Monster High

• 1. Introduction

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  Monster High is a fashion doll franchise from Mattel, and on the 16th of May 2022 a fresh batch of its dolls disappeared from the internet in less than a day. They were reproductions of the very first dolls from 2010, offered through the Mattel Creations section of the company's website. The brand had launched on the 11th of June 2010, with a cast of vampires, mummies and werewolves who were teenagers rather than terrors. Its target audience was children aged 7-16. How did a doll line for kids who liked dark fashion turn into a hit? Why did it vanish from store shelves? And what made grown adults rush to buy it all over again?

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• 2. A Shopping Trip

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  Garrett Sander was a packaging designer at Mattel when he and his twin brother Darren took some young girls shopping. The girls kept reaching for goth fashion. That small observation became the seed of a toy brand with a dark look. The company had begun conceptualizing the idea in 2007, and in October of that year it filed a trademark for the name Monster High.

  Darren helped shape the early concepts and came up with the slogan "(Where) Freaky Just Got Fabulous!" He also noticed a creative advantage. Because the characters were monsters, they could do things that ordinary kids could not. Children's enthusiasm for Tim Burton and for Lady Gaga fed into the brand as well.

  The earliest prototypes were assembled from borrowed parts. In a social media post in 2020, Sander explained that the heads came from molds for another Mattel doll line that was never officially released. The bodies came from Barbie collector dolls, and some accessories came from My Scene dolls. Much of the initial design survived, yet the finished dolls looked drastically different. Sander also designed the original packaging boxes himself.

  Mattel was trying a new business strategy with all of this. Instead of starting with a film or a TV show, it released the toy first and added the media and entertainment afterward. That gamble meant the dolls themselves had to carry the story, starting with the town where every one of them lived.

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• 3. Ghouls and Mansters

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  In the fictional American town of New Salem stands a high school called Monster High, attended by the teenage children of famous monsters and other mythical creatures. Its admissions policy is unusual in its own world. Every species is welcome, while other schools in the franchise's fantasy setting admit only one kind of monster, such as a school just for vampires. Stories about the students reached fans through the TV series, the web series, the official website and diaries, which were small booklets packed in with the dolls.

  The girls are called ghouls and the boys are called mansters. At first, the characters were mostly sons and daughters of monsters made famous by fiction. Later the cast widened to include figures from folklore, mythology and pop culture. The official website once sorted them into four groups: the original characters, the ghouls, the mansters, and the Frightmares, who are half centaur and half monster.

  Frankie Stein is the central character. She is the daughter of Frankenstein's monster and his bride, with white hair streaked in black and light mint-green skin. Her body is a simulacrum, assembled from many different parts. She is clumsy, sweet and kind to everyone. In the series she once dated Jackson Jekyll and Holt Hyde, but the diaries place both of them with Draculaura instead.

  Draculaura, the daughter of Dracula, is a vampire who is a vegetarian and faints at the sight of blood. Cleo de Nile is the daughter of the mummy pharaoh Ramses de Nile and is 5842 years old when the series begins. She captains the fearleading squad. Her design draws on Cleopatra, and her older sister Nefera is based on Nefertiti.

  Clawdeen Wolf, the daughter of a werewolf, loves fashion and has wolf ears pierced in several places. Lagoona Blue, daughter of a sea monster, comes from Down Under, speaks with an Australian accent and can talk with water animals. Ghoulia Yelps is the smartest ghoul in school. Being a zombie, she can speak only in moans and groans, which does not stop her from being mischievous. Abbey Bominable, the Russian-accented daughter of the Yeti, is blunt and enormously strong, yet she would rather be known as a nice monster to hang out with.

  Of all the characters, Ghoulia drew the most unexpected casting in the later era, when the actor Felicia Day voiced her in the 2022 TV series.

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• 4. On Screen

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  A web series arrived on YouTube on the 5th of May 2010. The first TV special followed on the 30th of October that year. Called Monster High: New Ghoul at School, it ran 23 minutes and premiered on Nickelodeon in the United States. It and the next special, Fright On!, were drawn in 2D. Every later film used computer-generated animation, with titles such as Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love, Scaris: City of Frights, 13 Wishes, Haunted, Boo York, Boo York and Electrified. Altogether, 15 animated specials and films accompanied the dolls.

  Starting with Fright On! in 2011, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment released the specials and films straight to home video. Online magazines reported that the films ranked Monster High second among children's direct-to-video franchises that year. They later turned up on streaming services including Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

  Japan received a version of its own. Monster High: Kowa Ike Girls was a set of eight animated shorts, each about three minutes long. Shougakukan Music & Digital Entertainment produced them and Picona Creative Studio animated them. They aired from the 22nd of October 2014 on Oha Suta, a morning children's block on the TXN network, and Mattel Japan's YouTube account released them online later. They were made in Japanese only.

  The theme song was sung by the idol group Amorecarina, with Kaede of another idol group, Chu-Z, rapping. It also became the title of Amorecarina's debut single, which was released with an instrumental version.

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• 5. Pages, Games and Songs

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  Lisi Harrison, the Canadian author behind The Clique and The Alphas, wrote the franchise's first novels. Mattel released her opening book on the 26th of September 2010, following Frankie Stein and a girl named Melody Carver. Her books use a separate fictional universe. In it, the Regular-Attribute Dodgers, known as RADs, struggle with love and school while trying not to be outed as monsters to humans.

  The Ghoul Next Door, with chapters on Cleo de Nile, came at the end of March 2011. Where There's a Wolf, There's a Way, featuring Clawdeen Wolf, followed on the 29th of September 2011. Back And Deader Than Ever, centered on Draculaura, appeared on the 1st of May 2012. A separate title, Drop Dead Diary, came out on the 19th of January 2011 under the pseudonym Abaghoul Harris.

  Other authors added their own series. Gitty Daneshvari wrote the Ghoulfriends books about Venus McFlytrap, Robecca Steam and Rochelle Goyle, with four titles ending in Ghoulfriends 'Til the End. Nessi Monstrata wrote diaries covering five of the main characters, and Misty Von Spooks wrote the Monster Rescue books about the second-generation cast. In 2024, IDW Publishing began a comics line that included Monster High: New Scaremester and Monster High: Boomuda Triangle, along with Pride one-shots for 2024 and 2025.

  The first video game, Monster High: Ghoul Spirit, reached the Nintendo DS and Wii on the 25th of October 2011. It had a special Ghoulify function for the Nintendo DSi, and players worked toward being crowned Scream Queen. Skultimate Roller Maze arrived in November 2012 and let players enter a hazardous maze of obstacles in the franchise's own sport. In October 2013-13 Wishes cast players as Frankie Stein, collecting thirteen shards of a magic mirror to free her friends from a lantern. Later releases included Monster High: New Ghoul in School in November 2015 and Monster High: Skulltimate Secrets in October 2024.

  Music spread the brand too. "Fright Song" by Windy Wagner came out in 2010, and "We Are Monster High" by Madison Beer followed in 2013, each with a live-action video on YouTube. Ewa Farna recorded Polish and Czech versions of the first song. In 2025, the girl group Katseye covered "Fright Song".

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• 6. Boom, Bust, Return

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  Within three years, Monster High was worth a billion dollars, far beyond what Mattel's executives had expected. Shortly after the first dolls appeared in 2010, shoppers sometimes could not find them, because they were selling out of stores so fast. The line even pulled sales away from Mattel's own Barbie in its first few years. In 2013, Barbie was still the best-selling doll brand, but Monster High ranked second, with more than $500 million in annual sales.

  Observers credited several things. Younger children wanted toys "a little bit edgier" than a traditional fashion doll. The "anti-bullying message" told kids to be themselves and embrace their flaws. And fans showed "deep engagement", kept alive by the steady stream of media and merchandise.

  Growth was strongest in 2012 and 2013. Sales began sliding in 2014, and 2016 was weak. That year Mattel rebooted the franchise with a revamped look and a new fictional universe, likely in an attempt to reach younger children. The reboot was a commercial failure, and the line was quietly discontinued in 2018.

  Two Skullector dolls inspired by It and The Shining brought it back in 2020, released just before Halloween. In 2021, two more Skullector dolls based on Beetlejuice characters arrived, together with a doll inspired by Gremlins 2: The New Batch. All three were sold exclusively through Mattel Creations. In 2022 came Haunt Couture, a wordplay on haute couture. It offered five collector dolls with rooted eyelashes, priced at $75 and sold only on the website.

  On Friday the 13th of May 2022, Mattel released Booriginal Creeproductions, a tribute to the 2010 line. Four of the main characters wore their original outfits in boxes closely modeled on the first packaging. At $25 each, they were aimed at older fans who had grown up with the dolls. At first they were sold only at Walmart stores in the United States, and then worldwide through Mattel Creations. Mattel also teamed up with designer Maisie Wilen in February 2022 for a $50 pair of earrings, and with Hot Topic in April 2022 for a clothing collection.

  In 2021, Mattel announced an animated series and a live-action musical film, co-produced with Nickelodeon. The series premiered in October 2022, with more gender diversity and LGBT characters. Frankie became non-binary and uses they/them pronouns in that version, and is dating Cleo. Lagoona is Honduran and grew up in a sunken castillo. As of 2024, Clawdeen has been in an official relationship with Toralei Stripe, a werecat.

  Mattel has kept releasing new dolls at intervals since then, for both children and collectors.

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• 7. Fairy Tale Cousins

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  Ever After High launched in July 2013 as the first companion line, with dolls who were children of well-known fairy tale and fable characters. Apple White, daughter of Snow White, and Raven Queen, daughter of the Evil Queen, took the lead roles. Their conflict drove its web series on YouTube. The Royals, like Apple, want to follow their predetermined fairy tale story, while the Rebels, like Raven, wish to rewrite theirs. Monster High's own C. A. Cupid joined that series from its fourth webisode as an exchange student.

  The second companion line, Enchantimals, launched on the 18th of July 2017. Its animal-inspired humanoid characters each come with an animal companion as a pet. It was first tied to Ever After High, but it branched off entirely once that line's sales declined.

  A planned crossover never happened. In the 2015 film Boo York, Boo York, a character named Astranova makes contact with Apple White and Raven Queen, hinting at a future meeting. The first franchise reboot and the end of Ever After High in 2016 derailed those plans, along with several films that had been in development. Fans got only a trace of them. Brief storyboard animatics appeared on the official Monster High YouTube channel as The Lost Movie, and early designs of the Ever After High characters made for the crossover were later shared online.

  In February 2026, Mattel revealed another spinoff, Moonspell Magic by Monster High. It centers on a witch school called Moonspell High and five witches, each different from the others and proud of it. The dolls were slated for major retailers in July 2026.

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• 8. Critics and Copycats

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  In her 2011 book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein criticized Monster High. Others agreed. Critics said the dolls' unrealistic bodies, often revealing outfits and focus on romance were a bad influence on young children. They called the line "hyper-sexualized" and said it reinforced gender stereotypes about women. Some even suggested that the presentation of unattainable body types could lead children to low self-esteem and eating disorders.

  The franchise has also won praise, mainly for the diversity of its characters, especially compared with other toy brands of similar popularity. Diversity has remained a major selling point in Mattel's marketing. In 2022, as a new doll line rolled out, Lisa McKnight, Executive Vice President of Barbie & Dolls at Mattel, said: "We've been waiting for the right moment to reignite the Monster High brand to connect with … issues that are core to our purpose, like inclusion, diversity and community … with the updated franchise focused on being authentic, true to yourself and celebrating differences."

  Rival toy makers took notice of the success. In 2012, MGA Entertainment launched Bratzillaz (House of Witchez), a paranormal spin-off of its Bratz brand that was seen as an attempt to capitalize on Monster High. That same year, MGA also introduced Novi Stars, fashion dolls portraying extraterrestrial humanoids. In 2013, The Bridge Direct launched Pinkie Cooper, a humanoid Cocker Spaniel. In an interview with CNN Money, the analyst Gerrick Johnson named both Monster High and Novi Stars as the "competitors that come closest" to her.

  Also in 2013, Hasbro launched My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, an anthropomorphized spin-off of the 2010 version of its My Little Pony franchise. It gave the pony characters human-like silhouettes with non-human skin colors, and it was regarded as Hasbro's answer to Monster High.

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