Dawn Keetley and Elizabeth Erwin

As the essays in this special issue make emphatically clear, dollhouses and miniatures pervade horror. But why? What is horrifying about the doll, the dollhouse, the miniature? Each essay offers their own particular answer to this question, but here we want to offer some general thoughts.

Dolls (and their houses) embody diametrically opposed existential states – both the illusion of total control and the terrifying state of being controlled, freedom and its complete absence. Safely contained within their miniature house, dolls can be manipulated, played with, and displayed. They thus represent a virtual outer limit of control, imbuing the one who looks, plays, and displays with an almost god-like power. In this way, narratives about dolls and their houses elucidate human subjective freedom expressed through control over an exterior world of objects. Surely part of the pleasure of playing with dolls, or crafting and arranging miniatures, comes precisely from this control and from the sense of freedom and power that comes along with control. In the end, the human is not the doll, not the miniature, not perpetually confined to its house. The human acts and sees. The human is everything the doll isn’t.

Sometimes, though – indeed, almost always in horror – the human becomes the doll, sliding frightening from outside to inside the house and thus from freedom to confinement, from having control to being controlled.

It’s no surprise that The Twilight Zone – that compendium of the existentially terrifying – has offered versions of this disorienting slide from being in control to being controlled, from being human (subject) to being doll (object), from being literally and existentially ‘outside’ to being trapped ‘inside.’ The essay by Linda Ganus in this special issue explores precisely the movements of freedom and its loss in The Twilight Zone’s season four episode, “Miniature” (1963), but this theme is also famously explored in the brilliant season five episode, “Stopover in a Quiet Town” (1964), in which a married couple wakes up in a small, unfamiliar and deserted town and find they cannot leave. After their sense of entrapment spirals unbearably through the course of the episode, it is finally revealed that they are in the literal play-pen of a large alien child. In an instant, they go from being agents to objects – from human to ‘doll.’ Essentially the same narrative also plays out in the brilliant season three episode, “Five Characters in search of an Exit” (1961).

Illusions of control 

These shifts between what is only ever the illusion of control and its loss constitute the essence of how dollhouses, miniatures and dioramas function in horror – and this theme cuts across all the essays in this special issue. First, let’s look at the illusion of control they provide, which works in horror only because we know the illusion will at some point be shattered, the control wrenched away.

In her chapter on the miniature in On Longing, Susan Stewart describes how it domesticates the world, rendering it knowable and safe: “The miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination” (69). The miniature offers a transcendent and totalizing gaze, thus directly shaping the illusion of control we experience in its presence.

In a 2026 article in the Washington Post on the apparent resurgence of interest in miniatures among millennials and Gen Z, Dina Cheney stresses the comfort and control the miniature provides, which she links to nostalgia. One artist and collector she interviews observes, “People are drawn to the satisfying, nostalgic and almost escapist nature of tiny worlds. . . There’s something comforting about slowing down and focusing on small details, especially in such a fast-paced digital environment.” Another interviewee specifically notes the allure of control: “we have total control over this little world we are making as the world is spinning out of control around us.” Steven Millhauser likewise asserts that the miniature represents “a desire to possess a world more completely,” an invitation “to become God” (135).

In this special issue, Laura Wright begins her essay on Paul Feig’s The Housemaid (2025) with a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining in which Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) looks down on a miniature model of the hedge maze outside the Overlook Hotel, watching his wife and child in doll-like form walk through it. It is, Wright points out, a scene that “situates Jack as ‘overseer,’ both of the hotel itself and of the members of his family whom he seeks to control and ultimately destroy.”

Just as Jack ultimately loses control in The Shining, two contemporary horror films illuminate the ways that dollhouses and miniatures grant the illusion of control – before, inevitably, ripping it away: David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018) and Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018).

The premise of Halloween (2018) is that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has spent the decades since Michael Myers committed his murderous rampage in Haddonfield fortifying her life, her family and her house – to protect them all against the threat of his return. Her life is dedicated to control. Not surprisingly, there are several brief glimpses of a dollhouse in her daughter Karen’s (Judy Greer) bedroom in Laurie’s “fortress,” the place Karen grew up – the place Karen felt utterly caged. This dollhouse within the (fortified) house represents Laurie’s efforts to manage the threat of Michael Myers – to stave it off, defend against it, contain and control it, all at the cost of containing and controlling her daughter. But the inevitable unleashing of Michael Myers – and the fact that Laurie’s fortress and the dollhouse within it go up in flames at the end – suggests the futility of attempting such control.

Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2017) perhaps most famously locates the miniature – and the dream of control – at the heart of horror. As Aviva Briefel puts it in her excellent essay on the film, “Nowhere perhaps is the intimate relationship between the miniature and horror as pronounced as it is in Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018)” (315). Briefel cites Jonathan Zinoman’s essay on the recent trend of “grown-up horror,” arguing that it is at least in part about drawing “audiences inward into increasingly small spaces of fear” (Briefel 315) – a trend perhaps not unlike the one identified above of increasing numbers of young people crafting miniatures.

Hereditary centers the idea of the dollhouse as embodiment of control. Throughout the film, we see protagonist Annie (Toni Collette) constructing her art project, “Small World,” which consists of painstakingly created miniatures of her life and family. It is transparently an attempt to master a life that has always been undergirded by the inexplicable, by forces unleashed by her mother who has long been part of a cult devoted to the deity Paimon. The film tracks the devastation wrought as Paimon kills all of Annie’s family members and then herself in its quest to possess the body of her son, Peter (Alex Wolff). As Annie’s life spins terrifyingly out of control, her dioramas increasingly “combine horror with domesticity” (Briefel 319) – exhibiting a “conflation of the horrific and the small” (Briefel 320) and demonstrating that Annie’s efforts at control are competing with some other ineffable force. When she looks at a diorama of her mother, for instance, Annie is clearly striving for what Briefel calls “a temporary fantasy of dominance” (320). Indeed, it is only ever temporary, masking – evading – as Briefel points out, the fact that Annie herself is trapped in this miniature controlled world. Like the conflagration at the end of Halloween, Hereditary finally, dramatically, proves that any effort at control is doomed.

While Hereditary is driven in part by Annie’s determined efforts to exert control – evident in the recurrent thread of her painstakingly-crafted miniatures – it is equally, from the beginning, driven by the inescapable sense that there is another agency at work. The film opens with the camera zooming toward Annie’s dollhouse and into her son Peter’s bedroom within the dollhouse, which then seamlessly becomes Peter’s real bedroom as his father knocks on the door and walks in. When dollhouse becomes ‘real,’ exactly, is unclear, setting up a blurred boundary that persists throughout the film. As Zinoman comments, “These people are minor players in a drama they have little control over,” adding that the adults in Hereditary “have just as little agency” as children have always had.” Briefel comments on this opening scene that it “conveys the intimidating scale of the invisible presence watching these tiny characters” (317). The opening is matched by the ending, which pulls out to reveal characters framed as miniatures in Annie’s treehouse: “From the perspective of whoever is watching,” Briefel writes, “these characters are little more than a macabre set of toys” (318) – reminiscent, obviously, of the recurring theme of The Twilight Zone.

In some horror, then, characters attempt to exert control over their worlds by means of the miniature, the dollhouse, even as most of these texts push toward the revelation that those characters are actually never in control, are, in fact, ‘dolls’ themselves, fully in the grip of other – implacable and uncontrollable – forces.

In other forms of horror, the dollhouse itself slips out of control, coming to uncanny life – not reflecting back on the human characters their own trapped existential state but displaying a separate eerie and unknowable realm. 

Sliding out of control

Susan Stewart has written that “The dollhouse is a materialized secret” (61). But what is that secret? In some narratives, as Dawn Keetley discusses in her essay in this special issue on Nick Murphy’s The Awakening (2011), the secret embodied by the dollhouse is revealed to be quite explicably human – the buried traumatic past of a character, for instance.

But sometimes the secret is more terrifying than the hidden or repressed human secret. Sometimes, what is revealed is a more ineffable unknown, one that veers away from the anthropocentric. Dollhouses can open up a kind of parallel, uncanny realm, one in which structures and figures look familiar, appear to be manipulable, but instead begin to act autonomously. Horror is replete with dollhouses containing figures that act on their own, raising the question, what does this mean? Do these autonomous miniatures prophesy a future? Do they reveal hidden actions from the past? Do they dramatize an alternate present? Or do they  act in ways that we’ll actually never be able to grasp?

Two texts illustrate the varied degrees of increasingly eerie autonomy dolls exhibit in their houses: Paul Feig’s The Housemaid and Josh Malerman’s story, “The House of the Head” (2017), which became a segment of the first season of the anthology series, Creepshow (2019).

As Laura Wright discusses in her essay on Paul Feig’s The Housemaid, the dollhouse features centrally as an object that sheds uncanny light on what is really going on in the home of husband and wife, Andrew and Nina Winchester (Brandon Sklenar and Amanda Seyfried). Andrew created the dollhouse for their daughter Cece (Indiana Elle) as a perfect replica of their ‘perfect’ home. There are two shots of the dollhouse, however, that hint at the fact that the Winchesters’  home is far from perfect and that Andrew is in fact abusive and controlling – and they both occur after housemaid Millie (Sydney Sweeney) is hired. In the first shot, a miniature man, woman, and child sit at a table: the woman and child stare at the viewer, but the man stares at the woman. Wright glosses this moment: “The female dolls implore Millie to return their gaze and to understand its significance while the male doll is oblivious to the battle strategy being staged by Cece.” In a later shot of the dollhouse, a woman now sits, bound, alone on a bed in the attic – foreshadowing what has happened to Nina and what will happen to Millie when Andrew reveals to her who he really is.

Neither of these shots includes any of the characters – there is no one at the dollhouse – no one moving the figures, no one playing (as there are in other scenes involving the dollhouse). The juxtaposition of the two shots, with their lack of human actors, gives the dolls and the house an eerie agency: who arranged the figures in the dollhouse like this? Who moved them? The fact that we didn’t see them moved raises the possibility that they moved on their own – an uncanny message for Millie. In her reading, Wright presumes that Cece is “staging” the dolls to warn Millie, using the dolls to articulate a threat she is unable to voice directly. This is certainly most likely the case. But, we can’t be entirely sure. Is Cece actually  “staging” these portentous scenarios, or is there another agency at work? These moments in The Housemaid – of the dolls and their house momentarily bereft of human actors – hint at the eerie agency of objects freed from human manipulation.

The use of the dollhouse in The Housemaid is finally human-centered – resolving into a human manipulation of the dolls and telling a story that is all about the characters themselves. The Creepshow segment, “The House of the Head,” based on Josh Malerman’s short story, is much more doll-centered and enigmatic. The short story and the faithful adaptation is rather simple in its plot: a girl, Elvie (Evie in Creepshow), gets a dollhouse which she keeps in her bedroom. One day, a severed doll head appears in the house. “Who are you? I didn’t put you there. How did you get there?” says Elvie (Creepshow). The head is violent – terrorizing the doll family of mother, father, son, and dog. When Elvie puts first a police officer doll and then a Native American figure into the house (because, the shopkeeper tells her, Native Americans are more “spiritual”), in an effort to combat its evil, it just kills them – along, finally, with the family. Neither the story nor the Creepshow episode ever explains what the head means – how it got there, why it kills all the figures placed in the dollhouse. Both story and episode just end, with Elvie/Evie permanently haunted by a violent doll agency she cannot comprehend.

Dollhouses, then, fundamentally take up issues of control, powerlessness, and agency, most centrally dramatizing the dissolution of control. In this, the primary form of affect in dollhouse horror is dread. Cynthia Freeland has aptly defined dread as an “encounter with something terrible or unsettling that is also deep, obscure, and difficult to comprehend. There may be hints,” Freeland continues “of a terrifying agent out there, but it need not be a repulsive monster,” and, indeed, it “can remain uncertain whether there is any agent involved in the threat at all.” Dread, she concludes, is a response “to things that are deeply unnerving for no clear reason” (193). Freeland thus links dread with the specter of ambiguous and often apparently absent agency – something that drives much horror about dolls and their houses.

It is safe to say that all of the essays in this collection take up these profound questions – questions of control and its loss, questions of agency and who has it, questions of the forces in our lives that we don’t understand and can’t grasp.

Creating the evolved dollhouse

In terms of how this special issue is structured, we have moved from essays that center the literal dollhouse to those that increasingly feature what we’re calling the evolved dollhouse. (Apparently “evolved dollhouse” has sometimes been used by gamers to describe The Sims – something we weren’t aware of, but which definitely connects with the fact that we have two essays on video games in this section.) While the former – the literal dollhouse – is self-explanatory, the latter – the movement to a life-sized dollhouse – needs some additional elaboration.

The life-size dollhouse is not new. From Princess Elizabeth’s thatched cottage with a working stove to the Victorian-era Handwerker Gingerbread Playhouse which has been exhibited with dolls taking the place of the children for whom it was designed, markers of wealth and craftsmanship have always been an aspect of the child’s life-size dollhouse (Aman; Lauderdale). But with the advent of mass production and an increased reliance on plastic in children’s toys, these playhouses were suddenly no longer the purview of the elite.

The exact opposite is true of the evolved dollhouse as these structures either require the financial means of creating a replica to exact specifications or otherwise engage with capitalism in meaningful ways. Consider the life-size dollhouse Target erected in New York’s Grand Central Station where guests could purchase items as they went from room to room. Here, consumption takes the place of creation, and play becomes overtly tied to monetary exchange (Lee). In other words, the evolved dollhouse is a simulated experience contained in a dollhouse structure designed for adults and that requires context and financial means in which to participate.

What makes the adult dollhouse different from a tiny house is in the intent of its presentation. Rather than being a place to live, the adult dollhouse is chiefly meant to be perceived. For example, at the American Girl Cafe, adults not accompanied by children consume sweet treats while the dolls that sit beside them enjoy the same (O’Neill). There is clearly an aspect of play in this performance but the real draw seems to be the photo ops that will be shared on social media. Unlike children in life-size playhouses who may or may not be watched by the adults around them, the evolved dollhouse is built to be observed. This is most readily obvious in online spaces such as Instagram wherein influencers frame their homes as dollhouses and then present a series of static images in which they are frozen in often domestic activities. In her article “Playing with Size and Reality: The Fascination of a Dolls’ House World,” Nancy Wei-Ning Chen argues:

the dolls’ house preserves and condenses a particular moment when all objects inside it are exhibited in an intact condition with no traces of having been tarnished. And the dolls’ house inhabitants, if any, are carefully posed to play their parts in the pageant. Indeed, the dolls’ house world freezes action at a particular time and position. (284)

The evolved dollhouse reflects this desire to capture and freeze an action for the viewing of outsiders but carries with it an adult awareness of how such imagery might benefit one financially. In other words, the child freezes their dolls to convey meaning through play, while the adult is intentionally selling their performance of labor. Interestingly, this latter motivation can be read as a reclamation of sorts as one of the original intentions of dollhouses was to train young girls in etiquette and how to engage in traditionally uncompensated domestic labor. Still, as adults have access to agency unavailable to children, how control and surveillance operate in the evolved dollhouse spaces will influence how horror tropes are deployed.

The uncanniness of the evolved dollhouse

Where the evolved dollhouse intersects with horror is that it inherently offers a space of uncanny inhabitation by adult players that by design challenges the status quo. These liminal spaces mirror domestic sphere labor and speak to a colonized existence by drawing upon our understanding of dollhouse mechanics while also subverting our expectations for its limitations. In “Dollhouses and Other Bad Objects,” Paulette Singley contends that “dollhouses today straddle the margin that separates good and bad objects. They offer both the milieu and the space for the performance of melodrama, or bad acting, often in a decidedly feminine modality” (89). By melding curation with agency, the evolved dollhouse can either replicate the performance of the hidden domestic through the human mimicking of stagnant doll poses or it can challenge it by reframing these scenes with additional markers of interiority that expand understanding of the cost of domestic labor. There is a choice involved with the evolved dollhouse that is absent from its traditional miniature predecessor simply because its adult players possess historical awareness and the financial and transportive means of alteration. The evolved dollhouse is quite simply the child’s dollhouse that has grown up in both structure size and metaphorical significance to meet the needs of adults.

While in the first half of this special issue, we go into the dollhouse – as essays consider horror texts centered on literal dollhouses – in the second half, we move out of the miniature dollhouse and into the life-size and evolved dollhouse. In a multiplicity of ways in these latter essays, the world becomes dollhouse.

In the first part of the special issue, “Into the dollhouse,” Charlotte Yule discusses uncanny dollhouses in Agatha Christie’s life and in two of her incredibly compelling (and not very well-known) short stories; Linda Ganus explores the uncanny appeal of the dollhouse world in Twilight Zone’s “Miniature,” including the way the episode’s music develops its themes; Alice Sage analyzes a fascinating early 1980s British TV show, Tottie: The Story of a Doll’s House, which should definitely be better known than it is, and which dramatizes the powerlessness of dolls (and children); Sarah Fevri looks at girlhood in HBO’s Sharp Objects (2018) and how the dollhouse can function as a map of the complicated identity formation of girls who grow up surrounded by violence; Laura Wright similarly reads the dollhouse as “tactical map” in Paul Feig’s The Housemaid, which also features an abusive household; Raquel Souza discusses how the dollhouse in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights dramatizes the entrapment of women; and Dawn Keetley explores how buried trauma explodes the containment function of the dollhouse in Nick Murphy’s film, The Awakening (2011).

In the second part of the special issue, “Creating the evolved dollhouse,” Tess Ezzy discusses the Blackwood sisters’ efforts to create a kind of dollhouse, a “miniature domesticity,” in Shirley Jackson’s 1962 novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle; Elizabeth Erwin explores Ashley Hutson’s fascinating novel, One’s Company: A Novel (2022), in which a traumatized protagonist re-creates (and inhabits) the set of the late 1970s to early 1980s TV sitcom Three’s Company; Gabrielle Sinclair Compton reads the function of “cuteness” in an episode of the twenty-first-century dark sitcom Search Party, in which a character is held captive in a felt-covered replica of her apartment; Emily Naser-Hall argues that Osgood Perkins’ 2024 film Longlegs explores the idea of the doll as a miniaturization of the girl frozen in time yet very aware of her entrapment; Lindsey Scott also looks at the struggles of girlhood and agency in Netflix’s Wednesday (2022–present); Paul A J Lewis analyzes Mario Bava’s film Lisa and the Devil (1973), arguing that the film’s villain creates a “Devil’s dollhouse” in which he entraps other characters and manipulates them, erasing their free will; NelRae Toler takes up the brilliant “KKK Comeuppance” segment from Rusty Cundieff’s 1995 horror anthology, Tales from the Hood, discussing the history of its dolls and the subversive power of their breaking free from their white-plantation ‘dollhouse’ and wreaking revenge on the embodiment of white racism; Catherine Pugh explores the life-size artificial dollhouses of the TV series Dollhouse (2009–10) and their frightening lessons about technology and control; Rebecca Booth analyzes the “parasitic-psychical puppetry” in the video game, Resident Evil Village (2021), which constructs “a life-size doll house that the player must escape”; and, finally, Jeff Ambrose explores another video game, Dollmare (2024), and the way it taps into a recent trend of job simulator games and illuminates some of the horrors of capitalism. Evolved dollhouses, it seems, are always about forms of entrapment – sometimes desired but mostly not – and the struggle to break free.

Cundieff’s “KKK Comeuppance” contains the evocative line, “There’s no peace in the dollhouse now.” All of the essays in our special issue evince the truth of this claim: there is no peace in the dollhouse. But it is true that the dollhouses these essays take up are largely inhabited by and displayed by white dolls/characters. We hope that this special issue starts conversations that, among other things, trouble this whiteness – refusing to leave it in ‘peace’ – and go on to illuminate a still greater diversity of restless dollhouses.

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Works Cited

Aman, Melanie. “At Age 6, Queen Elizabeth Was Gifted the Life-Size Dollhouse of Every Little Girl’s Dreams.” Woman’s World, 10 Sept. 2018.

Briefel, Aviva. “The Terror of Very Small Worlds: Hereditary and the Miniature Scales of Horror.” Discourse, vol. 44, no. 3, 2022, pp. 314–27.

Chen, Nancy Wei-Ning. “Playing with Size and Reality: The Fascination of a Dolls’ House World.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 46, no. 3, 2015, pp.278–95.

Cheney, Dina. “Miniatures Make a Comeback as Young People Seek to Relieve Stress.” [Washington Post] Yahoo.com, 12 July 2026.

Freeland, Cynthia. “Horror and Art-Dread.” The Horror Film, edited by Stephen Prince, Rutgers University Press, 2004, pp. 190–203.

Halloween. Directed by David Gordon Green, Universal, 2018.

Hereditary. Directed by Ari Aster, A24, 2018.

“The House of the Head.” Creepshow, written by Josh Malerman, directed by John Harrison, Shudder, 26 Sept. 2019.

The Housemaid. Directed by Paul Feig, Lionsgate, 2025.

Lauderdale, Vance. “Ask Vance: The Handwerker Gingerbread Playhouse.” Memphis Magazine, 21 May 2026.

Lee, Thomas. “Target gets all dolled up for New York’s Grand Central Station.” The Minnesota Star Tribune, 6 May 2013.

Malerman, Josh. “The House of the Head.” New Fears: New Horror Stories by Masters of the Genre, edited by Mark Morris, Titan Books, 2017. Kindle ed.

Millhauser, Steven. “The Fascination of the Miniature.” Grand Street, vol. 2, no. 4, 1983, pp. 128–35.

O’Neill, Shane. “Dolls, Food and Drinks for Likes, Views and Clicks Savvy Shopper.” The New York Times, 18 Feb. 2022.

Singley, Paulette. “Dollhouses and other bad objects.” Log, no. 50, 2020, pp. 75–89.

Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Duke University Press, 1993.

Zinoman, Jason. “Home Is Where the Horror Is.” New York Times, 7 June 2018.