. It's horrifyingly poor construction. Surely the brocade material could have been sealed or finished more stably? Isabel's hair was whatever at factory state, and I probably should have left it alone, but there was nothing to be done for the dress. It's astonishingly weak. Intentionally-distressed fraying LDD pieces have been more stable. 

So with the acknowledgment that Isabel could be the worst-quality LDD I've faced out of the way...let's just enjoy what I have, because just to look at on a shelf, she's quite a presence with her refined pseudo-antique horror vibe. Since I've learned that this doll really shouldn't try to connect her mask to both her face and hand, I did find that you can complete her face with it by manipulating perspective instead, and that's a really fun visual, and perhaps even more mysterious and surreal because it makes it clearer that you could see something just behind if you were only at another vantage...

In taking out and replacing her head, something might have shifted in her joint with no negative effects, because I noticed Isabel now has a bit more forward-back neck tilt than other ball-joint classic LDDs, and is closer to Return Sadie in that regard. 

Warning that these next pictures may make you recoil a little, but I discovered Isabel was able to put Gluttony's serrated knife into her right eye socket, and thought it was a really strong disturbing visual, even if you take her as a literal spooky doll on some abandoned shelf.

I thought it made a very compelling Gothic portrait to frame it in an oval mirror. The first photo is a bit more antique/Gothic themed, while the second, lit with red, is more emotive and giallo-esque.

Okay, enough of that. Isabel is a natural centerpiece at a black-and-red ball.

And I tried using red yarn as a way to suggest her nerves are still anchored to her sockets. This creates a very weird body-horror image and makes her look far more otherworldly than merely gory.

So, at the end of it all...what do I think?

Overall, I unfortunately cannot really praise Isabel because she's so terribly betrayed by her manufacturing. And in any objective sense, I'm suspecting she'd have to place at or near the bottom of my categories in a Series 16 ranking because of her issues. Creative differences with her hairstyle aside, I don't think her hair fiber is all that nice and her bangs are thin and the side locks are very awkward being rooted where they are. And her dress...the brocade fabric is not well finished or sealed at any point, resulting in tons of loose threads and the bodice and sleeves separating far too easily without any excessive force. It's appalling and not what I expect from the brand. The clothing is usually a highlight, but Isabel came out so so messy. I'm wondering if Series 16 overall represents a low point for the quality control in the brand, because Eleanor's sheet is pretty shed-y, too, and her dress could stand to be more opaque, but I think Eleanor definitely wins. In terms of quality and factory design, Eleanor is the better choice.

With Isabel, I also didn't feel totally clicked with the doll. I didn't like her tight bun hairstyle and put myself through hell to get a messy rendition of what I really wanted. I think she really demanded a grander updo and I'm not regretful now that she has one, sloppy though it may be. It works and elevates her, and that's what matters. I'm also disappointed that the LDD articulation forbids her mask from being connected to her hand and face simultaneously, though this would be less of a disappointment if my functional workaround did not end up exposing the serious structural frailty of her dress. Because her costume is so weak, the trick to cheat her mask display cannot be recommended. The saving graces are that I do genuinely prefer Isabel's look uncovered, and that you can manipulate perspective to view her mask aligned correctly over her face. 

After all my work, I did genuinely connect with the doll and I had fun with her spooky eyeless face, her Gothic twist on a grand ballroom lady, her strange mask, and some shivery eye-gouging imagery. 

She's one of the creepiest dolls in the brand, and has a really dynamic gimmick, and I don't feel as much like her look is too try-hard. She's clearly intended to be gory and grim for aesthetic and as a doll celebrating Halloween, I appreciate her representing that niche in such a visually striking and weird manner. She's got a little bit of class and surrealism to her wince-inducing gore. I just wish I didn't have to go through all I did to reach this point. With hair like this from the factory and a dress with sturdy fabric, she'd be an instant winner. What a shame. I do love her now, but it was a fight to get there and I can't dismiss her flaws.

To take the cover photo, I wanted to replicate the series' chipboard imagery, which I'll also be seeking to do with Series 18's cover. While Hemlock and Honey were photographed as dolls at a human-scale trick-or-treat stop, I did a doll-scale scene for Series 16 to suit the chipboard style. I used the same door and wall I prepared for Madame La Mort's barbershop, but redressed it a bit more like a homeowner's front hall in Halloween, and used the sidewalk tiles I made for Series 5 as the front steps. A dollhouse I acquired recently was perfect for the house across the street. I put Isabel and Eleanor on the step, careful to frame the photo so Isabel's mask would align right over her face. I put two arms on a wire and held them in front to have the scared-hands element of the S16 chipboards. The arms are Series 1 Sadie's. I needed a pair of swivel arms because those are fully hollow and could thread onto a sturdy wire for the right pose, and she has a human skintone. This photo is all in my basement, so I used an orange light next to the dolls to create a late-sunset atmosphere, moving further into the same Halloween night Hemlock and Honey stopped by in.

Very pleased with this image!

I had more detail for grass on the doorstep and grass and a path in front of the "house across the street", but the dolls covered that all up and left it wasted! Here's what the setup actually consisted of:

I think the cover looks good in greyscale, too.

That dollhouse was the MVP, allowing me to stage a trick-or-treat street scene at doll scale and conveniently occupying the background for me!

So that was our look at Series 16. It's a very strong group of character concepts and I can definitely see myself getting the other three dolls in the series, but I'll be more cautious about the quality going forward, because I'm not very impressed with the samples I've picked here.