Gabrielle Sinclair Compton Discussions of dollhouses in horror and cultural theory return to questions of power, control, and scale. The dollhouse operates as a structure of miniature domination – and creepiness inheres in this imbalance of scale and agency, where the miniature world serves as a site of surveillance, containment, or control. The fourth season […]
Paul A J Lewis Rooms filled with mannequins; characters who are living people one minute and dolls the next; a mechanical music box that features six figurines rotating around one another in a never-ending cycle; a Gothic drama in which characters are destined to replay the past; a young woman lost in an eerie, dreamlike […]
Rebecca Booth In Resident Evil Village (2021), the eighth installment in the longstanding Resident Evil (RE) video game series, the (unnamed but Romanian-coded) titular mountain village is ruled by matriarch Mother Miranda and her subordinates, a council of House Lords from four noble families. In her quest to find a compatible vessel to house the […]
Elizabeth Erwin At first glance, Ashley Hutson’s One’s Company: A Novel resists the classic definition of the haunted dollhouse as it neither centers on uncanny miniatures nor is the intended plaything of a child. And yet, the replica physical environment leveraged in the novel mines similar themes of trauma negotiation and spectres of the past, […]
Laura Wright About midway through Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film adaptation of Stephen King’s 1977 novel The Shining, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) stands above a diorama of the Overlook Hotel’s giant hedge maze. As he looks down at the model, the camera follows his gaze as he seems to watch his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and […]