Monster High x Us Skullector Adelaide & Red Dolls
About the packaging copy:
One of my favorite projects to date is the copy I wrote for the Monster High x Us two pack, a release that brings the doppelgängers of Jordan Peele’s ingenious horror film Us to life in doll form. Adelaide and Red speak so poetically in the film that I wanted to evoke the stirring, captivating, symbolic quality of their speech within the Skullector package’s story. What I wrote was a dark mirror of a poem where the reflected line is as twisted and distorted as the Underground in the movie.
Reflections are an important motif in the film, and also visually represented on package. As the two main characters, Red and Adelaide, are mirrors of each other, I thought: what if the dialogue is like mirrored lines, where the reflected line is distorted? The rhythm and syntax of each ~tethered~ line is the same, but the meaning is quite different. Essentially, it is a shadow of a dialogue where the characters cannot hear each other overtly, but are still speaking about each other and responding to one another.
Furthermore, while it is one poem—one dialogue— you can separate Adelaide’s lines from Red’s lines and read them as two separate poems, for each half of the complete poem makes sense by itself! Try it out for yourself by reading the black text below all at once, and then the red text. The packaging designer I worked with on this project, Diana, did an incredible job at formatting the copy in a way that allowed these nuances to come to the forefront.
I’m afraid she’s coming for me // I’m coming for her
My whole life I’ve felt this… darkness… looming over me // My whole life I’ve been… burning… with a higher purpose
Followed by a shadow lurking just out of sight // Drawn to a sun I am not allowed to feel
Like dancing some twisted duet, but with a partner I can’t see // Like scuttling on silent rabbit paws, I creep ever nearer
The dread of a reckoning grips like claws around my heart // The anticipation of an uprising soothes my severed soul
Like wrestling with a pair of hands obscured by the dark // Like two blades on a pair of shears, we’ll join with a slice.
Will I be strong enough to break free, to face the warped reflection that smiles back? // Will she understand the depth of my anguish, when I make her pay for all that she stole?
For the sake of my family… I will have to be. // For the sake of the Tethered… I will deliver us from misery.
Below, I list some of the easter eggs I included in copy, as an example of how just a few lines of copy can be rich with myriad references and packed with meaning. The beauty of writing is that a single word or phrase can imply multiple things at once.
- The opening lines of the poem are inspired by Addy’s confession to Gabe, right before the Tethered family shows up: “Being here… feels like there is a… black cloud just hanging over me and I don’t feel like myself… My whole life I… I’ve felt like she’s still coming for me.”
- The sun reference is from Red’s final monologue: “How it must have been to grow up with the sky. To feel the sun, the wind, the trees. But your people took it for granted.”
- The line about dancing references both their ballet performance as 14-year-olds, as well as their dueling duet during the fight.
- The severed soul line comes from when Red said: “…they figured out how to make a copy of the body, but not the soul. The soul remains one, shared by two.”
- The line in the poem “like two blades on a pair of shears, we’ll join with a slice” is significant because it is the one time when the poem breaks the parallel syntax/rhythm. It foreshadows the hoped-for Untethering, when they will come together with a slice and then break apart. Jordan Peele once mentioned the symbolism of the shears in an interview, saying “There’s a duality to scissors — a whole made up of two parts, but also they lie in this territory between the mundane and the absolutely terrifying.” I found this symbolism fascinating, and since the shears are a striking visual symbol of the movie, I knew I had to weave them into copy.
All packaging and ecomm copy was approved by Monkeypaw Productions and Universal.