Emma Roberts House Tour Is Full of Scary Dolls
By Jason P. Frank, a Vulture writer covering comedy, theater, and music
Sometimes the scariest movies are the ones you least expect. The 1999 film Audition, for example, begins as a romance and devolves into a terrifying horror film filled with torture porn. Similarly, the Emma Roberts Architectural Digest house tour begins pleasantly enough before devolving into a frightening example of a type of madness likely to render you an insomniac for the rest of the week. The video begins auspiciously enough: Roberts is talking about her living room. There is a terrifying, doll-faced pillow on one chair, but that’s fine, there are also flowers. But then she says something ominous: “It’s a grown-up doll house.” What could that mean? Well … meet Emma Roberts’s dolls, a collection of plastic and ceramic freaks.
“These are the dollykins,” Roberts says, after shoving a desk aside to get an “optimal looks at the dolls.” She then introduces the audience to her crew of misfits, who have clearly scrambled her brain with their dark toy magic because she claims multiple are her favorite and multiple were her first. There’s Leggy Jill (ah! Why so long?) and drunk-cowgirl Barbie (scary eyes!), and, most terrifyingly, Blythe, a Wednesday Addams–like doll who has an eery emptiness behind her eyes. Roberts has two of these. The rest of the tour features doll faces popping up with no comment. They are wine corks, cups in the bathroom, they’re on bookcases, on mugs, they’re wall art, and dear God, all of their eyes follow you even though this is a video and that can’t possibly be true. It’s high time that Roberts invites Ryan Murphy into her home to film a horror movie or perhaps a season of American Horror Story: Dolls. We just think that would be— Ah! What was that? Was that one of the dolls?
