Or will they?  I loved dollhouses and that didn’t actually change once I looked at them by the light of day.  Still, nearly any time you see a dollhouse in television, movies or even novels, they’re usually creepy as all get-out.  And that got me thinking: what else is fairly benign in the real world, but routinely besmirched by fiction?

Dolls

You may think dolls deserve to be lumped in with dollhouses; I disagree.  Dollhouses operate like another dimension, a contained world of their own.  Evil dolls, on the other hand, can come to get you at any time, and they’ve got the extra creep factor of something animated that shouldn’t be.  I don’t know when the first “evil doll” story was filmed or written – the earliest one I can think of is that Twilight Zone episode with Talky Tina – but dolls nearly always look disturbing on film.  In the real world, on the other hand, we wouldn’t give the majority of them a second glance – well, unless we’ve just had a viewing of Child’s Play.  I can’t be the only one who witnessed a My Buddy doll being defenestrated after one of those.

Old-timey music

In the real world, music from the past is considered annoying, or interesting at best.  Early recording methods left relics that sound scratchy, tinny and weak.  Most people would much rather hear a live performance of an old piece of music than an old recording.  So where does that leave these little samples of history?

To the horror fans, of course!  It doesn’t matter if it’s jazz, bluegrass, opera, or even early rock-n-roll; an old-timey recording sounds sinister without fail.  What would the Tower of Terror or The Shining be without a clarinet warped by the passage of time?  Would BioShock be half as creepy without its music?

Nursery Rhymes

What is it about children that we’re so easily freaked when we look at things from a slightly different angle?  All it takes is a recitation of a nursery rhyme to get people anticipating the worst.  Double that if it’s an actual child doing the speaking.  Sure, some nursery rhymes have disturbing origins – like “Ring Around the Rosie” – and some scary movies have written their own creepy rhymes, like Nightmare on Elm Street.  But let’s face it: stick a little girl in a pinafore and patent-leather Mary Janes and have her recite “Little Miss Muffet” in front of a camera, and we’re afraid to take another sip of our soda in case a sudden scare causes it to shoot out our noses (no? Just me, then).

Scarecrows

“Oh, come on, J,” you might be saying.  “Scarecrows are scary all the time!”  Really?  See many scarecrows, do you?  The fact is, scarecrows are few and far between nowadays, and almost the only time we ever see them is in film.  And almost without exception, they’re scary – in the movies.  However, have you ever tried to actually make a scarecrow, say, for Halloween?  It’s hard to make them as sinister as they are in your head, because in person, they’re… kind of dopey.  A silhouette, from far away, with the right lighting and right music is scary.  A lumpy dummy dressed in your dad’s old windbreaker?  Not so much.  Store-bought is no better – a few years back I wanted to do a spooky Harvest decorating theme, and the only scarecrows I could find had big goofy grins and neon clothes.  And that just takes us back to the “Dolls” category – most of the time they’re not scary at all.

What about you?  Can you think of anything familiar that has been made frightening by fiction?  Something you haven’t been able to see the same way since?  

I was utterly fascinated.  I had grown up with dollhouses and Barbies, and it always seemed like the coolest bits were the details, the miniature bits that were “just like the real thing.” The more realistic, the better.  This dollhouse museum had all that on a scale I had never seen before.  Instead of an orange generic plastic soda bottle, here were tiny cans of Pepsi.  Tiny boxes of diapers, brand names.  I bought a copy of The Vampire Lestat that was less than an inch tall – and you could open it to individual pages.

These tiny houses with real electrical wiring – it was an immersive world.  And soon, depsite my fascination, I began to feel a little claustrophobic.  I wasn’t quite sure what, exactly, was the problem – I just had this feeling that it was a path to an obsession that had no limit.  I was somewhat relieved to leave the little museum, and live in the real world, not one that was a painstakingly recreated ersatz.

Since then, I’ve encountered a couple of other movements that seem really interesting, but that I’ve held at bay due to that same claustrophobic feeling.  One is the steampunk aesthetic: gorgeous stuff, fascinating to think about, almost like a fantasy world that you can actually create.  And I just know that if I were to tread a little deeper, I’d have an endless stream of projects, forever hunting for this or that object.

The other is retro renovation.  I love the mid-century aesthetic; when I was little I wanted to have the kitchen from the 1940s segment of the Carousel of Progress.  With antique and junk stores, it’s not as difficult as you might think to bring your kitchen, your bathroom, your entire life back to 1950s glory.

But it’s easy for me to get carried away.  Do I want this blender because it’s superior, or because it’s vintage?  Wouldn’t I rather want to find a modern blender with the design elements I like?  One that, you know, works?

Movements like these are sort of like losing yourself in a novel with a richly created world.  Maybe because I’ve always been looking forward to The Future, and loving the era I’m in, I’m wary of immersing myself too much into something else – the past, or a world that’s altogether fiction.

Am I the only one who gets that claustrophobic feeling from time to time?  What other immersive pastimes and movements can you think of?