They Played With Us: The Monster High Skullector "The Shining" Set by Mattel Creations

Mattel Creations, are you headed for a crash or something? Save for a continual release pattern of boy Skullector characters turned into girls, you keep putting out wondrous surprises at breakneck speed and I'm getting worried for your safety. 

Warning for bloody imagery.

Now, we all know Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to some extent or another. I watched it fully for the first time on Halloween 2022 and understood the phenomenon instantly. It's one of those classic works that’s almost annoying for (in my opinion) being just as good as everyone says it is, and as one of the most iconic and parodied horror films in the canon, you can't watch twenty major horror movies, or fifty comedy works, that came after its release without at least one or two of them referencing it. It's...gotten old, admittedly. I think the point of exhaustion in the horror genre was It: Chapter Two and I could have done well without it in Weapons. It worked fine in The Substance and Us, though. Oh, well. It's referenced for a reason. Kubrick’s film is an adaptation of the Stephen King novel that eclipsed the novel in the popular consciousness, much to King's dismay, and the film's influence is inescapable. Director Mike Flanagan clearly loves and understands King, translating his works to film with alarming fluency on multiple occasions. When Flanagan made the film of The Shining's sequel Doctor Sleep, the Overlook Hotel was amplified in the narrative and ripped straight from Kubrick, indulgently so, despite the text overall honoring King's version of the two stories more. (And I mean indulgently. The location is used for nothing new; the whole affair in Doctor Sleep just recreates all the famous images and spooks from the movie so you can ooh and ahh because you remembered that! The film does transplant the Shining book's finale to the sequel's adaptation and has one scene where the Overlook changes for adult Dan, but otherwise its use is a bit hollow. You can watch the first film to see the same material. Not to knock against Flanagan, who's put out some of the best horror writing and filmed media in the modern genre, but his scary visuals sometimes feel uninspired and his scripting sometimes misses the mark. He's not a good match for a Kubrick homage; he's much more in line with King.)

Kubrick's film is a psychologically ambiguous unsettling story of a broken family (abusive father Jack, submissive mother Wendy, and psychic child Danny) irrevocably splintering due to isolation, abuse, and psychosis, regardless of whether the ghosts of the tragedy-stricken old hotel are real or not (though the intent was for the ambiguity to resolve and side on “they’re real” by the climax). The film is full of iconic imagery and masterfully haunting directing, including set design and spatial discrepancies that make the predatory setting of the Overlook Hotel physically inconsistent and impossible, and idiosyncratic use of dramatic score in events where nothing’s really happening…is it? It’s a fantastic story about the horrors of humanity, even if it wasn’t the most ethically directed re. the mental health and working conditions of actress Shelley Duvall. The film could be considered hypocritically made since she was mistreated to get her to play the role of someone mistreated the way Kubrick wanted. All the same, Duvall never pronounced any hostility toward the film or Kubrick after its completion, and went on record appreciating the performance she produced from that methodology, and it is a great performance and I don’t want to fight a battle for someone who rejected the concerns in her sake.

Among the many famous visuals of the film, it's arguable that none have become more recognizable than the Grady sisters-- apparitions of a pair of young girls who were daughters of a previous hotel caretaker. They appear as visions to Danny Torrance in brief jump-cut flashes a couple of times, and have two actual scenes. In the first, they silently appear in the game room. While the girls reflect on the floorboards, the lighting otherwise makes them look oddly chroma-keyed in as if they weren't filmed in the room. 

This looks like a composite to me, but it wasn't.

In their second scene, Danny sees them at the end of a hallway where they implore him to play with them…while Danny sees flashes of their axed bodies on the floor replacing them, depicting how their caretaker father murdered them--a fate Danny himself will be threatened with.

The spectral Grady sisters as seen in the film.

The girls are inspired by the Diane Arbus photo “Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967”, depicting two girls in the same outfits with the one on the left frowning and the one on the right smiling. 

It's an enigmatic picture that has been interpreted according to themes of identicality vs. individuality, and I feel like there are other imitators. American Horror Story: Freak Show's conjoined twins Bette and Dot Tattler seem derivative, with the two being brunettes--Bette the cynic on the viewer's left and idealist Dot on the right. 

Bette and Dot, a dual performance by Sarah Paulson.

The Gradys naturally feature in the cavalcade of Kubrick replication within the Doctor Sleep film, too.

Since these ghosts have become so well-recognized and symbolic of the film, they were naturally Mattel’s choice for a Skullector release from The Shining. 

Now, these are not new dolls. These are Skullector OGs, from the very first Skullector year in 2020. Back then, Skullector was a slower release schedule and the first few years were themed. 2020 was all Stephen King, with the two releases being the Gradys and an interpretation of Pennywise from the modern adaptations of IT. Pennywise is a looser interpretation and the first of most Skullector male characters to be made into a girl doll, a trend that has become more consistent and frustrating with time.

I've been thinking about the twins for a while! I first wanted them when I re-entered the hobby in 2023, past their sale date, so not great tidings there. For a moment, I saw them perhaps being available for less than $300, but then it quickly became baseline $1K forever, and that was it for my hopes of having these two.

So what miracle brings them to the table so late today? Did I snatch a deal that fell within my threshold of insanity? Nope. Instead, we got an unprecedented move by Mattel Creations. A rerelease of the set at retail rate for the film's 45th anniversary. 

Now, Mattel has sometimes done short reruns of Skullector dolls, with the framing of "oops we found a few more in the warehouse!" Now, that may not actually be true and they could be short reproduction runs, but I thought it was believable that those reruns really were just excess stock being cleared through a special sale rather than being purely a stunt. But a full-rerun, "start up the production lines again" kind of scenario hasn't been done before by Mattel...maybe ever? Not without a heavy label of reproduction or reissue over it, at least, and we are getting that. 

It's great to have another shot at these dolls, even if they're bumped up to Mattel's new price rate for the doll line. It's still better than $900 over original price, that's for sure. I feel bad for the resellers, and any buyers who burnt $1K+ on these. Mattel, do this more often. Destabilize the resale market and give the buyers a shot. I'll never understand the refusal to take our money. We will pay if you supply!

A rerelease of Skullector Pennywise would make sense given that the series IT: Welcome to Derry, expanding the same adpatation continuity as the films and featuring the same Pennywise, is now running. I'd get the doll if she were rereleased.

I'm maybe a little surprised Mattel went this route for The Shining's anniversary. It could have been easy to also do a Jack and Wendy duo for a second set based on the film, but perhaps Mattel's brand image, weapons aversion, doll style, and refusal to depict male characters are all factors that would make such a choice ill-suited. I can't see Mattel depicting a supernaturally-induced domestic incident, no matter how iconic it is to film, Jack wouldn't be able to have the axe, and probably would never be made as a doll since Mattel is so scared of boys now and the character can't really glam up regardless of gender. Wendy, meanwhile, wouldn't be designed to capture Shelley Duvall's terrified performance....and while Wendy is eminently respectable for successfully doing what she had to to get her son to safety, in no regard is she a tough, confident "slay" character. She wouldn't be recognizable in a calmer or more assured state. Neither character fits the "monster" designation of the brand, either, unlike ghosts, possessions, or definitively supernatural creatures. The Gradys could enroll in the school that is Monster High. Jack and Wendy couldn't.

Here's the box. Save for a "2nd release" graphic on the corner, this is a direct reproduction of the 2020 box, right down to the build; I checked the stock photos of Pennywise to be certain. This box uses a different folding-doors design over the front window. By 2022, the flaps were just folded cardboard panels that never laid flat, but these first Skullector boxes are more complex three-sided covers which are taped down with conspicuous and ugly adhesives, with adhesives also holding the corners of the doors together in an unsightly way.

The girls are on a minimalist background evoking the hotel hall, with the text of Jack Torrance's manuscript of madness behind them. The film's logo is also present, as designed by Saul Bass.

The tape pieces look really sloppy to me.

The sides of the box have a really spooky photo portrait on one side and the logo on the other.

The back has some copy in the voice of the girls. It's not the greatest. Nothing will ever beat the genuine poetry they wrote up for the Us box; I'm so excited to talk about that...when they get here, ugh. The tennis ball from the film and these dolls is shown here. 

I can't fathom why the graphic designers didn't use the famous Overlook Hotel hexagonal carpet pattern in this box artwork. This rug pattern is so iconic to the film that you'd really expect it in any homage to the film, even though the sisters don't coincide with this carpet.

Maybe my favorite piece of scenic unsettlement in the Overlook Hotel involves this carpeting--in one shot, Danny is filmed overhead on an expanse of carpet that makes him look tiny. The very next shot shows him in the normal hallway dimensions. It's an eerie effect that makes it look like Danny Lloyd, the actor, was filmed in two locations--one with a more sprawling rug, but it's possible it really was just careful framing and lenses and both shots were on the same location.

Shot 1--dwarfed by the carpet.

Alternate view in the same scene--a normal hall. Also, the direction of the pattern has flipped relative to Danny and his semicircle of toys!

The box's doors open to reveal the famous hallway scene they appear in. There was literally only one place they'd be depicted in the packaging since their role is so small.

Apologies for my orange hoodie reflecting on the plastic; I forgot to check the window for myself!

The box construction confused me. Because I'd unboxed with the assumption this was an updated box build, not an outdated one, I was looking for ways to take the plastic window out of the front, but it's built in and the box just opens with a top flap before the backdrop comes out.

This doll release has no certificate of authenticity on the back of the backdrop. I'd have assumed the originals had one, but perhaps not. It's strange to me that the reissue would lack it even if the original didn't have one. Maybe the rerelease not having the certificate is an intentional marker of these not being the 2020 originals. We'll have to wait for future rereleases (and we better get them!) to find out if this is a practice.

Here are the dolls unboxed.

They're an interesting pair.

If these weren't adaptations of one of the most famous images in horror, it would be pretty hard to read these as horror dolls at first. Among the output of Monster High, they're some of the most normal-looking characters ever put out. The Gradys, Headmistress Bloodgood with her head on, Jackson Jekyll, Lydia Deetz, possibly Tiffany Valentine, and Adelaide Wilson are the most human-looking dolls in the brand, but the Gradys are the most subtly spooky among them. Jackson, Bloodgood, and Tiffany are shades of goth, while Addy is made to look blood-soaked. The Gradys are more quietly sinister and beyond the Monster High art style and hair clips, could be taken as simple period fashion dolls.

These are also the most identical duo of dolls ever produced by the brand. The sisters are only mirror images with their hand shapes, and the only other difference between them is their face paint. Their hair and costumes are produced exactly the same and they share the same sculpts. Adelaide and Red are the next most identical duo, but have far greater differences overall.

While it's pretty universal to refer to the sisters as such, it's actually fairly ambiguous whether these girls are actually twins. In the beginning of the film, the Overlook manager tells Jack Torrance that prior caretaker  Charles Grady murdered his eight and ten-year-old daughters in the seventies, but when we see the ghosts of the Grady girls, they're overtly framed in visuals and behavior as hauntingly identical twins. They have different heights but were played by real twin girls. This ties into other questions of the accuracy of the Overlook's apparitions to real life--when Jack meets the presumed Charles Grady's ghost, he identifies himself as Delbert Grady, and as a ghost, seems to come from several decades before Jack's predecessor caretaker. Were there two men named Grady who cared for the hotel and killed their two daughters each? Was there only one Grady family, rewritten further in the past by the hotel? Were there two families, reincarnated and repeated? Kubrick intended for Jack to be the reincarnation of a prior caretaker. Perhaps the Grady girls we see are not being accurately represented by the ghosts and the hotel is conjuring up spooky twin sisters in their role, or twisting their appearances or personality or timeline. Alternatively, because Danny sees them without hearing the story Jack was told, maybe the Grady girls were actually twins and the manager got the facts wrong. Or maybe the script made a mistake. Kubrick was a perfectionist and much of the film's inconsistency feels intentional, but discounting the possibility of any artist being fallible feels unwise. Who knows. Pop culture at large has embraced the sisters that appeared in the hotel as the defining pair of creepy horror twins, though, and if merchandise is permitted to refer to them that way, then I don't object to doing so. (I can't stress enough how famous and influential these girls are for characters with less than five minutes of screentime and only a single short speaking scene.)

The Grady sisters are unnamed in any version of the story, but fan wikis with no sources cited claim they’re named behind-the-scenes of the film as Alexie and Alexa, and that unverified information seems to have spread. That’s overly confusing and completely unconfirmable as far as I can see, so I won’t be using them. I will not use those names without a source, and there isn't one I can find. I feel like I'm losing my mind seeing the names everywhere. Where are they from??? And who would name their twins in such a confusing way? For characters as iconic as these, any official behind-the-scenes names would have become widely-known horror and cinema trivia, and that just isn’t the case here--information seen only on a few fan wikis that can just make stuff up if they choose cannot be accepted as legit. I'll use the names of their actresses, Lisa and Louise Burns--in my schema, Lisa will be the stern one.

The girls start on top with their hair accessories. This is really the only touch that visually marks them as horror characters in a vacuum--replacing the hair bows from the film costumes are identical hair clips in the shape of the axe that killed them.

Mattel has a general weapons taboo, even for the adult Skullector dolls, so weaponry at life size is never offered to their horror dolls, but it's allowed to be referenced in jewelry and such. Adelaide has a fire poker in her hair in a similar workaround. I think these hair clips look oddly good in this costume design despite being one of the most interpretive caricatured touches here. It's actually interesting how adherent to the source the first-year Stephen King Skullectors were. Pennywise was turned into a girl with big curls, yes, but the dolls are generally less fashion-yassified and far less indulgent in Monster High branding than many later Skullector dolls would be. The Gradys and Pennywise represent basically accurate costume replicas without a Skullette in sight. More recent designs that flip male characters into girls do more costume work to justify their idea. Pennywise has little explicitlty femme about her beyond her face, sculpt, and hairdo. The most recent Skullector gender-flip reveal, Edward Scissorhands, has most of what she'd need to read as the boy character because the original design is androgynous already, but she has a skirt in addition to her sculpting being feminine.

Let's be real: I adore the world we live in where diva Xenomorph is a reality, and Pennywise, Betelgeuse v1, and Edward look good even though I disagree with the choice to flip them into girl dolls. But I also like the Skullectors that feel more directly faithful to material, and the Gradys are probably the very least divergent of any of the Skullector designs.

The girls have brown saran hair parted to their left, and it's gelled into a rolled curl on both.

The stock photos of the girls did them atrocious, depicting an overly relaxed and boxy and lank-looking hairdo that poorly resembled the film and made their faces look bad.

Part of what made me actually like these dolls was seeing their hair out of box...but reflecting on it, this isn't quite right, either. 

It's too severe and prim-1950s for the look of the girls on film and I think relaxing the hair of its gel without boiling or heavily combing out will let the style actually match the film hair. Fingers crossed.

The sisters have a pale human skintone and very similar face paint with all the same colors and makeup but subtly different expressions. "Lisa" has more furrowed eyebrows giving her more of a glowering quality, while "Louise" looks more relaxed and unassuming, but can still be piercing and firm in certain lights. "Louise" has a different lip paint shape to "Lisa". Both girls have brown eyes, pink and brown eyeshadow, and nude-toned lips.

In the film, their facial expressions don’t seem quite as disparate to me, but "Lisa" can look more intense of the two.

The face sculpt the Grady girls share is reported to be reused from G1 Twyla. They have a 2012 mold stamp on their heads to corroborate this.

The Gradys with their face source.

The Gradys could very well be considered recastings of the whole Twyla doll, since they're also on the little-sister body sculpt Twyla used. I hadn't been aware of that for a while, but the 2020 Skullector Gradys were the dolls that brough back Twyla's head mold and the little-sister body type after the end of G1. We have them to thank for Sweet Screams Twyla and the several little-sister Skullector dolls who followed them.

This sculpt choice for the Gradys makes sense to me, since Twyla was sculpted to be an unsettling old-fashioned spooky girl, and I saw her face as being evocative of old photos of kids who looked haunted or aged beyond their time, a vibe the Gradys in the film evoke too.

The girls' dresses are identical. The design is blue with puffed sleeves and a rounded lobed collar with lace trim on each. The bodice has vertical ribbing and the skirt has a white gathered ruffle on the end as well as some lace. The body of the dress is one layer of blue fabric with white polka-dots, with the tulle frill sewn on top. The sleeves are a sheer equivalent of the same fabric. The body fabric is stiff and crinkly. The waist is trimmed by a pink satin bow on the left hip.

There's really very little artistic license taken with this costume at all, and it merely looks like an honest effort to replicate the film dresses. I don't think the film dresses were dotted, and the sleeves weren't sheer. The bows were also centered, so there are a few subtle touches to make these dresses more "fashion" and slightly more "teen", but the dolls aren't that much older than the look of the characters here (unlike Young-hee or Annabelle), so there's less changes made. And again, no Skullettes at all. 

The skirts have the usual Skullector satin tag sewn inside, and velcro down the back like normal.

The twins are wearing simple knee-high white socks and shoes based on black Mary Janes. The platforms of the shoes are shaped like the hedge maze, with topiary llamas for the heels.

The shoe design almost feels like a reconciliation of novel and film together. One of the threats in the novel was haunted moving topiary animals, a concept which was deemed impossible to film at the time and replaced with the film's giant hedge maze (to very strong visual, symbolic, and narrative horror effect). The girls' heels could have been squared Greek key-esque hedge sections to also reflect the maze and be more film-based, but the choice to make them topiaries cements it as a book reference to me.

The only Skullettes on the dolls are found in the shape of the shoe buckles. There's no detail on the soles of the platforms.

On Lisa’s left and Louise’s right, the girls have mirrors of a cupped hand mold. It’s a good choice because it allows them to stand hand-to hand and look like they’re holding hands as they do in the film.

Only the one hand on each being cupped also keeps them lined up in order--just look at the hands and arrange them to meet if you forget who stands on which side!

The other hands of the dolls have mirrors of my least favorite G1 hand sculpt, with the ring finger and middle finger pressed together awkwardly.

The hands on this release are very soft plastic, including the pegs. They come out and pop in easily, but the hands could have been cast a little firmer, I think. The necks are also nearly immobile as expected due to whatever Mattel did to mess up the molding on their current dolls, and Louise's left knee is a little floppy when it's fully extended. I haven't been heard on the neck issue yet, unfortunately. I'm pretty sure the 2020 twins would have had better body quality.

The dolls come with three handheld accessories, which is three more than they’re ever seen with in the film, but they bring in some great references.

First is the yellow ball that Jack throws against the wall in lieu of productively writing and which rolls to Danny to lure him to room 237.

 This is a tiny simple piece and would normally be a nightmare to display in a doll's hand, but the cupped hand on either sister is quite suited to holding it if you're okay sacrificing the look of their linked hands.

Next is a page of Jack’s typewritten manuscript, which is revealed late in the film to be the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” repeated ad nauseam. It’s maybe my favorite psychological scare in the film, as the reveal of the manuscript's contents, and just how much was written like this, uncovers that Jack has been going insane for far longer than anybody expected. Per the film, variations and typos change the sentence in its repetitions, but it's not a novel, that's for sure. I don't know why "Dull Boy" is capitalized here. It wasn't on any of the many pages shown in the film.

This is a tiny printed piece of glossy poster paper, so it's fairly fragile and was hard to safely extract from the plastic bracket in the packaging.

The last accessory, and the only one I think I’ll display with the girls, is a room key for room 237. 237 is supposedly a very haunted room of the hotel, based on room 217 in the novel, and the real Room 217 of the Stanely Hotel which inspired Stephen King. In the film, room 237 contains an unknown presence who hurts Danny's neck. When Jack is sent to check it out, he finds a beautiful nude woman who seduces Jack until she turns into a rotted elderly corpse, being the ghost of a woman who died in the bath. A Room 237 key appears in the door when it finally opens, first to Danny, and the Monster High key matches the design closely.

 This is a static single piece, and I really wish it was a real tiny key on a ring that could move and dangle, but it's fine. I can't help but think if the Skullector Gradys were designed today, the room key would be an earring design for them instead of a handheld accessory. Maybe that would be too divergent and mature for these characters, or break too much with their look even if it were aged up more. 

I took the dolls for a hair rinse to relax their styles, and the result was thankfully just what I wanted. Not too long and limp, not too short and tight. This captures the film hairstyle and suits the doll design in just the right balance. To give Mattel some credit, though, in the case of these dolls, I'd imagine the gel rolls really were just for the sake of packaging. Unlike G1 MH C.A. Cupid, I don't think they honestly wanted the unboxing owner to keep the hair locked up in a roll since the relaxed hair is so clearly proper and accurate to the film.

The stock-photo stylists absolutely insulted the dolls and their hair, though. 

I also gave them some light neck surgery to increase their head tilt. I gave them more side-to-side than front-to back, since it's hard to increase front-back tilt without taking out the whole neck peg, hollowing the neck socket, and replacing the anchor pin, and doing that risks breaking the whole neck or losing the original neck peg in the extraction process. Simple cutting around the socket can widen the side tilt without removing any parts, though.

Here's the girls holding the extras. Their hand sculpts make them look really nice with their accessories without any cheater handles necessary.

Despite the dolls objectively being more mundane than most of Monster High, the originating character designs carry a lot of eerie power--I find the Gradys to stand out and feel genuinely creepy among the other dolls on the shelf!

Photographing the sisters was a little tricky. Like Young-hee, they're minor images in their source work and extremely "site-specific" and hard to explore outside the physical location they're seen in. Given my dearth of a miniature-scale Overlook Hotel, I did what I could.

Thinking of one of the other famous images from the film, elevators that spill tons of blood into the hotel, I thought to shoot the girls behind a vessel of red liquid (cranberry juice!) as if they were submerged within those waves of blood.

Next, I shot them on black in their "dead" poses from when Danny sees a flash that confirms they're the ghosts of murdered children (at least, the way the Overlook Hotel wants to portray it).

For this next photo, I cut the girls out and replaced Lisa and Louise Burns in the shot from the film, doing my best to edit the dolls in. Warning for bloody imagery:

I pulled up the Overlook rug on my computer screen to frame a simple composition.

I then did an edit to recreate the Saul Bass movie poster with these dolls. I've gotten into a pattern of using the Skullectors to imitate their original films' posters!

For the cover, it was as simple as shooting the dolls in front of their naked box backdrop.

I mentioned in my review of Living Dead Dolls' Hazel and Hattie that the LDD twins have notes of the Gradys as brunette twins who stand side by side in a connected manner (the LDD twins being conjoined with their shoulders connecting them). Now I actually have both duos, which would have been unheard of, twofold, two years ago!

I also mentioned that LDD has licensed the actual Gradys as part of their LDD Presents line. 

The costumes are more screen-accurate, and one of the twins has an electronic audio box to play their quote, but if the MH dolls are slightly older, the LDDs look too young. I'm also not sold on their face paint. I see the attempt to be realistic and match the film, but I don't know if it quite scans. Somehow, I've ended up fully on the side of MH as far as licensed horror dolls and never perused LDD for the same. 

I then took the sisters down for a rewatch of The Shining.

These dolls are nice. They closely evoke the film characters and pack in a lot of extraneous iconography from the film in their adapted character designs. They gain an appeal and impact from how comparatively mundane and how extremely identical they look among other MH characters, and are close adherents to the source material while still successfully entering the world of MH. If these characters weren't famous for how de-individualized and similar they were, then it would feel more like you're buying one doll twice, but touches like the faces and the hands show that these dolls had more design consideration as a pair. Like any identical twins (or identical non-twin sisters), they share a lot, but once you know them, you can easily tell them apart. I like that their accessories display pretty neatly with their hand shapes, and their hand shapes are a great touch to link them hand-in-hand.

It's very nice, especially, to have gotten a second shot at these dolls. Mattel ought to do second editions more often. I get them worrying the promise of a second chance will reduce the original launch's success, but I think the doll fans are ready to pay for a product that is available...so making it more available should be encouraged. 

Granted, a 2020 set of these dolls would probably be nicer. I got a bad knee on one twin which could be a fluke, but what isn't is the current MH output nullifying the intended neck articulation design by bad manufacturing (and molding alterations for G3). I'm also wary of the uber-soft hand casting here. Low-risk hand removal and replacement is great, but the hands themselves don't need to be so soft. Paying more for something originally sold for less a few years ago is also pretty scummy, especially when there are manufacturing backslides. I also think on the flipside with the accessories, they feel a little delicate to display and potentially easy to lose. I'll need to find a good memorable spot to store the manuscript and tennis ball, since those have no chance of staying tidily on display with them on the shelf. I think I'll store them with LDD accessories. The girls do get to hold the rom key, though.

Overall, I'm glad to have the Skullector Gradys. I love the film, and the dolls are a fun tribute. Even if the dolls themselves don't become my most cherished of all time, what this rerelease represents--this very opportunity to have gotten them at all? That's something I'll cherish forever and ever and ever....