When Death Becomes a Toy - Shrunken Heads

---

At some point, something broke...

Not suddenly. Not loudly. But quietly, between museum glass and toy store shelves, between anthropology books and Saturday morning commercials. Somewhere along the way, human remains stopped being treated as evidence of violence, grief, or loss, and instead became novelties. Entertainment. Even fun.

Shrunken heads, once sacred objects, once trophies of war, once the remains of people who lived, loved, and were violently killed, did not fade from history. They were repackaged.

By the early 20th century, tsantsas had already crossed oceans and borders. They had been removed from their cultural and spiritual context, stripped of meaning, and transformed into curios. Museums displayed them. Collectors traded them. Carnival sideshows charged admission to gawk at them. Violence, once distant and foreign, became something you could stare at safely behind glass.

But that wasn’t enough.
By the mid 20th century, the horror was no longer just something adults whispered about. It had been softened, simplified, and handed to children.

In the 1960s, companies like Mattel began producing kits that allowed kids to make grotesque objects at home. One of the most infamous was The Thingmaker—a toy that let children melt plastic and pour it into molds shaped like severed heads, eyeballs, and monsters. The message was clear: this wasn’t death. 

This was fun.
Not long after came the Vincent Price Shrunken Head Apple Maker, marketed with the smiling face of Vincent Price…Hollywood’s gentleman of horror. Children could place an apple into a mold, dry it, and produce their very own “shrunken head.” A real human practice, rooted in violence, colonial exploitation, and death, had been transformed into a kitchen craft.
No blood. No history. No victims.

Just laughs.
Movies followed the same path. Shrunken heads appeared as jokes, props, punchlines. They talked. They sang. They were silly. They were spooky but harmless. The human cost was erased, replaced with caricature. What once represented killing and power became a cartoon accessory.

And that was the point.

To make horror consumable, it had to be defanged. It had to be small. It had to be funny. It had to stop reminding people that these were once people.

The transformation didn’t happen because the truth was unknown. It happened because the truth was inconvenient.
Acknowledging that shrunken heads were real human remains meant acknowledging murder. Colonial violence. Exploitation. The global trade in human bodies. It meant admitting that entertainment was being built on suffering. That toys were being molded from death.

So instead, a story was rewritten.
Shrunken heads weren’t victims, they were “weird.” They weren’t evidence of killing, they were “exotic.” They weren’t human, they were “things.”

Once that shift happened, everything else followed easily.
You could sell them. You could joke about them. You could give them to children.

The irony is that while Western culture laughed, collected, and played, the violence never stopped being real. The heads may have shrunk, but the brutality did not. Reducing death to a novelty didn’t make it disappear, it just made it easier to ignore.
This is how murder becomes entertainment.
Not through ignorance, but through repetition. Through packaging. Through distance. Through the steady erosion of empathy until something unspeakable feels normal enough to sell in a box.

And once that line is crossed, the question is no longer why were shrunken heads made?

The real question becomes:

Why were we so eager to turn them into toys?

www.EleventhGate.com