A Living Dead Dolloween, Part 5: A New Exclusive Era

The same year Series 32 was released, Living Dead Dolls debuted a new format of Halloween exclusive dolls, starting with Jack O Lantern. These dolls were all themed heavily on the holiday, and have the same deathdate as that year's Halloween, like the first Halloween exclusives Hemlock and Honey. Each of these dolls was a solo release, though, and had three regional color variants available in different parts of the world. I imagine this string of Halloween exclusives could have continued for more than three annual dolls if the classic era of the brand had not collapsed to this very day, but with such a small selection of this phase of LDD Halloween, my choices were more narrow and easy. I have some appreciation for the first doll, Jack O Lantern. I like that he's based on the legend of Stingy Jack, who is the very namesake of the carved veg, and his orange/black UK variant looks really good. I was also briefly obsessed with the black-and-white variant of Vesper, a girl in a bat-winged hoodie. She has a very classic old-LDD 1960s-dolly faceup with a lot of classic-horror camp about her, but I felt like she might be a doll better suited by a classic dolly dress outfit in the same colors, and I was iffy enough about the effect of the painted fangs in her face paint that I let her be. To look at this collection of Halloween LDD, one little ghoul was the answer.

Read the first part here, the second part here, the third part here, and the fourth part here.

Dentists' Nightmare: Sweet Tooth

Warning for allusions to horror tooth trauma.

All of the LDD Halloween exclusives, including Hemlock and Honey, have had some trick-or-treat theming with pumpkin buckets included, but Sweet Tooth might have the most iconic Halloween vibe, at least in her US edition. Jack, Sweet Tooth, and Vesper each had regional exclusives with different colors, a trick previously done with 10th anniversary Eggzorcist. All three had a more black-and-white variant among the group. 

Sweet Tooth's concept is a little vague. She's an ugly wrinkled little zombie girl with literal sweet teeth of candy corn, making her feel a little like a generic classic Halloween ghoulie in disguise among trick-or-treaters. Or else she is just a zombie who ate a lot of candy. She's not particularly cute, but that can be part of her appeal for the Halloween theme, and there does appear to be a very deliberate contrast between her face and the cute costume. She's a unique sculpt variant and she has a rare coffin color, so I figured I'd bring her in. I went for the USA variant.

Sweet Tooth's special coffin color is a bright solid Halloween-orange design and I think it looks incredible.

The tissue color is the greyish black used for the variant sets of Series 16 and 18.

All of the print on the cardboard box is solid black with no metallic elements or mixed colors, and it's very striking. I don't know if any other LDD coffin design has had entirely monochromatic printing like this.

Strong contender for top favorite divergent coffin design. 

Solid color variants of the coffins have been done before, always on other holiday dolls. Valentine Rose and the Toy Soldier have solid red coffins, Violet (Rose's solo-released match in their duo) has a solid blue coffin, Nohell has a solid snow-white coffin, and the Jack O Lantern doll before Sweet Tooth was the first with the orange. Surprisingly, Halloween 2018 Vesper has a basic black coffin, not following her two direct predecessors, and Sweet Tooth was the final orange coffin at just the second one made. (Of the two orange coffins, I think Sweet Tooth is the better doll.) Had the Hansel and Gretel Scary Tales-reimagined set been released, though, it looked like they were also set to have a solid red coffin color.

Sweet Tooth's chipboard depicts a paper candy bag spilling candy corn on the ground and denotes her Halloween 2017 celebration release at the top.

The chipboard poem says:

Sweet Tooth comes every Halloween.

She loves her tricks and to hear you scream.

Sweet Tooth comes to collect your teeth.

She won't stop coming till you sleep beneath.

And a rewrite.

Sweet Tooth stalks on Halloween

Bringing tricks and seeking screams.

She wants to take your teeth and kill

And won't let up until you're still.

Her death certificate is a different design from recent releases in Series 32 and 33, with a greyer color. 

Series 33 certificate.

This looks even older, which is odd for a contemporary death. Sweet Tooth died, as expected, on Halloween 2017, her time of release as a toy. All of the Halloween-themed LDD exclusives died on their year's Halloweens.

Her poem says:

Beaten savagely by a mob and left for dead

Where once there were teeth, they shoved candy corn instead

She died cold and alone on Hallow's Eve

The daughter of a devil, born to deceive

This story sounds far more horrific and folkloric than a 2017 death would suggest. Realistically, this would have a true-crime flair if it was a current incident; it would be a major news story, not a legend. And Sweet Tooth wouldn't be described as arriving "every Halloween" if 2017's was the first one she existed in. I feel like the latest she could have died in this old-story framework is maybe the 1970s. Neither of Sweet Tooth's poems are written like she's a contemporary figure, so maybe her death date doesn't mean anything and she is meant in-universe to have more history and be more of an urban legend than a real case. That certainly makes her easier to deal with. Try this poem:

Did you hear of the girl who was killed for her teeth?

They replaced them with candies then put her beneath

Sent by the devil, each season she rises...

Oh, I made it all up--I'm full of surprises!

Sweet Tooth's hair is long center-parted saran rooted in layers of orange and black that blend together to striking effect. The hair feels nice, but gets untidy as saran often does. A few strands look warped and bent, but not enough to ruin the texture. Sweet Tooth's scalp is painted the same orange shade as her coffin, and it can show through occasionally.

Sweet Tooth's skin is a slightly greenish neon yellow color accented by multitonal green wrinkle/shading work and a green tongue. Her body color might be the same as Milu in Series 27. 

I think this color scheme is cool, but my instinct would be to make Sweet Tooth entirely warm-colored and remove the green hues. All the same, I can't seriously argue against them. They make her more interesting, and I realized, of course, that her face is designed to glow under blacklight! Despite her 2017 year, that makes her suit 2024 pretty well, where retail Halloween decor has leaned hard into hypersaturated colors that seem blacklight-friendly.

She's an open-mouthed doll with a ghoulish zombie face that's not really feminized or cute. The rendering style is broadly like the line-drawn vintage art of the Series 32 dolls, and is most similar to Ernest Lee Rotten, also a corpse-themed doll. I certainly don't mind another droplet of the Series 32 style, but it's strange to see it applied on a more modern character. I think overall, though, Sweet Tooth is aiming for the popular "pop-vintage" or modern-throwback style of Halloween decor which affects vintage Halloween art aesthetics with brighter, more saturated colors and higher contrast, so the combo of modern styling and retro linework and bright colors is intentional.  Sweet Tooth has green wrinkles and shading around her lips, eyes, and face, and her irises are orange with green pupils, with neither outlined. Her eyes have bold black outlined shading around them. This copy's pupils aren't super well aligned.

Her upper teeth are a new element and form a downward curve and are sculpted and painted to look like pieces of candy corn placed with the flat side downward. The teeth have fairly wide gaps, painted black, built in between them to make the shaping look clearer as depictions of candy. The gaps between and gums are black, though a dash of orange got up there too. Since you can't see it with contrast from a distance, I'm assuming that's a paint error and I will cover it with black. 

Design logic would dictate that candy corns are striped in a loose gradient of white to orange, with yellow in the middle, but the actual order is white tip, orange middle, yellow bottom, which Sweet Tooth gets correct. I've mistaken the order myself in some designs when I trusted my instincts and got it wrong, so I was sensitive to the possibility of Sweet Tooth's design making the same wrong assumption. It doesn't.

Sweet Tooth's bottom teeth are too small to paint with stripes, but they are orange to suggest they are candies as well. Her facial expression is empty and hungry if nothing else. It's an effective little Halloween creature face for a tooth collector. 

As with Eleanor, the more illustrated, poppy, flat look of this ugly corpse face design prevents it from being genuinely unappealing in the way Vincent Vaude's main doll was.

Candy corn is a divisive confection, and some people, facetiously or not, stake social categorism on its polarizing nature, akin to the debates and judgment that come from questions like cats vs. dogs or the legality of pineapple on pizza. I put no such weight into the question of candy corn myself. I'll nibble on one or two pieces per year, but I don't go nuts for it. Sweet Tooth's mutilation is a hell I don't want to suffer, but I see it on an objective sense of it being horrific, not in a "hell is being stuck with candy corn for teeth but any other candy is fine" kind of way.

It is interesting how candy corn is really the only Halloween-exclusive candy in the culture, though. Sure, every candy manufacturer rebrands and reshapes their goodies for the holiday, but all of their stuff is consumed year-round. Candy corn, despite best efforts to market it for other contexts, is pretty firmly iconic to Halloween specifically and is likely the only candy that trick-or-treaters won't be eating at any other time of the year. Maybe it's those autumnal colors being so essential to its identity.

Sweet Tooth's costume is Halloween-themed, but it isn't a Halloween costume. It's much more like a cute spooky outfit you'd dress a little girl in for the occasion, but doesn't feel especially trick-or-treaty, and she's not dressing as anything. I think this works with the idea of her face being jarringly ghoulish because she's styled like a sweet little girl, but it's a different kind of Halloween outfit. That's fine, though, and it's certainly a valid depiction of Halloween attire.

Sweet Tooth is wearing a black long-sleeved cozy shirt with an orange pumpkin graphic and two bows in the upper front corners. The choice to have two bows seems a little odd, and just one in the center might look better, but it's fine. It looks like a cute warm top to wear during the season. The pumpkin is entirely wholesome in design, which fuels the facial contrast, but part of me wishes it matched the LDD pumpkin bucket's face. It's the same graphic as featured on the treat bag pictured in her chipboard.

The three Halloween exclusives in this era of the brand (Jack O Lantern, Sweet Tooth, and Vesper) all have appliqué print on the back of their costumes, featuring a commemorative "Living Dead Dolls Halloween [Year]" logo to denote their release celebration. Sweet Tooth's accordingly notes her 2017 release.

This is a cute touch, and it's unobtrusive. I like the occasion being included as a stamp on the doll. I wonder why the "O" in "Halloween" is underlined. Does it have to do with Jack O Lantern being the first in this format of exclusives and the graphic was initially designed with him in mind? Or maybe it's a quirk of the chosen typeface and other characters not used in the word "Halloween" had similar touches.

Because this sequence of Halloween exclusive dolls had to print the back of the costumes, their outfits are not designed to be removed. You'd have to at least pop out Sweet Tooth's head to take the shirt off.

Sweet Tooth's skirt is an orange tutu that feels very flouncy and fun. It's the kind of thing a lot of fanciful little girls would like to wear and sits as the strongest stylistic contrast to her face. The ruffled top layer is sheer with black trim and a long thin black bow, and underneath is a satiny orange layer that perfectly fills in the color of the tulle so it looks seamless. You can't discern the under-layer through the over-layer, and the over-layer looks rich and saturated. The skirt's shade of orange is also particularly blacklight-friendly.

The layers are sewn together at the back.

The skirt velcros partially in back and can be removed. The sweater is tucked into it. Sweet Tooth is otherwise wearing orange stripy tights just like variant Ember's, and black Mary Janes. I'm disappointed that there seems to have been another backslide for the shoes--Sweet Tooth's aren't that tight. Not as bad as Evangeline's in S13, but not as snug and solid as S6 Jinx or S18 Ember's. So maybe there's no linear consistency regarding shoe fits in the manufacturing. It might just fluctuate from release to release, or maybe from manufacturing site to manufacturing site.

Sweet Tooth's pumpkin bucket is familiar. The handle isn't as tight in her grip, so it can rotate and swing in her hand. The bucket itself had some unfortunate dark discoloration I couldn't remove.

I really wanted to give Sweet Tooth a mask of some kind, and my idea was pretty immediate--a brown paper bag. That would make her feel trick-or-treat sketchy while giving her a unique costume covering among all the other Halloween dolls. I had to fold her a bag myself out of brown construction paper so I would have something in the right size, and it took multiple attempts and still came out wonky, but I think it works. I cut the bottom with textured scissors and then cut her a round eyehole. That inspired me to turn her eyeholes into part of the phrase "trick or treat", and painted the words on to form an abstract evil grinning face! I think this is a really fun design.

I think this makes her an even worthier entry in the ever-competitive space of prospective Halloween personifications, and makes her feel somewhat similar to Sam of the horror film Trick 'r Treat, demanding candy at people's doors before revealing her face when things get really ugly.

I haven't had a blacklight until now and have gotten by recently with the blue setting of my nightlight, but that necessarily isn't the same. So I finally added a blacklight to my repertoire for Sweet Tooth's benefit...and she's awesome.

I don't know if Mezco quite made it obvious enough that Sweet Tooth had been designed with fluorescence in mind, but I think she definitely was, and it's a really fun added dimension to an already fun doll.

Sweet Tooth's two regional color variants are similar to Jack O Lantern's variants. 

In the UK, Sweet Tooth was released in mostly greyscale, save for her eyes and mouth bringing in pops of orange. This is a very striking and appealing spooky design that feels like an old-timey ghoul, and I like her white bucket. 

There's a speck of green via her pupils, which doesn't go, and is the only part of this variant I don't like. If they were white, she'd be perfect. This doll would not do quite as much under blacklight, but her white tones would all catch and glow bluish. The paint for the eyes and teeth on the main is not exceptionally vivid under blacklight, so I don't think those would pop especially well on this variant, either.

Her Japan/Australia variant is the weakest to me. Her skin and costume and bucket colors have switched to a definite neon green, but her hair is still orange.

I think purple accents and less green would help this doll, or conversely, eliminating the orange altogether. Jack O Lantern's equivalent variant (which was the Australian edition on him) mixed purple and green. (His white variant was the US edition and his orange/black variant was the UK one). I think this variant of Sweet Tooth would look great under blacklight, but I'd get more mileage out of this by customizing her hair and paint to ditch the orange. She could be a witch or some other flavor of generic Halloween spook with this setup.

Of these three, the US version feels like the definitive edition. I think the orange/black edition of Jack O Lantern might also be the definitive edition for him. Vesper is a pale skintoned doll with orange and black styling and has a variant that trades orange for red, but also has a full greyscale doll using white skin and accents, and on Vesper, I think the white-themed variant is the best.  

For photos, I had to recreate the trick-or-treat scene I used as the Series 16 cover set to show Sweet Tooth making the same rounds very late at night. I think she'd come around after everyone is in bed, knocking on doors and waking people up in grisly encounters. As such, I left the "candy bowl" empty and put a light in the dollhouse across the street and a light over her head to make her look lit by a porch light.

I edited in some more shadows in post to obscure her face and darken the area to sell the late-night call even better, and that became the cover. I also tried a version with her teeth highlighted, done by editing in a picture of them over top.

Here's two alternate lighting schemes I liked enough to keep.

And the two moments at the same doorstep--Eleanor and Isabel visiting hours before Sweet Tooth arrives very late.

I also took a shot by accident that had a perfect angle for a seventies-ish horror poster, so I made one.

Here's a blacklit version of the trick-or-treat photo.

And a shot with only her hand in light and focus, reaching out with its bucket.

Her face is still ever so visible.

With Sweet Tooth's setup, I did change the "porch" tiles a bit and added a row of tiles on each side of the "street" to depict a sidewalk. Here's some more of her on the "street".

And then I remembered that I made her bag mask and completely forgot to photograph it, so I restaged the doorway again!

I got a couple more pictures with this setup, showing her busting in and then against the door in isolation.

The street diorama wasn't convincing enough, so I got some more photos at night on the human-scale outdoor street. I staged her dead on the side of the road after the murder.

Here's some photos against the street, taken in night mode which made it more colorful. The moon was bright and full and beautiful, but my phone doesn't seem equipped to capture it properly, so I settled for these instead. The third is my favorite, tonally, and feels the most "Halloween".

Then I put her bag on her for more photos.

And I returned to the crime-scene pictures with the addition of her bag, which gave me my favorite shot of the death story:

And in blacklight:

I wonder if Sweet Tooth and Ember would get along, since both were evidently little girls horrifically and unjustly murdered on a Halloween. Sweet Tooth looks far more angry about it, but possibly also more mindless, while Ember looks more sad or sweet despite her gory burns.

I tried one shot compositing her into a street scene I found online.

I'd had the idea of carving candy corns into split roots to look like human teeth for a couple of non-doll photos, but the candy is too delicate and crumbles when you try to carve it, so I resorted to sculpting three candy-corn teeth out of clay and painting them instead. I took one photo of them on the ground, and another framing them on a tray at a morgue:

I don't know why so many of my pictures with Sweet Tooth went into 1970s horror aesthetics when the only thing remotely aesthetically like that is her hair parting, but she suited grainy, brown, low-lit imagery really well. Maybe the Halloween neighborhood pictures were getting me in a very "John Carpenter's Halloween" mood specifically. Suburban autumnal horror is the tone of that film and series. The actual Living Dead Doll paying homage to the Carpenter film/wider Halloween franchise is Pumpkin in Series 16. He'd get a photoshoot on the street too--and he might, another season.

And a photo against orange with the candy teeth in her bucket, holding a candy corn and in front of a pumpkin hoodie. I only painted the front and sides of her candy corn tooth pieces, so I had to arrange them delicately inside the bucket.

Sweet Tooth is weird. And that's what I love about her. 

Her green hues that kind of don't work but entirely do, her zombie candy-tooth design that feels like it's broaching a whole new monster type, and her very classic Halloween aesthetic with a cutesy girl's seasonal outfit form a great contrast against her grotesque face. She's not cute...but she kind of is, isn't she? And her blacklight reactivity is a really fun feature that justifies her more conspicuous color choices.

She really does feel like that wonderful archetype of "the trick-or-treater as monster", and she's fun and ugly and adorable without being too gritty and gross. She does still fit a gritty, grim horror aesthetic remarkably well, though, and getting outside with her and using the real street scenery got me in the Halloween mood really well, so I appreciate her work in charging my spirit! The bag mask I made her is an asset, but she doesn't really need it. She feels compelling as she is, and of the LDD Halloween exclusives, feels the most original. Hemlock and Honey are awesome and I love them, but Sweet Tooth is more stylized and surreal to the point that it's hard to define her horror archetype, and I love that too. Is she a zombie? Is she an urban legend? Is she a spirit of the holiday itself? You decide.