HALLOWEEN BESTIARY:
SPIDOLLS




The pale face of an infant hovers out of the darkness, and you realize that it's being carried on eight long, fuzzy limbs. Is it a normal spider "wearing" the head of an antique doll? Is it a variation on Heebie Jeebies? Both of those would be a little boring, so no, it's clearly its own thing! Of course it is!


This formula is easy to recreate with commonplace props, but somehow, it wasn't until 2022 that I ever encountered a spider-legged human head as a retail Halloween item in person, a baby doll head attached to an almost complete arachnid. Two years later, all during August 2024, I finally saw two more varieties for sale; a baby head with bendable legs, and a less baby-like ghost-girl head with plastic ones. This completes my "rule of three," and so, it's time to assign this phenomenon its own original Halloween lore!


Head-spiders crop up slowly but steadily in spooky (and even non-spooky!) media; one of The Thing's famous temporary transformations can be described as such, Toy Story did it with a plastic doll head attached to a metallic body, and I've seen a fair number of them in video games, like the Ubu in Shin Megami Tensei. There's also a singular horror movie, 1991's Hiruko the Goblin, where a head-spider is the star antagonist, seen here.

Beyond their physiology, however, known arachnocranioids share little else in common, besides one detail that's so obvious, I know some of you were thinking it already: I've definitely seen a couple of horror manga in which spider-like entities "borrow" human heads, like hermit crabs commandeer snail shells. It's also what Hiruko does in her film, though not, oddly enough, the horror manga that inspired said film, which is probably a topic for a whole different post someday.


So what are they without heads? I don't want to say they're just literally spiders, of course. I imagine there's not usually much more to them than their legs and a few simple appendages that can "puppet" the head. Hiruko actually had a sort of worm-like head and neck of her own that plugged in to the stolen visage, but could access the head's memories and personality in a sort of undead symbiosis, combining the decapitated victim and the demon into one malevolent new entity.


Two of the three examples we've seen, however, use baby-like heads, and the assumption is more that they're either "doll" heads, or the monster naturally has a baby-like face. The idea that they're picking up and assimilating the heads of actual babies might be genuinely too grotesque for the level of Halloween Fun we're really going for here, so I'm going to propose a compromise: these magically engineered creatures, which I'm just going to call Spidolls for now, are often created with the head of a doll or a mannequin, the "spell" simply failing if it isn't provided a suitable effigy of a human face.




This could also mean that masks work, as well as skulls of course, and wouldn't you know it, we've also seen plenty of spider-legged skulls! In the past, I was classifying spider skulls as a variety of "skeleton" monster or a type of Sklider, but if the head is the only bony part, and the legs look more "alive," I'm going to say it's one of these little fellas. Doll heads, masks and skulls, however, are already either inanimate or dead, and the new Spidoll is a mindless automaton.

What a Spidoll really "wants" is a brand new, still living head, and its creator will typically name a specific person as a target. From there, the creature will mindlessly, relentlessly pursue the intended victim, and with just a touch of its legs, I wager, it can magically make a trade, again like a hermit crab swapping its shell. Perhaps even striking while you're fast asleep, it neatly swaps its original dummy head with your own, and integrates with you permanently. Your head is now an undead ghoul, with your knowledge and memories intact, but fully loyal to whatever nefarious being created your new many-legged body.

But if there isn't a master, or there isn't one anymore, it doesn't mean the spell is broken. It just means that your head starts to decay for real, until you're driven to find another replacement. Maybe a little of your memory is still retained, every time, every new head mingling a new personality with the remnants of your last, until of course you're just an utterly scatterbrained head-trading maniac for reasons you no longer even coherently understand.


PAST HALLOWEEN BESTIARIES:



THE HALLOWEEN BESTIARY BOOK:

Written by me with illustrations by our friend Bynine, this little book collects thirteen monsters inspired by Halloween decorations. Real copies are sold out, but you can get a digital version on my ko-fi!



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