The Nightmares toys with your deepest fears…
At one time or another in our childhood, each of us woke up in the middle of the night to find some menacing shape looming before us. We froze in terror, clutching the covers over our head, unable to utter even the slightest cry for help, praying with all our might that by remaining silent and unseen we would be safe. Eventually, daylight would rescue us, only to discover that the horrible entity we had so feared was nothing more than a harmless toy or doll, its twilight shadow playing on our young imagination. In looking back, we laugh at the thought of having been so frightened by something so safe.
For some, however, those ridiculous fears do not melt away with age and maturity. Automatonophobia – an irrational fear of inanimate humanoid objects – plagues a great many individuals, both child and adult. The automatonophobiac finds it difficult to completely separate the artificial nature of a doll or mannequin from the lifelike characteristics they display. The more realistic or authentic an object appears, the more likely it is to elicit anxiety or despair in the automatonophobiac. They can easily convince their own logical mind that the item poses a threat, that it may spring to life at an given moment. It can eventually prove overwhelming and lead to a total nervous breakdown.
Within the shadowy halls of Netherworld Haunted House’s The Nightmares, this powerful phobia could truly be put to the test. Seemingly innocent dolls and puppets, long forgotten by the children who originally found comfort in their company, inhabit many rooms of Netherworld. Painted smiles and glass eyes leer out from playful carved faces initially designed to provide a constant sense of happiness and security among the boys and girls who called them friends – boys and girls who would eventually grow up and out of interest in childish tokens. No longer considered essential, they have found their way here, broken, chipped and tattered, in hopes of finding new “friends”.
But is their presence within The Nightmares truly innocent, or is there a far more sinister purpose? Are the rosy cheeks and toothsome grins of these “harmless” toys actually a clever disguise, concealing a terror so deadly that what doctors call a phobia is nothing more than a heightened perception? Could it be that the automatonophobiac isn’t irrational at all, but instead able to see what so many of us cannot – that dolls and inanimate humanoid figures are far from benevolent tokens of childhood? Perhaps the truth lies within Netherworld Haunted House…
