It was my mum’s birthday and I was googling photos of adorable baby animals to send to her when I stumbled upon an image of an adorable baby. I was shocked when I realised it was not, actually, a baby. It was just the most lifelike doll I’d ever seen: the only difference between it and an actual baby being that, while a living baby will burst out crying (with that newborn meow coming out of newborn lungs) and will eventually grow up to become just another schmuck adult, this baby will remain in this perfect moment, forever.
I became fascinated with image-galleries of what I now knew to be ‘reborn’ dolls. As I scrolled through, I couldn’t stop thinking that this was so much better than Facebook, where people feel justified putting up hundreds of photos of babies they begot by doing nothing newsworthy. But these baby dolls are works of art. I’d be posting close-ups of tiny feet and wrinkly foreheads too, if I’d created them with my own hands.
Instead of the infant vole I’d been planning, I sent my mum a photo of a cute reborn. “That’s morbid!” she said when I revealed that the baby wasn’t real. Even though she had burbled over it when she’d thought it was alive, my mum now found it disturbing. There was something eerie about it, she said.
My mum was experiencing uncanniness: that feeling of dread, when something is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Like when a good guy in a film turns out to be a zombie, or when you mistake a mannequin for a person – a sudden sinking in your stomach tells you: something’s not right.
The Uncanny Valley is a phenomenon specifically addressing dolls. Roboticist Masahiro Mori came out with it in the 70s, when he noticed people getting creeped-out by humanoid robots. Most people are fine with dolls, Mori said. For example, teddy bears: we find them especially cute if they have human characteristics, such as a smile or cheeky facial expression. But when dolls start looking too human, then they frighten us. I asked my mum what she found so morbid about this baby. “It’s not alive, and I thought it was,” she said. “It reminds me of death.”
My mum was not the only person who got the willies from reborns. As I would hear over and over, dread was a common reaction. On the internet, people seemed to love them (spending thousands of dollars on dolls), or hate them (mainly for how terrifying they seem). Seeing the strong emotional reactions people had to these little dolls made me want to dig deeper.
I found out that reborns are conceived by sculptors: people like Alicia Toner. “Some people find them creepy,” Alicia tells me, giving an example of a friend who won’t come over because she is scared of the dolls. But for Alicia, they are art. “I started sculpting in 2006, after I had a miscarriage. I went on eBay looking for a memorial piece to help with grieving process. Then I saw the reborn dolls. I was fascinated.”
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