Horror - Pediophobia - Fear of Dolls

Pediophobia

This is the fear of Dolls.

This is considered to be a branch of Automatonophobia (fear of humanoid figures). There are different variations of what types of dolls scare people. It can range from, china dolls to dolls that can talk and move.

This is the fear that I am going to do for my level. This is because I think, with dolls, the imagination can be stretched. This is because you can think about a child's mind and what they would think on the matter and personally, when kids talk about toys and their 'worlds' it just gets creepy.

For this phobia level, I am going to be leaning more towards feminine characteristics. This is going to be based on a girls room. This isn't all but that will be the main place that you will come across where you see that the phobia will come into place.

This phobia is mostly based on the idea of dolls that look like humans and the ambiguity of whether or not they are alive, this is going to play a part in the level.

When children are little, they can not really distinguish the difference of reality and fantasy.
This is why sometimes when presented with a human looking doll a child would scream, for as you can probably imagine, it would be creepy for a small person to sit at the end of the bed and stare at you and not blink.

Pediophobia can be linked to all sorts of toys, they can be stuffed animals or realistic looking porcelain dolls.

I am going to use an amalgamation of children's toys to make up a scene where the main level is going to take place.

Dolls are used a lot in Film/TV horror, this is usually one that have kids or are based on kids. This is because children often believe that their toys are alive, and toys being alive to an adult audience is creepy.

Porcelain dolls are creepy in the sense that they look like little people, they look a step away from just getting out of the chair.

Dolls that have wide eyes are just as creepy as those that have eyes closer to proportion. This is because it makes you think that the doll is looking straight at you.

This doll is scary because it looks like it has blood in its hair and all you can do is think about how it got there in the first place. To me, they aren't good, happy thoughts.

This this dolls eyes looking off to the side, all i can imagine is that they are going to slowly roll so it looks like it is looking at me. Also with this doll, there are no pupils, this just looks weird and adds a great effect for creepiness.

This doll just looks frightfully human, and realistic, this is what most people with Pediophobia are afraid of, because they do not know whether or not they are alive.

There is a hypothesis about Dolls and human features, and this is sometimes called the 'Uncanny Vally', this is when human features, move and look almost, but not exactly like natural human being, and causes the response of revulsion within human observers. 'Vally' refers to the dip in the graph of the comfort levels of humans as subjects move towards a healthy, natural human likeness described in a persons aesthetic acceptability.



This is a graph that is showing where the 'uncanny vally' is in a general persons confort zone.