This week I want to continue my series on Gothic vocabulary. You may remember back in November, I wrote about another vocab term—the sublime—which was central to the Romantic era’s conception of the Gothic. This time I want to discuss a twentieth-century term that to this day still crops up frequently in any discussion of the Gothic or of horror more broadly: the uncanny.
The concept of the uncanny was popularized by the infamous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in his 1919 essay “The Uncanny.” Freud was building on the work of earlier German theorists such as Ernst Jentsch, whose 1906 essay defined the uncanny as being a product of “intellectual uncertainty” and applied it to both psychology and literature. In Freud’s essay, he explores the etymology of the German word unheimlich, which translated in very literal terms means “unhomely.” Thus, there is an aspect of the uncanny which is unfamiliar, quite the opposite of the comforts of home. However, heimlich can also mean “concealed, kept from sight.” And so, unheimlich is “the name for everything that ought to have remained … hidden and secret and has become visible” as Freud quoted from Schelling. The uncanny blends elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar, the revealed and the concealed, until the result makes us feel uncomfortable, uncertain, and ill at ease. Indeed, Freud ultimately defines the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”
In the 1970s, a Japanese robotics professor named Masahiro Mori explored people’s emotional responses to robots, and translations of his works were the first to coin the phrase “the uncanny valley.” Mori found that if you graph the relationship between an object’s resemblance to human beings and the emotional response to that object, there is a significant dip somewhere in the middle. Humans like things that look exactly like other humans or drastically unlike humans. But there’s something in that range of human-like but not human enough that makes us deeply uncomfortable. The concept of the uncanny valley has been applied not just to robots, but also to dolls, to computer animation (remember the recent incident of Sonic the Hedgehog’s CGI teeth?), and even to clowns.
Where do we see the uncanny in horror and Gothic literature? Almost everywhere! Freud and Jentsch both pointed to the works of German short-story writer E. T. A. Hoffman. Hoffman’s horror tale “The Sandman” features an automaton girl and a recurring theme of faces without eyes—approaching the uncanny from two different angles: with the automaton, a machine has been rendered nearly (but not quite) human, while the eyeless faces take something as comforting and familiar as a human face and render it horrifying by removing the eyes. The uncanny also be seen in stories of domestic horror like Margery Lawrence’s “The Haunted Saucepan” (which I discussed in my review of Women’s Weird, vol. 1), in which familiar household objects like a saucepan become the locus of an unnerving haunting. Entire tropes in Gothic literature are based around the uncanny, such as the trope of the doppelganger. In this trope, the familiar and the familiar-made-unfamiliar are embodied in two separate characters that both mirror and diverge from each other. And of course, there are all sorts of human-like monsters and entities in fiction whose very horror stems from their uncanniness. The Chucky franchise is only one example of many stories that feature evil, haunted, or cursed dolls. Stephen King’s novel IT relies on the all-too-common fear of clowns. And even vampires—one of our most beloved monsters—are often given an edge of creepiness by the features that make them not-quite-human. For example, their unnatural coldness, preternatural speed, or in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles the aberration of crying tears of blood.
What are your favorite examples of the uncanny in horror? Are you afraid of dolls, clowns, or robots? What other Gothic vocabulary words would you like to see me cover here? Let me know in the comments!
Although I am quite satiated and bored with Cthulhu, how about the over-used term “eldritch” for a term? Thanks.