Nightmare Dollhouse is a haunted house “inspired by the weirdest and scariest roadside oddities,” according to its press release.  Thus, we begin in a one-room museum, and this is filled with dolls from both history and popular culture, with an emphasis on the latter.  Most prominent are Slappy from Goosebumps, Chucky from Child’s Play, Talky Tina from The Twilight Zone, and Annabelle from the James Wan film series (not the real Annabelle, which is a Raggedy Ann).

In what follows, the “dolls have come to life and want to make you one of them,” and we meet a series of these, including the host of a tea party (Gwendolyn Torrence) who offers us roaches and an insult comic clown (Ozzy Angulo) who loves balloons (“Because they pop!”) and blasts our ears with an electric balloon inflator.

There are some nice touches in Nightmare Dollhouse, like the room that requires crawling on your hands and knees.  The actors, too, are committed to their high-energy performances.  But I wouldn’t call it particularly scary—even the crawl could have used something following or waiting for us to heighten the tension.

Dolls, no doubt, are a potent subject for a haunt; this one could use more of them.  The production did little to make the actors doll-like, to differentiate them from humans, and thus Nightmare Dollhouse loses some of the features that make dolls so scary: they are small, inanimate, and uncanny.

Nightmare Dollhouse runs through October 31st at 107 Suffolk Street  New York, NY. 15-25 minutes. Photograph by Vanessa Lopera.