Time to look at the last LDD Halloween series!
Living Dead Dolls Series 32 was the last full series of dolls based on a Halloween theme, and the first not to include pumpkin buckets, or any accessories at all. This is especially unusual since the exclusive Halloween dolls released in the same year, and for two years after Series 32, do have the typical buckets. Furthermore, not every character's costume in S32 features a face covering. (The series does feature the final Halloween masks within the classic LDD originals, since the three exclusives from 2016-18 lacked them.)
The concept of the series was also a new spin. Rather than fully leaning into trick-or-treat and doing a third iteration of the basic idea Series 16 originated and 18 followed, this series is based on vintage Halloween artwork and iconography, with the characters having a unique textured 2D-esque line-art paint style and costumes that seem, with the lack of candy buckets, more styled for a Halloween party, or perhaps just as decor, than characters who are door-to-door candy collecting. I love vintage Halloween art and I liked the 2D style of the dolls' designs.
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| This promotional photo, however? A tragedy. Why has the aesthetic not at all been utilized? This is so sterile and boring! |
Like with Series 16, I wanted three of the dolls but restricted myself to two to make things reasonable on myself. Here, though, I tacked on a third--an exclusive that came out after S32 who shares an art style and didn't justify her own post. Let's commence!
Trick or Meat: Butcher Boop
I've always adored this Living Dead Doll, and she was probably the first bloody doll to win my heart. She was on my wishlist back when I discovered the dolls as a teenager. Boop is a very bizarre fit in the otherwise clean, classic, wholesome-spooky vintage theme of the series, but they leverage a perfect angle for her.
Butcher Boop's concept is that she was a cannibal who snapped and cut off and ate her face, and now has to go about her undead days with a shoddy papier-mache mask to replace it. As such, she fits the vintage-Halloween theme by having skeleton imagery with her pitiful bare skull, and she also reflects the phenomenon of crappy, unintentionally-scary homemade vintage trick-or-treat costumes with her freaky homemade mask! In that way, she's the "shoddy-costume" rep of Series 32, following from Squeak in S16 and Gabriella in S18. And on top of all that, she's a direct homage to the slasher killer Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, being a butcher from a cannibal family who has black curly hair and a scary mask. That mask itself even references the "pretty woman" skin mask Leatherface wears at the end of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre film (yes, it's four words in that first one).
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| Leatherface in the "pretty woman" mask. |
And she's also a (very loose) reference to Betty Boop too!
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| Boop-boop-be-doop? |
So Butcher Boop is just an extremely oddball concept, but despite how twisted she is, I also find her very sympathetic and genuinely adorable.
Her blood is only splattered on her hands and costume. No warning for body gore on the doll because there isn't any...but I'm going to indulge in her gruesome story more. Warning for gruesome caricatured butchery themes.
I had always intended to get this doll for the seasonal celebration this year, but the specific impetus for when I got her was giving up on my Chloe's original body after my repair work on her broke. I decided to switch gears on Chloe and just replace her body altogether with that of another stark-white LDD with ball joints, preferably from a time after LDD had switched to opaque plastic for those ball pegs. A spare Butcher Boop who had been lingering on eBay loose sans mask appeared to be the perfect candidate to replace Chloe's body (she wasn't, but I made her work as her own character). I wouldn't feel right getting a loose Boop for parts without securing a proper complete one for myself at the same time, even just to satisfy myself with knowing the real deal was waiting for me. The loose Boop was also a fortuitous choice for the purposes of designing a look for offscreen S5 coroner Tinselton Stitches. The apron was perfect. Boop was the second doll I secured early for this project, after Eleanor.
Butcher Boop is my first doll received from my teenage illustrated wishlist, but because she waited in storage for Halloweentime, the first doll from that list who got inducted was Bloody Mary in June. Here's the front side of the drawing I made in my teen LDD phase. Boop's piece has held up better than most of my old LDD art.
Boop came sealed, and the seller disclosed a corner on the box was dented. This is on the plastic lid, which is totally a non-issue.
The coffin is basic black with orange tissue, and the chipboards depict a spooky moon, grinning tree, and an anthropomorphized haunted house with a scared face, all in a vintage Halloween art style in orange and black and pale yellow.
Boop's chipboard poem says:
She tried to construct a mask
She thought would resemble a beauty queen
But the crude replacement face
Was as as gruesome as what lay beneath unseen.
And a metrical reworking.
She tried to make a beauty mask
Her skin could be replaced
But everyone who met her screamed
To see the paper face
Because the doll was packaged bare-faced, I opened her and repacked her with her mask on like I did with the other dolls in this Halloween project. The mask comes in the same packet on the back as the death certificate, which was visibly non-standard in design, though I didn't open it ahead of time.
The certificate has the same design as Series 33 afterward, meaning it's less of a specific design for the series and probably just LDD changing the baseline certificate design during this tail-end of the classic era. I don't know if S32 was the first with this certificate design.
Butcher Boop's death date is given as October 31, 1926, which contradicts the website archive saying it was Halloween in 1918 instead. The actual toy material is gospel, so I'm changing my date on the timeline post, but I wonder if a date got swapped. Halloween 1926 is cited as the date for Ye Ole Wraith and Nicholas on the website, too, so is one of them the 1939 date instead of Boop, or are all three 1926 deaths?
1926 is not long before, but still is before, the time the character Betty Boop debuted. This makes her name anachronistic, because there would be no reason for people to call her Butcher Boop without that cultural reference. If we wanted to nitpick and explain this, perhaps in the LDD universe, Betty was actually somehow inspired by this character instead of vice-versa? Or else the butcher only got her nickname some time after she died and Betty debuted in pop culture.
The death certificate says:
Born into a family of butchers
With a peculiar taste
Meat was the only thing sacred
Never to go to waste
Most of her kin were cannibals
Insane, an utter disgrace
One Halloween Boop snapped
Carving and eating her own face
And a rewrite.
Boop lived by the way of meat
Her family liked its taste
Killers each, and hungry too
They all reviled waste
Their bloodlust was atrocious
Their meals a sheer disgrace
One night she snapped and joined their sin
And carved and ate her face.
That one just rolled off the keyboard. I found that rewrite extremely easy and elegant!
Here she is unboxed. No accessories beyond her mask. It's kind of awesome that a scary, brutal butcher archetype is being pretty well played-straight on a female character. The cartoonishly femme face does gender her more, but it's a reference to something first worn by a male character, so...?
Putting the mask on was pretty easy, but the band squishes down a lot of Boop's wild curly hair so it's up to you to rearrange the curls that got pinned under the band if you want her hair silhouette more circular and in line with her unmasked silhouette. This is what happens if the hair isn't adjusted.
Boop's hair is a big fluff of black curls, with more volume and thinner curls than Dahlia or Jezebel in Series 5. This hair is a big facet of her visual Leatherface homage.
Butcher Boop's mask is unique among all of the plastic Halloween masks made for Living Dead Dolls because it's designed to look like lumpy, bumpy homemade papier-maché! Beyond the surface texture, the piece is minimally detailed with shallow contours, and has a very simple flat paint job that looks like an inept attempt at a pretty feminine face. It has thin black eyebrows, heavy black eye shading with lashes, blue eyeshadow, pink messy blush spots, and red heart-shaped lips with a simple black curve for a smile.
The mask is absolutely eerie due to its shoddy look and unsuccessful attempts to look human and beautiful, and the amount of forehead showing, greater than her actual head, undercuts it further. I think there's also a meta element, intentional or not, of Boop as a toy trying and failing to emulate a classic pretty dolly face, similar to how Hemlock and Honey and Madame La Mort's faces can read as attempts to blend in with normal pretty dolls. Poor Butcher Boop just wasn't a craftsperson. She knew how to cut apart better than how to put together! This is a creepy horror-slasher mask perfect for a scary story, but it's also just an authentic reflection of how unintentionally creepy an amateur homemade costume can be historically, perfectly sliding her into a Halloween theme. It's also a very sweet reflection of Boop's ideals and dreams.
The prototype Boop in the group photoshoot seemed to have subtler mask eye shading with grey tones or streaks, but the final mask has solid black shapes around the eyeholes instead. I think that works better for the art style of the series.
The mask also, of course, has obvious similarities to the mask Leatherface wears at the end of the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The makeup colors are all the same.
LDD Presents was set to release a second Leatherface doll depicting the costume in the film, but I believe it never surfaced. There's no in-hand photos of this doll; only promotional ones (the only one that looks like an in-hand picture appears to actually just be a custom built on the LDD Leatherface that did see release). I think maybe LDD got this back on track, since I heard they re-showed the doll at a more recent convention to hopefully get it released down the pipeline for real this time.
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| LDD Presents "Pretty Woman" Leatherface on show for a release that...wasn't (so far). |
I wonder if Butcher Boop was LDD's self-consolation for the Leatherface doll falling through in the meantime.
In her mask, I like her best when her head is down and her gaze looks tilted up.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was loosely inspired by the case of Ed Gein, a killer sensationalized in the media as a twisted fetishist who took women's skin in the pursuit of wearing a female body. That translates into the film where Leatherface wears masks of flesh, including, as discussed, a feminine one. Ed Gein was up to some nasty stuff, but I don't like how his highly abnormal case got turned into an anti-trans gender boogeyman to paint a whole community of nonconformers with, and so I find Boop to be more innocent horror than Leatherface. Boop is a woman who just wants to look like she used to or better, not an "eww creepy man with woman appearance" trying to take on a role society rejects. Any dissonance of her mask comes from the fact that she's made a creepy unconvincing piece and that its target aesthetic is comically glam for her job. Boop is a dreamer for glamor beyond her filthy work, and we can cherish that. She just hasn't gotten there. A few art classes and makeup lessons, and who knows where she'd get. It's also an interesting choice that she clearly did not try to use human skin for her replacement face. While that could be to make her suit the vintage-Halloween costume theme more and avoid coming too close to Leatherface, it also might indicate that she truly isn't malicious or unaware, and perhaps her own face-eating incident was a real temporary mental break that she doesn't want to repeat in any way.
Under the mask, Boop's face displays a very unhappy clean bare skull with cracks and texture lines, and it's hilarious and pitiful and charming all in one. She looks so goofy and so distraught at her extremely twisted mistake.
I was extremely charmed by this skull face...and dare I say I absolutely nailed the likeness in my teen drawing?
Boop's face paint works to obscure the underlying LDD standard face sculpt, and I think it's quite successful. The top teeth of the skull are on the top of the lip, while the bottom lip is painted black to represent the open mouth. The lower teeth are below the lip. Even in profile, the real shape of her face sculpt doesn't look obvious, and that's extremely impressive. This has to be one of LDD's most successful caricatured paint jobs that disregards the sculpt.
The Leatherface character is heavily implied to be the product of familial inbreeding, which has rendered him nonverbal and mentally childlike, which is definitely a problematic portrayal for a villain. While there's no indication either way what Boop's mental status is like, and that allows her to avoid bearing another piece of Leatherface's othering, the cannibal family history and face-eating incident could indicate some form of sadistic or dissociative psychosis she may be subject to. Or maybe it was really a one-time thing built up without a persistent disorder as the cause. I think her uncovered face and endearingly earnest mask portray her as very well-meaning, if not always in control of herself, and paired with her butcher occupation, it seems like she's a troubled sweetie who doesn't understand just how frightening she comes across. I really liked a cosplay of her from a costume contest which seemed to portray her as a heavyset middle-aged woman.
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| This cosplayer did an incredible job, right down to the photography aesthetic being dead-on for seventies grindhouse. |
I like how this body type adds to her imposing vibe while working for someone really kind and earnest in truth.
Butcher Boop's costume is a brown faux-leather apron over a cream-colored smock that covers her well. Her butcher's attire looks a lot more professional and sanitary in setup than Gluttony's. It is, however, fairly soaked in blood, which continues onto her hands. This could be a normal (if messy) part of a normal butcher's slaughtering job and not related to the more sinister disturbing aspects of her mental state and family history, but it doesn't make her look approachable in any case.
The prototype had brighter red blood on her costume with more of a splatter effect, while the final Boop's costume blood is darker and looks more dabbed-on, creating a soaked-in effect that works just as well.
The apron is brown faux-leather with a fuzzy underside. The neck has a strap with small grommets fixing it to the front, and the neck strap is a closed loop that cannot come off the doll without popping her head off or cutting it.
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| The back of the closed neck strap. |
The waist strap can untie.
Boop's smock is a simple cream piece with a shirt-style collar and a narrow silhouette. The sleeves have two layers to make her look like she has another piece underneath with sleeves coming out of the smock. No other detail besides the bloodstains. The back of the smock velcros open to the waist. There are no bloodstains on Boop's back, which feels logical.
Her footwear is the round-toed LDD boots in an atypical brown color. These suit her. She has no socks. Very few later LDDs with boots, if any, appear to.
Here's the two LDD butchers together.
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| She's jealous of Vulgar's accessories. |
LDD very often skimps on the accessories, and it's broadly disappointing that S32 doesn't have any at all. I didn't need the pumpkin buckets again...but why doesn't Butcher Boop have anything butcher-like for tools? LDD has made a cleaver and a meat tenderizer and a kitchen and serrated knife, and at least the knife and cleaver should have still been available to produce by S32's time! The accessory I always wanted for her was a cleaver in specific, and that vision extended to me taking liberties to draw her with one in my fan art at the time. But wouldn't you know, there was a ball-jointed doll with stark white skin and a gripping hand and a cleaver?
This is where Little Red Riding Hood from the Scary Tales line comes back into play--I got her for Boop's benefit. Red was the only LDD with a white gripping arm and cleaver in one. All I had to do was pop off the dolls' right arms and switch 'em, and voila! Butcher Boop is properly complete!
The hand was yellowed, which alarmed me, but a peroxide soak in sun made some improvement. I declined to paint blood onto it just to allow myself the possibility of swapping back the arms someday if I ever need to.
Another thing I did was make use of the screaming face from the loose copy of The After I replaced my Chloe's body with. I'd taken the bulk of the head to be a toilet prop (don't ask, just look), while I decided the face could be the one that Butcher Boop cut from herself! I cut out the eyes and everything inside the lips and outlined them and the nostrils and creases in black, with red splatter like her hands and clothes on the face.
I didn't replicate the glam makeup that's on the mask because I figured Boop was a no-glam practical-looking lady who attempted to "upgrade" her face when she regretted losing it and saw a second chance in the mask. While I know she ate and destroyed her face in her story, what if she still had it to re-wear? The result is terrifying.
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I feel like this would actually be how a Resurrection Butcher Boop would be done--replace her Halloween mask with a skin mask of her own face. Maybe the face underneath would look like a red musculature system instead of a bare skull. I'd be down to repaint a Series 7 Gluttony and give Boop a reimagining with that.
Series 32 was the last non-Resurrection release with variant editions in the classic era, though Return of the Living Dead Dolls Eggzorcist has since brought variants into whatever the brand is now with her alternate "Bunny of Doom" edition.
Despite the Series 32 concept being vintage Halloween, the variant set has a looser color palette concept than the classic orange and black theming of S16 and S18's variants, and the colors trend poppier, with bright green involved in most of the variants. I actually really love how Boop's costume becomes entirely high-contrast orange and black...but I can't vibe with her blue-green body color.
I do appreciate that the body color of every S32 variant is changed, even if it's not pleasing to me, and I can appreciate the flavor of Halloween kitsch the variants evoke, resembling bizarrely-colored cheap plastic toys and pop aesthetics with perhaps some Scooby-Doo tones. I imagine the variant dolls are also designed with some blacklight reactivity in mind.
Back to the main. I made her severed face for her, and we know she ate it...but not how. And who's to say she consumed it raw off her bones? Maybe her breakdown was more of a fugue than a frenzy and she managed to cook with it.
So I got this idea after seeing an image of those viral horror face pie bakes that people do making the rounds again. Those pies are fruit desserts designed to look like oozing human faces, but what if Boop baked a meat pie with her actual face on top as a crust? I attempted to sculpt one using a tapered circular plastic container cut down as a mold for the pie, but the clay deformed too much when I tried cutting the mold off and there was no baking it with the mold on because of the material. So I ordered some tiny tart tins. Not only do they scale well to Boop as a full-size pie that a LDD face could fit on top of, but the tin adds a lot of verisimilitude and I can bake the clay pie inside the tin in an oven, which makes the execution of the piece very easy and also closely emulates how the thing I'm depicting would have been made in a very charming manner.
Here's Boop with an empty tin. I don't know if I'd have been nearly as excited if the pan rims didn't prove wide enough to rest on top of an LDD's hands when their arms are held out in front. Boop not being able to hold the pie in any way would be disappointing.
I filled this with a ball of clay flat to the top, but not pushing upward in the middle. This isn't a mound-shaped pie. I rolled another piece of clay flat and put a piece on for the nose, and then cut slits and widened them to make the eyes and mouth of the face, distorting them to look more like a piece of skin with no muscles. I pressed this onto the rest of the "pie" and blended it in as best I could, then scored the edges. I then plunged the cleaver in to create a cut mark the cleaver can fit into for display when the piece is finished, since Boop needs both arms to hold the tin.
This piece easily went into the oven to bake. When it was baked, I painted it golden with darker brown accents on the edge of the crust and around the holes, and filled the holes with a dark pinkish meaty red. More solid red stroke and splatter/trail accents trimmed the holes and filled the cleaver gash as if the pie is leaking blood, and the solid red got trailed down the foil pan on the outside, too. Since Boop is fairly horrific, I didn't want the pie to look too tame or cartoony, but I think I found a good balance of pop and detail in the paint job, and the two red shades matching the two shades of red on Boop works well.
I'm very pleased with the paint job and the interaction with the cleaver, which was also an addition for the doll. This feels like what Return of the Living Dead Dolls would do to give her an accessory set. The pie and severed face are mutually exclusive in the sense that they don't make sense displayed together, being alternate depictions of the same flesh's fate, but I'm glad the cleaver can be on show while the pie is too.
Torn-off faces and meat pies are themes that also relate to Madame La Mort in the series right after Boop, seeing as Madame has a Sweeney Todd theme and her face was definitely cut off and placed onto her in some set of unknown mutilatory circumstances. The pie accessory was made specifically for Boop, though. Its aesthetic, were this Madame's original face baked into a pie, feels all wrong for Madame.
And of course I had to make some vintage-style illustrations. I did these by tracing the doll in my vector program. First was a direct flattened copy, then I did a no-outline orange/black/off-white piece for a more stylized Halloween look. It was a fun challenge figuring out how to make Boop read properly with the restrictions of no outlines and a much-reduced palette.
She takes shockingly well to the second art style, considering her theme.
And I did another version with her maskless and with a new poem. The body was taken from the first piece, but I cut out a digital auto-trace of her bare face to swap in--very easy and effective with the 2D paint style of these dolls, and it saved me some good time...but then I gave myself more work to do by going over the outlines with a thicker, rougher stroke to match the trace. But it suits her. I also tweaked a few colors for this rendition specifically, just so she'd suit the background better.
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| Click for higher-res. |
None of these illustrations were my first go with the format--I originated these compositions with Salem, whose digital art I did first, so you'll see her counterpart pieces imminently.
Unique to Butcher Boop, though, I needed to embrace the namesake and draw up a Fleischer-era 1930s cartoon intro slide for her, complete with projection effects to simulate a screening on an old projector. I based the mask shape on Betty's head here (the Betty character was originally designed as an anthropomorphic bulldog woman!) and gave her the heavier figure of the cosplay I showed earlier, since I thought that worked so well. I used the closet wood paneling for the background, and here used the pie as a way to abstractly depict the skull face under the mask. As with vintage Halloween art, I'm quite attached to the vintage cartoon style as well, so Boop was a lot of fun to work with.
Then I set up a butcher shop for her. While Gluttony's shop was a teddy-bear slaughterhouse to feature butchery on a toy level, Boop is a cannibal butcher, so I had to leverage all of the doll gore I could. I used a hand from Return Sadie, the halves of Viv with her head in a basket, the cleaver from Return Sadie and Gluttony's serrated knife and tenderizer, the Scarecrow's brain and the Tin Man's heart and axe, and my toy wooden meat pieces and some bloody newsprint paper. A copy of Grace of the Grave's dress was a perfect spare smock on the wall. I did a few takes with different lighting, including a lighter 1970s-camera-esque take.
Then I took some photos of her during the moments of severing her face, done in a gritty, dark style to look like 70s horror films.
I tried using a white-lined Series 5 costume with Hollywood and a lot of tulle to represent a victim's body kept in cold storage.
And I had to take pictures with a human-size meat pie--a shepherd's pie, to be precise. I staged her in the (entirely inactive and cool) oven for a couple of pictures, with the interior recolored red in post. The industrial tone kind of suits her in a surprising way.
And sitting with the pie.
And one last return to the butcher shop, bare-faced, lit by orange, and trying to enjoy Halloween with a pumpkin bucket full of butcher's tools.
Butcher Boop has an appeal most people simply would not see. I think a doll of a cannibalistic serial killer in a creepy mask is appealing? What's wrong with me? But really, she has charm. She's gruesome and horrific in concept, but her placement in this series results in an oddly close-to-family-friendly rendition as she reflects a skeleton archetype and her worst imagery is blood splatter. Her personality shines. Her mask is menacing and emotionless despite its attempts to look pretty and sweet, but she flips from threatening to heart-rendingly miserable when you take her mask off and see her anxious, regretful little skull underneath. Boop may be dangerous and have poor regard for human life, but she's also very easy to see as innocent in disposition and a victim of the forces around her. She's a sweet little doll at heart, but everything else about her is repellent and scary. And if you're a Texas Chainsaw fan, then this is a really fun design homage.
As designed, Boop is also an oddly successful fit for the vintage Halloween concept, despite her subject matter being anything but. Her look is old-timey and spooky in the right way. I do think Boop was lacking accessories, but having given her a cleaver, a skinned face, and a diabolical pie myself, I'm delighted with her options. She's a dark little doll, but her earnest desire to be approachable comes through.
The Witching Devil's Beast: Salem
You're terribly surprised, I'm sure. Knocking out both LDD Halloween witches in one year is far from unpredictable for me!
I actually wasn't sure this doll would be number two in this roundup, though. For the longest time, I was sure it would be Ye Ole Wraith, who I really like and find emblematic of the concept, especially since she's based on a specific old Halloween illustration...but I found myself more intrigued by Salem over time. Salem, named for the city in Massachusetts historically infamous for witch trials, mixes a witch with a classic Halloween black cat and absolutely nails the faceup.
My hangups with her were that her cat ears are fabric attached to her hat and her head sculpt is not modified to remove the human ears, so I worried her hat wouldn't be able to hide them. I was also daunted by Salem's aftermarket prices, which seemed oddly high. I wouldn't have expected her to be very popular, but it was rough enough to discourage me...until I checked AliExpress. There, I found one for a more reasonable ("reasonable") price and took her as my second S32 doll. I still wanted Ye Ole Wraith quite a lot, but unless I found the budget for the third dolls I could envision for each series, I put her aside in my mind. I wanted the symmetry of this series too much to break the balance. Leaving one doll from each Halloween category gives me a nice Dolloween for 2025.
If her hat was not able to hide the human ears of her head sculpt, I planned to find some fabric I could use to make a tight hood she could wear in even more Puritan fashion which would cover her ears and leave the kitty ones as the only visible pair.
Salem was a sealed copy.
Her chipboard poem says:
Black cats and witches
Are staples of the season
Tricks and treats are given
With no rhyme or reason
The second couplet feels like a non-sequitur. Try this:
Black cats and witches
Are often seen this season
But did you see the two in one?
What could be the reason?
What could be the reason?
Salem's death date is also given as October 31, 1926, and the year again does not match the website (which says 1939). I'm taking this as gospel too and updating the timeline, but now it looks like every doll in the series died on the same Halloween, save for Ernest Lee Rotten, who is confirmed to have no death date. That easily makes October 31, 1926 the most populous deathdate in the brand when you add Vincent Vaude into consideration.
A black cat (really, a transfigured punished warlock) named Salem has been done before as the pet of famous "teenage witch" character Sabrina Spellman. Sabrina and her Salem have appeared in the LDD Presents line, with the release specifically based on the Netflix Chilling Adventures of Sabrina series.
The Sabrina doll actually fits seamlessly with the retro-sixties doll style that several classic LDDs imitate...she's just not very creepy.
Series 32 Salem's certificate poem says:
This poem says:
When the night has gone dark
And the full moon lights up the sky
Gather your spells and broomstick
For on this Halloween night we fly
I'm disappointed there's nothing about Salem as a character here. How about this?
When the moon rises high
She wishes to fly
On a broom from the trees
She conquers and climbs
Here's the doll unboxed.
When I took Salem out, I was struck by dusty coloring on her hat and head. She looked like she needed a cleaning.
Salem's witch hat is made from a thicker canvas-y black fabric just like Ember's costume, and, unlike Ember's, has wire in the cone letting that be arranged as you like. I think Salem calls for a very pointy hat, myself. The brim does not have wire. The cone has a band of green ribbon with a silver metal witch buckle on it which is nearly identical to Ember's. The buckle isn't as square, with a pinch between the two halves.
Salem's cat ears are fabric sewn to the brim of her hat with the implication that they're emerging from cutouts. The ears are black outside, matching her hat fabric, and orange velour inside, and they're cute, but the fact that they're not attached to her and are a different material from her body is strange.
This hat can pull down relatively low on Salem's head, but not to the degree that it's able to cover up her head sculpt's human ears. That's a big issue for me conceptually. Why couldn't LDD have done something about that?
Despite the ears, posing wire, and straight hat tip, this piece is very similar to Ember's hat overall.
Salem uses the "fanged" version of the screaming LDD face (which I now know is done with a separate tooth element rather than a whole different sculpt!), and is my first doll to have it. The tooth sculpt originated with Lilith in Series 3, who was also the very first screaming doll. I don't imagine the teeth needed any re-molding to be used on the ball-joint version of the screaming face. The first ball-joint dolls with the fanged teeth appear to be Sanguis and Agana in Series 19--a long gap since their last appearance! Using this face style for a thirsty vampire makes sense, but repurposing it for a hissing cat (and the Big Bad Wolf) is very creative and clever.
Salem's head looks a little lighter and less starkly black than the other pieces of her body, which is disappointing. Her face paint is really nice, though, depicting a perfect yowling Halloween cat in yellow and orange colors. I think the mouth really successfully integrates the sculpted mouth into the overdrawn design, while the eyes do work, but are less successful due to counteracting the sculpted eyes, and the contours are less hidden as a result.
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| This photo makes her head look a little lighter than it actually is, though. |
I have to wonder just how anthropomorphic this character is. Her face looks fully feline and animalistic, so can Salem speak human langages, or is she human-intelligent in accordance with her body, but only able to vocalize as a cat?
I knew Ye Ole Wraith was based on a specific piece of vintage artwork:
So I wanted to go out on a limb and see if Salem was too. Black cats are a dime a dozen in old Halloween art, but I actually found the exact match to her face design:
This specific image example was from a Redbubble sticker sold by user Robert Saenz, but image search pulled up disconnected matches of the same design, including what appeared to be a physical card cutout to with a holepunch to hang from a string, suggesting it's a generic design that's been floating around and merchandised miscellaneously, and is not a stolen known artist's work. I certainly hope that's the case and that it's non-creditable/public-domain art. It's a really cool adaptation if it's all fair, and I think it's okay to directly use the visual because it's a different medium and dimension to put it on a doll's face. A direct visual quote also adds a stylistic authenticity that designing a vintage cat face in a vacuum might not achieve. I think LDD chose a great source here. This is a very good vintage Halloween cat design.
The biggest difference between this original art and Salem's face is a strange one--her "pie-cutout" old-timey eye reflection designs are pointing in opposite directions, suggesting light coming at her from both directions or a more wall-eyed gaze. The artwork source has both reflection cutouts in the same direction, which makes more sense. I think maybe there was a digital drawing at some point where the artist just copied and flipped one finished eye to symmetrically create the other, and forgot the pupil was also reversed before the face paint design was finalized. It happens to the best of us, but to be able to pick this as a slip rather than a design choice doesn't look great. It's a very minor detail on the doll, however, and her impact isn't harmed by it.
I decided to get a cutout set of black cats from Etsy featuring this image so Salem could be paired with her inspiration. I thought it would work nicely tacked on her chipboard. I can do the same for Ye Ole Wraith in the future, because people are selling cutouts of her source art too. This set is from JustLikeTheRealDeal on Etsy.
Due to their subject matter and rendering, I didn't think Butcher Boop or Ernest would have real vintage art matches, but Nicholas turned out to--his face is a loose translation of this devil face design, though I've seen this flat image and also an image of this face as a 3D plastic mask, so I don't know which came first, or who did what when. Maybe the old artwork inspired someone else before it inspired Nicholas, or else the mask was made and someone retro-adapted it to a vintage-style illustration before Nicholas.
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| This is a picture of a 2D Etsy photo print, so whither the mask comes is unclear. The Etsy user describes the image as a Ben Cooper mask, throwing the origin of this design further into question. |
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| Knowing the basis of this doll makes me like Nicholas more, but I prefer the original art, honestly. This is awkward in execution. There's no reason for the head to be mostly red and bald, and the expression is totally different. Variant Nick, with his red face and green eyes, works better for me with this rendering. |
The Wraith thing was known, but I don't know if anybody has previously clocked the other vintage art cited in this series!
Around her neck, Salem has a very simple cape. It's attached with a band around her neck rather than a clasp or closure, and the band is sewn closed and the cape cannot be removed without cutting it or popping off her head. Series 32 has a weird thing about unremovable neck costuming--Salem and Butcher Boop have closed neck straps, and Nicholas has a cape secured by a chain sewn across the neck which can't disconnect--a lot like Maitre des Morts' jacket in the series right after.
Salem's cape is green satin, including the band, and lined with orange satin inside.
Under the cape, Salem has a very Puritan-esque black shirt that suits her name, with white trim for the collar and cuffs, buttons down the front, and a V-shaped gap in the front. All of the white pieces have a yellow aged effect, which really sells her as an "authentic" vintage decoration you could acceot as a much older item, and the sleeves are short. This piece velcros all the way down the back.
Around her waist, Salem has a separate imitation-leather belt in bright Halloween orange. The silver buckle on the belt matches the one on her hat band, and the belt piece is clean and thick and tidy. It's honestly the most polished piece of the whole doll.
Salem's skirt is more green satin, and velcros around the waist. It's pleated loosely, and the bottom is gathered with elastic around her ankles, creating a poofed shape.
While Jinx in Series 6 had a wired fabric tail attached to her black cat costume, Salem, an actual black cat, has no tail accent. That doesn't bother me. It could get overwhelmed by her cape and skirt if she had one.
I really like Salem's color palette. The medium green, orange, black, and white pair together great for a classical Halloween palette that still feels a little uncommon--usually, Halloween green is more lime-toned and paired with purple, and orange and black often stand alone.
Salem is unsurprisingly wearing the witchy boots, but her lack of socks makes them rock on her feet like other booted dolls sans socks.
I think it could have made sense for Salem to have the clawed LDD arm sculpt, since she's a cat and all, but I can understand the standard arms lending her more of a classic vintage-doll look that suits her art style more.
Unfortunately, Salem's outfit felt like nothing but loose threads. It was a mess on most seams, on every fiber piece, and very disappointing to see.
Salem's arm joints also disappointed me. Her left arm, likely due to some molding issue, didn't feel able to rest by her side as low as her right arm. Her right arm, conversely, was very easy to pop off and liked to slip off the joint when posing her, like my Scarecrow Purdy's left.
With the human ears, the loose threads, the dirty doll, the inconsistent plastic coloring, the loose boots, and the wonky arm posing, I think this is probably the messiest Living Dead Doll I've ever encountered sealed.
With the cape, I cut the strap and added a velcro closure. I probably didn't have to, and maybe should have left it untouched, because the velcro is fiddly the way I had to extend the closure across, but I like having it removable without taking apart the doll.
And because Salem's witch hat is not capable of hiding her human ears, I went ahead with making her an old-fashioned conservative tight hood. To do this, I took a white glove from the pack I ordered, popped off Salem's head, and put her head in the wrist hole facing upward between the two seams. I cut a hole in the bottom to shove her neck through.
I then trimmed and glued the glove in various places to tighten around Salem's face and close up the back. I didn't glue the hood to her skin, but she won't be able to remove it while her head is attached. I then took the hood off and put it to soak in some tea to stain it to match the other whites in her outfit.
When I put her back together, I properly fell in love with her. The hood fixes her biggest problem while making complete visual sense with her design and aesthetic, and you'd never know it was an addition. The hood makes her look several factors more Puritan, and thus even more worthy of her name, while making the doll read much more cleanly as a cat.
It would have made sense if her death date was from actual Salem witch-panic times like Ember, even if she's not actually historically accurate. She looks more like she's from that era than Ember does.
I also think it could have made perfect sense if Salem were a masked doll. Imagine her having a humanoid or humanoid-witchy mask covering her cat face so she could disguise herself as more human, only betrayed by her cat ears! This is another place where Butcher Boop's variant mask would work well.
I probably didn't need to make the cape strap open and close because I could have popped her back together with it untouched, and that might have looked cleaner. Oh well.
Here's Salem packed back in her coffin, with the cutout of the cat artwork she's based on tacked to her chipboard with poster putty.
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| Also seamless. |
I know LDD didn't cite preexisting illustrations for every S32 doll, so it wouldn't make sense for them to have done this kind of personalized imagery quoting the source, but I like how this adds to her chipboard and puts her inspiration in context.
Salem's variant doll changes her to an orange cat and flattens her a little with increased black tones. I can see myself vibing with this doll.
I set Salem up with some vintage cat decorations and scenery, differentiating from the shoot I did for Jinx by emphasizing the vintage tone over the basic presence of the black cat or a strictly orange/black combo.
Here's Salem climbing trees.
And the vintage-style illustrations. As mentioned, I did these before Boop's.
Salem is objectively a disappointing doll in terms of quality, and I am glad I found a better deal on her as a result of how let-down I was. I would be unhappy paying more for what I got. She's got janky arms, her boots give her a wonky stance, her body was dirty and her outfit shed threads everywhere. She also has a major design flaw with her head sculpt being inadequate for a cat and nothing being done to hide that. But once she was tidied and given a hood, I was able to fully see her vintage charm and I adore her aesthetic. And unlike Isabel, her costume didn't outright fall apart. Of Series 32, she may well be the very Halloweeniest and she brings the classic Halloween spookiness right into my soul. I wish she was at least nicer out of the box because I don't feel begrudged by having to make the hood. It's the doll being such a mess that really threatened her standing. I'm just glad it all worked out and she was able to shine.
To take the cover photo, I decided to go with my read of the series as guests at a late-night Halloween party and set up a diorama as such. Because the series didn't get a fancy themed photoshoot, I basically had carte blanche to choose the setting and style. The chipboard design wasn't enough to work with, and would involve too much 2D art for a cover photo, as well as demand image/style imitation I didn't want to do. I had an orange background prepared and cut a window from it, which I trimmed with clay to give it more polish, and used checkered placemats for the floor. I hung the orange check ribbon around the window as a curtain. Agatha's coffin lent me her lid and the Series 23 table legs to set up a treat table in the back, including Boop's pie. I put a cauldron and filled it with water and decorative berries to depict an apple-bobbing vat. Bobbing for apples immediately comes to mind as the quintessential old-time Halloween party activity. I included two vintage-style papier-mache buckets to reflect the dolls- a small fleshy scowling face for Boop, and the black cat for Salem. Overhead, I hung the black cat cutouts as pieces of a garland, with pieces of triangular paper cut as pennant flags between the cats. They're all just taped onto the line.
I added cartoony glowing stars in the darkness of the window in post to suit the aesthetic for the picture I chose as the cover shot.
I'm really charmed by these dolls. Boop is a gruesome oddball with a strange kind of heart, and she gave me a lot of artistic inspiration. Salem is sloppy, but undeniably classic and gets me right in the Halloween mood. This collection of dolls is a fun departure in art style that led to some really cool dolls. I think Series 16 is still the first of the three series I could see myself completing and really liking every doll in, but I'm certainly not calling off Series 32 now. I need the Wraith for sure. Even though she's not in the cards for this October, I want her enough that I may not even make it to next Halloween before I get and review her. Ernest is pretty interesting, too.
While this is the last LDD series based on Halloween, it's not the last spooky seasonal release of the classic era, and I have someone from the short run of yearly exclusives to look at next. And even with that, the Living Dead Dolloween will not be over! There's still more spooks to show!
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