The living dead and the dead living

It is true that I have always been afraid (or at least wary) of clowns. I have also never felt at ease with china dolls. When one considers the two, one can see that both the clown and the china doll actually have similar features. Both are unpleasant and can be used to scare and intimidate . I would say that the difference between them lies in their personalities, yet both personalities cause alarm.

The clown, with his crazy face and oversized and over-coloured clothes, acts with frightful enthusiasm and silliness. He also always wants to act with an element of surprise - the only result being intense fear and panic on the surprised. No-one likes surprises. The clown is never still in the presence of another human, heightening our sense of panic. I don't think horror films that have clowns in them began this fear - clowns were always to be afraid of (and always wanted to be).

The china doll also has a madness in her face and wears clothes that give it a ghost-like image. Her face has similar painting to the clowns, though slightly shinier. Her eyelids can move up and down (and we are always waiting for them to flicker). The clothes are from strange periods in history, ranging from what looks like the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, and always from the upper-middle classes. There is always a feeling of her coming back from the past. Or being dead, but never having died. Either way she is never from our age and is therefore always judging our present age. She has a stillness that makes us quiver. My great aunt used to have lots of china dolls in her house (only great aunts do) - at any moment they could have come alive (at night they surely did). The gaze is cold and dead, which is how you will end up if one of these dolls gets their way.

The clown intimidates with his chaotic personality, the china doll with her cool, watchful personality. Both have some kind of angry mental disorder and are truly psychotic. As an informed man once said to me, "they [clowns and china dolls] are two sides of the same coin." The clown should be dead yet is alive, and the china doll is dead but should be alive. The clown is the appalling reality of an inanimate thing come to life, the doll the appalling reality of the living thing petrified. That is enough to frighten the toughest of humans.