@@cavemanzach9475 it's one of the only times I can remember feeling like my blood ran cold during a movie scene. Just an overwhelming feeling of "oh shit".
You are right.The uncanny valley is the moment you realize that a person you are spending time with is a narcissist. It is why it was termed this way. In modern film it is as you describe - the fear of the unknown.
@@Yatukih_001 That's not true at all, the term is derived from studies on robotics. It refers to a line graph on which the X axis is how similar a robot is to a human and the Y axis is how appealing a human viewer finds the robot's appearance. There's a steady trend upwards from 0% similar up until the point it looks very very similar but not quite the same as a human (let's say 95% for argument's sake). When it gets to that point the approval of human viewers plummets and they find them repulsive until they attain near-complete similarity (say, 99-100%). The "Valley" in uncanny valley refers to that sudden drop and re-rise on the graph as it approaches total similarity.
@@michaelwood368 whoosh. The point isn't the terminology, the point is *why the uncanny valley exists at all*. We have had robotics for what, half a century? The visceral reaction of the uncanny valley speaks to something much more intrinsic to human psychology without an obvious evolutionary cause
@@Langtw They said "It is why it was termed this way.", to which I disagreed and gave the actual origin of the term, which is robotics. "The visceral reaction of the uncanny valley speaks to something much more intrinsic to human psychology without an obvious evolutionary cause" There is an obvious evolutionary cause, that's what my initial comment was about. It's a repulsion at fresh human corpses. Also we've had robotics for centuries my dude.
For me, it’s an obscure horror film from the ‘70s called “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death” The whole film has an uncanny feeling to it. What makes it more impressive is that a lot of these scenes are achieved in broad daylight. Something in the way it was filmed and the soundtrack gives me the chills to this day. There is one scene in particular that stands out and it involves a lake and a very creepy looking pale woman rising out of the water. Nightmare fuel.
That film is a textbook on how to use the uncanny, and I agree with you: the moment when someone slides into the water, and then walks out as a different person... that moment stuck with me for decades.
there's another obscure 70s horror film called Messiah of Evil. it has scenes that can almost drove anyone to anxiety. it's really good actually, the cinematography and direction is very solid and still holds up to this day
The most uncanny thing I experienced in real life was as a child. There was this old abandoned property that the neighborhood kids rumored to be haunted. One night, I decided to try and explore it. Before going inside, I looked into a window, and saw something very large moving around in darkness. After observing for a while, I realized it was a white horse. It probably just wandered in through a busted entryway, but it blew my tiny mind. I still don't know why it scared me as much as it did. Living room horse! Then that year, _Twin Peaks_ started airing. My parents made a big mistake by letting me watch it with them.
Watching Twin Peaks at any age is a big mistake. I'm 32 and I still have several scenes that are too visceral for me to ever watch again. Pure single-blend nightmare fuel.
Yeah, the scene with the white horse is interesting. They are said to be a symbol of death by native Americans. When Mrs. Palmer sees it, it's taken to be a premonition she has of Madeline's imminent death. Still great after all these years.
Your rationalization does not hold water. Did you live in an area near any wild horse populations? If so, how did it make it into your suburb without being detected and why would it enter that derelict property? I don't doubt your experience, only your attempt to explain it away.
@@KittSpiken sometimes “rationalizing” is a defense mechanism our mind unconsciously uses when we face something beyond logic and that could defy our sense of reality
Whenever the concept of "uncanny" is mentioned, a particular tale comes to my mind, which I heard long ago on the radio while I was laying in my bed getting ready to sleep: "One night, a man was walking through the forest near his house. Nothing special about that forest, he knew it like the palm of his hand, as well as the sounds of all the creatures living in it. It was like his kingdom, no reason to be afraid of it. Then suddenly, he heard a baby's cry. Being both surprised and concerned by it (no families lived in the immediate vicinities), he followed the noise, until he reached a creek deep into the woods; the baby was laying there, on its shore. Couldn't be more than 5 months old. As he grew closer to it, it noticed his presence, and the constant wailing stopped. Its stare was locked on him, as he came closer and closer. Then finally, once he was right in front of the baby, it gave him a wide smile. *The baby had all of its teeth."*
i love simple short stories like this… it sounds like it came right out of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books 👹👻 i remember a story called The Farm Visitor that always stuck with me
i thought this posted 😩 The Farm Visitor Author: unknown (jezebel dot com) I was 7, my brother 10, my mom in her early 40s, my grandmother (her mom) in her 60's. So we were all cogent. No one was too young or too senile to not recall this nonsense. Yet, still no bloody answer. Grandma lived on an isolated country road in NC that was named after her family since they were the only crazy fuckers who lived on the land for about 1000 acres. And I *do* mean crazy. We have stories about relatives that start with, "You remember that time Uncle Bob was in the ditch with a shotgun?" "WHICH TIME?!" Her house had been empty for several weeks while she'd been visiting us in Florida, but we were all back, spending the weekend with her before trekking back to the Sunshine state. The house is in the foreal country, literally over train-tracks, past a salvage yard and her nearest neighbor (a cousin - everyone is related to everyone who owns a house on the road) ain't within screamin' distance. Yes, that seems to be a real system of measurement - "screaming distance." It's early in the AM, like just before daybreak. We're awake because these are farm freaks who wake at the crack of dawn from sheer ingrained habit. We're eating cereal when we hear someone pull up outside. Curious, we all run to the big picture window that looks onto the front yard. There is a strange truck there. No one seems to be behind the wheel, though the engine is idling. The truck is... well, old, for one thing. It's old-timey like from maybe the 1930's? You could picture the Joad Family heading to California in this thing. It's rusted but it was probably once painted blue. We stare at the thing, bewildered. Mom asks grandma if she knows who that is. Nope, not a clue, says grandma. She runs to get the phone to call her cousin and ask him to come up - she thinks maybe it's a hired hand and he's just at the wrong farm. Just as she asks him to come on down, the phone goes dead. Well, that's unsettling. All at once, there is a loud, insistent banging on the front door. We all scream. My grandma, who is terrifyingly resourceful, huddles us all into the living room, away from a window where anyone can see us. Then, while mom, me and my brother tremble there on the couch, she grabs a serrated bread knife from the kitchen and cautiously approaches the front door. She peeks out a side window, very stealthily. She turns back to us and looks confused. She shakes her head, like, "No one is there." We all kind of breathe easier. Then EVERY goddamn door in the house is banging - relentlessly. I can still hear it. Rhythmic and terrifying, like all the doors are about to splinter and crack. There were two doors in the basement beneath us, so the sound is also a reverberation at our feet. The three ground-floor doors are shaking - we can see them trembling and jerking on their hinges from our vantage point on the couch. Finally, mom runs to the window - either from a psychotic break with reality or terror, I have no clue. She cries, "Oh thank Christ - Cousin is here!" We run to her and peek out the picture window - there is no one that we can see in the yard, but we can't see all the doors from our viewpoint. Cousin walks by truck with a shotgun in his hand. Cousin, it should be noted, has pretty much every gun ever made. He looks puzzled, looking at the rear of the truck, then he glances in the cab window and he stops. He goes pale, runs a hand down his face. Then he RUNS towards to house, towards us. My grandmother flings open the kitchen door as she sees him coming. He shouts, "Everyone get behind the couch! Get DOWN!" He runs past us as we bolt for the couch. The banging starts AGAIN, all the doors and now we can hear the windows rattle. It's like a tornado or the end of the world. We are too scared to even scream. Cousin flings open the front door and fires the huge shotgun, once, BANG, deafening. As he does, the truck roars into life and it sounds like a train. We scramble up; the banging stops, mercifully. Cousin is advancing onto the lawn, gun leveled at the truck. We run behind him, wanting to be out of that shaking, quivering house and near the dude with the gun. The truck peals out, backwards, cutting across the yard and racing into a breakneck speed. Tires sqeal, rubber is burned. Cousin fires again and we all cower behind him. He blows out the back window with the sound of a thousand plates smashing into linoleum but the truck never even hiccups, just roars down the road. No tags, not even a vanity plate on the back. There was NO ONE behind the wheel of that thing. We all had a clear view. Everyone agreed. Not a driver in the cab. Well. Not anything we could SEE, anyhow. The police were called. The phone line had been cut. There was not a single boot print in the entire yard except Cousin's, from where he'd run into and out of the house. Cousin reported that there had been no plate but when he looked into the cab, it looked like "something from a horror movie." He said there were all kinds of weird restraints - handcuffs, c-clamps, nylon straps - and he said the floorboards looked covered in what "smelled like" blood to him (Cousin was famous for his keen sense of smell and the window was down, so it's possible). Cousin said he thought he saw a blur of something out the picture window and ran to fire the first shot, but "missed" because, once he stood there, nothing or no one was on the lawn or in the truck. Then it shot backwards out of the yard and out of our lives, leaving no answers, just a deep sense of unease every time we'd visit. Grandma and Cousin have passed. Deeply religious people, they stuck by their unchanging versions of the story until they died. My brother, mother and I have never been able to figure it out - neither did the cops, I think it should be noted. We don't know how all the windows and doors were banging, and we don't know why we never saw a SOUL anywhere or how they could get around the sides of the house without leaving a trace in the damp earth.
I would think the uncanny is a feeling that arises when our normal predictive models for reality are flouted. Being able to predict what will happen is one if our great survival skills. If we see actions that appear nonsensical, it means our existing models are incomplete. Fear (adrenaline) is very useful for learning, so we might just be trying to understand what so far we do not.
Quite possible. It's something I've heard put very well that one of our main psychological flaws is that our fear response doesn't have a separate level for things that aren't life or death -- everything that stresses us is taken as a threat to our lives.
I saw a woman in a supermarket. She just stood still in front of a mirror starring at her reflection. I told my little sister something like, "nope, we're not going to the supermarket today" and we headed home.
You missed one more way to create the uncanny: messing with the camera footage, like when the screen becomes staticky for no reason or when someone is slowly walking toward the camera and the footage glitches and they appear right in front of you. They used that a lot in those creepy VHS films in The Ring.
It's such a masterpiece of writing and direction, because the actual visuals aren't that terribly scary (look up a screenshot, the face is creepy but not scary in a traditional way). But the tension buildup and something unexpected in the timing of the reveal has it etched in the minds of all who've seen it.
It created this terrible sinking feeling of dread and despair for me. It took me a while to get out of that funk upon my first viewing. Really stuck with me for a while. Honestly, I have a difficult time re-watching it, or even suggesting it to my friends. I don't want them to get pulled into the same depression I felt. That's not to say it isn't good . . . Just . . . Handle with care.
Seems like there's a kind of uncanniness that is linked to survival instinct. Grins with sharp teeth, wide-open eyes and still or slow movements (stalking) can all be linked to the behavior of predators, and I believe they lose their impact if the viewer isn't specifically targeted. I believe these aren't truly "uncanny", but more overtly threatening. What I think is a more pure "uncanniness" is for example the images in The Ring cursed video tape of the chair and the ladder. There's literally nothing scary or predatory in the picture of a ladder or a chair, yet these are some of the images I remember most vividly from that creepy tape when I watched it as a child.
Not a movie, but the titans in Attack on Titan are a great example of weird but disturbing. The way some of them move and behave are kind of goofy in by itself, but how strange they are make them very terrifying.
Yes! Specially in the first seasons when their origin was unknown, it added a lot to the mysticism and horror of watching big “humans” eating other humans
We had a story in our school back in 1999 that a kid hid away in a broom closet after lessons to mess around the empty school at night, but fell asleep in there. He woke up in the very beginning of the first lesson on the next school day, and when he came into the classroom he saw his exact copy sitting at his desk. It was acting like he would, messing with its books and chatting away with classmates, but when its eyes met with the original kid who just stood in the door shellshocked, it started screaming and howling and twitching and it shook itself apart into like chunks in a violent full body seizure. Then the teacher ran in and covered its remains with a sheet then scooped them into a body bag... That part freaked me out back when i was little. The teacher had a sheet and a bag, which means this happened from time to time so much so they had equipment for dealing with the doubles
This made me think of that scene from the Australian horror film, Lake Mungo, where a girl is filming as she walks alone in the dark. She approaches a figure in the distance, and as the figure gets closer, she realizes it’s her own bloated, decomposing corpse. The scene itself is horrifying, but what makes it truly unsettling is that it’s not some monster or ghost of a stranger, but it’s HER. SHE’S the figure - her own future corpse that’s supposed to be at the bottom of a lake. Truly unsettling and a highly underrated film.
The whole atmosphere in The Shining is uncanny; probably because the hotel feels like it has different time periods mixing in one… That’s where this movie’s genius resides. The timelessness of pure evil.
I’m an avoid horror movie fan and nothing NOTHING has made me jump out of skin more then the usually beautiful Laura Durn’s face from the thumbnail. Nightmare fuel
The creepiest uncanny moment for me was when was from a show called "The White House." The president in the show started shaking hands with the air after mumbling incoherently through a speech. I realized something was wrong when I couldn't understand what he was saying. It was like he was possessed by an otherworldly force. But then he shambled away from the podium like a puppet being controlled by invisible stings and stuck his hand out to shake hands with somebody, but nobody was there. It was creepy and chilling at the same time. I don't know how they pulled off making a corpse look so lifelike and yet his movements are so eerie and unsettling. Then, there was another episode where there was a gathering including some politician's family. The corpse of the president came shuffling up behind a little girl and placed its hands on the girl's shoulders. She tried to pull away, but he held her in place. Then, with the creepiest and most uncanny grin on his face, he proceeded to lean down to her ear and slowly sniff her hair. It whispered something about how hot she was going to look when she grew up and then placed its hands on her sides before backing up, but the grin never left its face. I still get goosebumps thinking back to that moment. Hollywood has really outdone itself in that horror show.
As a cinema projectionist, I sat in my chair next to the projector, watching the movie (not a scary one at all), when I clearly saw a ghost, a translucent figure walking through the auditorium in the middle of thin air. I nearly shat myself a second time when I realized that it wasn't a ghost at all, but somebody's reflection in the window. Somebody real had suddenly appeared behind me, having come into the projecting room by the unusual route (which cannot be overseen from said chair).
The Haunting (1999). When Eleanor looks in the mirror and her reflection is slightly distorted. You can't tell exactly what's wrong, but I remember getting very upset watching that scene.
This is such a good video. I felt like in a nightmare just from seeing the examples, really well curated! I think the reason we can't stand the uncanny is because of that feeling of chaos you mentioned, like the world we know has just been turned upside down. My boyfriend (who's really into psychology) tells me we usually establish a map of the world around us, we understand how it works, what to expect for the most part, etc, and it's like a framework for us to interpret events through. But when major trauma happens that "doesn't make sense" ie someone dies, or you get cheated on or some other major news, it feels like the rug has been pulled out from underneath you because your framework was wrong to begin with, or it is incorrect now. I think something similar happens with the uncanny, and that's why the nightmare situation is so effective IMO, because we expect the world to be a certain way, our framework for our expectations seems to be confirmed (eg it seems like a normal day) and then suddenly it's not what we're used to; something's wrong. Makes us feel that feeling of chaos. That's my interpretation!
It's true fear of the truly unknown. It creates a fear so deep in your being it's like being fearful for the lost of your soul. It's what causes people to largely freeze up because the brain freezes up because it cannot compute what it's encountered. However, it follows the rules of fight or flight (which also includes a third reaction which is paralysis). A smaller percentage of people will go into flight mode while an even smaller percentage will actually go into all-out fight mode. I actually learned how to combat my nightmares as a young child when I started getting ANGRY at my nightmares. I had so many that trapped me in my sleep (couldn't wake up from them or get away from whatever was confronting me), that I finally chose the option of fight. Summoning up so much anger that I channeled it towards the entity in the nightmare. The result? After a short battle of wills, my anger vs. the entity, it ended up in the nightmare dissipating or me waking up - problem solved.
There is also that scene in Hereditary where annie is looking through her mom stuff and when she flicks the light off she sees her covered in shadow in the corner of the room, nightmare fuel
The strangest uncanny valley I’ve experienced through dreams, was the same dream I was continuously having in my child room. All my settings were the same and I always felt that I was in a normal environment, but no matter who I spoke to - they wouldn’t be talking they’d be shouting. For example one was my mother - and her mouth would be moving very normally yet her dialogue was loud and really overwhelming, the amount of nights this kept me awake for
The most uncanny thing I experienced was when reading an article about an opera singer. There was a picture of a pair together with the singer. He had make up on up to the point where he looked downright terrifying. His face had the same color palet as that of The Joker from Batman along with the same freakish smile. He was also very overweight and combined with how his face looked it was just nightmare fuel. Worst of all. The article never mentioned how freakish he looked.
I also had an experience of the uncanny. A while ago i experienced a long period of a phenomenon that is called depersonalization/derealization or dp/dr for short. I'm still not sure what caused it (probably weed though) but it felt like i was living in the uncanny valley. Everything around me just looked and felt off. Almost like a copy of the world i knew before. I felt like i was living in a waking nightmare, felt like i was caught in between worlds, halfway between dream and reality. It was not psychosis, i had no delusions or hallucinations, i was fully aware of what was happening, but it constantly felt like my mind was slipping away. It never did though and luckily it eventually passed. Careful with drugs kids.
I have only experienced depersonalisation/derealisation twice in my life (occurring from SSRI adjustments), and both of them were wholly unpleasant. The first time was utterly terrifying, because it had never happened to me before and I was not entirely sure what was happening, but it was like suddenly the indefinable thing that makes reality distinguishable from unreality was just... gone. It was exactly as disorienting and existentially destabilising as if an object had just turned and started talking to me.
I don’t know if this qualifies as “uncanny”, but damn is it a great moment that always creeps me out is in Jaws when the shark bites the guy’s leg off. It’s not what happens, it’s how Spielberg shoots it and how he uses an overhead shot to emphasize how huge the shark is, but as soon as it pulls the guy under it disappears. Not only is it powerful, but it’s deceptively quiet, hard to see, and intelligent. John William’s score goes from tense down to absent so that we simply hear the man take a last breath before being pulled under. It’s one of my favorite shots/scenes in film history and it’s easily the furthest Jaws delves into true “horror” rather than suspense/thriller or drama.
A recent uncanny movie scene that has stuck with me is from "Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum." There's that horror trope of someone's back being turned to the character, indicating something's not right. But the combination of face distortion and fast whispering when revealed freaked me out.
The hotel in The Shining is a fantastic example of an uncanny setting. The main one that springs to mind is room 237. We are first exposed to it's negative and frightening connotations when Halloran tells Danny to "stay out!". Then when we enter the room, we're struck by a faux sense of normality, like an imitation of an inviting hotel room. It's hard to pinpoint specific elements which make it uncomfortable, and yet we feel fear. The normal room is accompanied by an ominous score, which features a heartbeat-like rhythm.. making the room feel alive. If we look more closely we can spot things that just look... off. There don't appear to be any windows. The carpet is strangely designed, like an optical illusion that draws your eyes towards the bathroom. The room and the pacing of the scene makes it feel like one of your worst nightmares.
Really interesting video that actually goes somewhat deeper into the concept of Uncanny Valley than when people usually talk about it. The examples you gave are great. I'd like to add that the best example of the embodiment of more subtle uncanny valley i've ever seen is Unedited Footage of a Bear by Alan Resnick. The whole short is full of these subtle but jarring little moment that just feel super uncanny and weird, like the doppelganger sprinting towards the main character in an odd way or the mother staring at her children through the window in a very strange position.
Lynch is an absolute master of that indeed. Other examples can be seen in Blue Velvet, where a disturbed Frank Booth breathes whatever from a breathing mask to calm himself down after assaulting a woman and yells 'baby wants to fuck', the singing scene after Jeffrey gets roughed up too. Kairo and that walking ghostly figure scene makes my skin crawl, litteraly. There is another seriously disturbing scene, the revelation scene. Another contributinf factor is that both characters walk and move slowly, too slowly for humans, even when we walk slowly. Terrific flick overall.
Both Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini were uncanny af in Blue Velvet, but overall Inland Empire has to take the cake for me in terms of uncanny-ness. Brutal fking murder gets me every time lmao
I wanna watch all of Lynch's filmography, but I cannot deal with the nightmare after sitting through Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks and TP: The Return. I'm 32.
@@NorthernRealmJackal aw, don’t give up now. There’s still Eraserhead, Fire Walk With Me, and Inland Empire lol the Twin Peaks return was insanely good, and I probably watch Mulholland Drive once a month, just to set that certain mood
@@NorthernRealmJackal Then you might wanna watch The straight story. It's a beautiful, peaceful movie. Very nynch-esque and at the same time, not lynch-esque at all. No nightmare fuel inducing imagery to be found here. And as always, a very nice soundtrack by the very recently deceased Angelo Badalamenti. A David Lynch movie produced by Disney. No joke. Wrap your head around that.
definitely less about "the jolts' and more about the unsettling sensation of something not being "quite right", despite initially seeming familiar, it's skewed. Distance is a great unsettler as well as obscuring. prolonging a shot (very much something i learnt from David Lynch, also allows the viewer to have to go through more than one emption (per shot) so that something like Laura Palmer's mother (played brilliantly by Grace Zabriskie) crying/screaming in "Twin Peaks", can leave us feeling more than the initial shock she's experiencing. we can end up sensing pity, discomfort, but then because the scene goes on longer than 'we'd normally get from any other director (and the emphasis of the soap operatic music pushing the poignancy to extremes), it almost become ludicrously funny and pathetic, which is even more disconcerting. to be made to feel some kind of "humour" in what is essentially a traumatic scene makes us question this experiential empathy. "why is the director doing this to us?", "are we supposed to laugh or feel less sympathy for Sarah Palmer and what's happened to her daughter?". the longer we're made to look at a shot, i think the more likely our emotions will change towards that shot.
Freud wrote a brief book about the uncanny ("The Uncanny"). One more thing he connected to this feeling is repetition. The repetition of a place (like the hallway in "Shining"), of an event or of a movement. Las year I saw "I'm thinking of ending things" on netflix, and there is this weird scene with a dog wich I found unsettling: basically we see a dog scrolling his head, a very natural movement, but the dog doesn't stop, he keeps moving the head over and over.
That’s dog thing is such a perfect example of this. It’s just went on for a little bit too long and was such a normal behavior but it was so deeply disturbing in a way that can not really be expressed
This reminds me of reaccuring settings in my dreams. Every once in a while I while have a dream with a setting that seems so familiar, I may even have a map of it in my mind, I just know where everything is. But the place doesn't really exist, and sometimes this will be a reaccuring setting in my dreams.
The uncanny is best felt when, in trying to explain the uncanny, everyone turns to you in unison, their smiles drop.. and they say "The uncanny valley does not exist, it is just a human response to corpses"
yes, I'm familiar with this effect, but mostly from the other end. when I went through my deep literally me phase people always looked at me like I was looking at them like an uncanny valley
The Mandela Catalog, an analog horror series here on RUclips, does a fantastic job at creating and playing with the uncanny to create horror. I highly recommend it!
The scene that makes me feel this way is the end of Sleepaway camp that heavy breathing and facial expression disturbs me so much, it gets so bad I gotta look away
I'm a full grown adult with kids and saw this for the first time recently and it actually kept me up. It's because of the crummy special effects of super imposing the teenage girl's unmoving face frozen with her mouth open on a grown man's body made it so deeply unnatural. Ironically, low budget made something 10x worse than any CGI could have done
Ikr? The entire movie falls into the "so bad it's good" category, then all of a sudden that stare in the end is just.. unnerving to say the least. I've gone back and seen the film numerous times, but have always skipped that part. It really made me upset for some reason the first time I watched it.
First time I got the uncanny feels was when I saw the MV of Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. I was young and had nightmares. Those eerie smiles, it was like a surreal type of hell to me.
I still remember when i watch the 3rd Shrek movie, there is a scene where Shrek woke up and he saw Puss and Donkey had his children's faces. I found it funny yet terrifying at the same time.
One of my favourite moments of the uncanny appears not in a film, but in a short story: Turgenev's "Bezhin Meadow," when something appears on the grave of a drowned man -- something utterly simple, but utterly wrong.
No other filmmaker has disturbed me as much as David Lynch! I was 11 when Twin Peaks first aired and anything involving Killer Bob (slowly entering the living room and getting closer and closer and closer to the camera, crawling over the bed) freaked me out for life.
that was excellent! I'm a big fan of the uncanny while, you know, hating it. The familiar twisted into the unfamiliar is such a good way of looking at it. Thank you.
This is EXACTLY the type of "horror" I love. Could you recommend some movies like that? (Besides the ones in your video, cause I've seen those). I HATE the "boo" horror. most of the time it doesn't even scare me! They had ONE JOB!
помню это чувство, когда идёшь ночью в туалет по темноте мимо зеркала, видишь своё отражение, и какое то время не можешь вспомнить, что там зеркало и это всего лишь твоё отражение. И даже когда потом вспоминаешь, некоторое время тебе ещё страшно от происходящего.
I have a much more mundane version of the uncanny feeling. When I was a kid I live in the middle of a forest. A taxi would drop me at the end of a long single track road. Half way along the road there was a small stone quarry where I could see the front of my house as it sat on a hill before it disappeared from view. As I was walking home one day I saw my dad in front of our house. Nothing too strange about that. He was usually at work, but it could be a day off etc. But something gave me a really weird uneasy feeling of wrongness. He was a fair distance off but still recognisable as my dad. He was wearing a red sweater though and the feeling intensified. My dad didn’t have a red sweater. I’d never seen him wear red before, ever. Still, could be new? I walked the rest of the way slowly, wary, my scalp prickled with unease. When I got home my dads car wasn’t there and he wasn’t outside now. As I called out my mum approached saying to come in as we had visitors. My uncle, my dad’s elder brother was visiting which was rare as we lived far apart but he’d been in the neighbourhood. He looks a lot like my dad and it’s only close up you can see differences like my dads eyes are bigger, his nose is less pointy. He was dressed in a red sweater. It was such a relief. My brain had obviously noticed more details than my conscious mind and triggered the wrongness, “that’s not what you think it is” reactions. After that I always followed my instincts in situations. I may not know why but they are warning me for a reason and I trust them.
What specific parts of Dracula ‘92 do you mean? I always thought that movie was kinda ham-fisted. I’ll see your It ‘87 and raise you a Tommyknockers tho, the sequence where that kid learns how to make his little brother disappear in a magic act comes to mind, but I remember the whole thing being just eerie af
@@jonathanmulondo9206 to each their own. I personally couldn’t get past Keanu’s intermittent English accent lol the costumes and set pieces were pretty cool tho, it was what it was for ‘92. Dracula is definitely one franchise that could stand to see a film version that does the classic epistolary source material proper justice. I’d actually like to see it modernized somehow with texts and/or emails instead of handwritten letters.
@@jonathanmulondo9206 if you want unsettling, you should delve into David Lynch if you haven’t already. Basically the modern-day master of the uncanny. Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. Delightfully bizarre stuff. Edit: NVM I see that you put Lost Highway in the OP
Quite true. I was a scare actor this past Halloween season and extended my smile (showing off my missing tooth and other decayed teeth) and holding perfectly still. 95% of people (mostly) believed I was fake, making it effectively scary when I moved and did my thing. When I tweaked the smile, I heard some people whisper "Why does he look like... that?"
The only part of The Exorcist that has ever scared me was the dream sequence. Karras' mother singing silently on the street before descending into the subway is just creepy for me.
Same with the dream sequence in Excorcist 3 with the dream sequence in Heaven's waiting room. The band playing with unblinking smiles, the obviously out of place cameo actors just staring blankly, good shit
When I was in a mental hospital we had exercise every morning and the lady who exercised with us seriously looked like from a horror movie, I'm serious. She was _very_ tall and _very_ skinny, had weirdly long limbs and short torso and extremely big eyes with too much eyeshadow and looked like she was forcefully holding her eyes open and never blinked and a GIANT smile. Freaked me out every time I was getting up, half asleep and she bolted into my room and said "GOOD MORNING COME TO EXERCISE" every. Single. Day. Like it was a record being played, always sounding the exact same. I can pick up extremely subtle nuances in sound that most people cannot and it was always the fucking exact same. Pretty freaky for someone admitted for psychosis.
That sounds really scary in an already stressful situation. I think, people trying to create an emotion in others by exaggerating their own emotions (such as by smiling really big) also triggers that sense of wrongness.
in the babadook there is another scene that made me feel this and i cant forget. the part where she goes to the police station and realizes the babadooks gloves are there, looks at the policeman and cant tel whether shes crazy or that is real
I think it was ringu 2 but when the guy is rewinding the footage of the girl shaking her head and he keeps rewinding it and eventually it won't stop even when he tries to pause it and the ghost starts manifesting on the screen.
I once saw a female assistant in a surplus shop near my school stare at me with an unsettlingly deadpan look. Sometimes, whenever me and my friends would make our way home from school, we'd catch her staring through the window stiff as a mannequin. We never heard her speak, nor saw her around town. Probably the most uncanny thing about her was that her face looked too smooth to be real, almost like a life sized doll.
...with his brain exposed, presumably not dead, but so brain-damaged his body just locked up that way. Yeah, that got to me, too. So did Dean Stockwell in white makeup lip-syncing "In Dreams" into a utility light.
I remember seeing a robot as a kid at a science fair I felt so terrified by it walking up stairs and moving its "head" while everybody around me was so fascinated by it. Me. No. I wanted out and away from it so fast.
Thanks for including Ingmar Bergmans “Wild Strawberries”, that short clip. Check out “Hour Of The Wolf” for nightmares, his only real horror movie. Throughout his movie career he was a master of that uncanny feeling.
I had an uncanny dream once where I was walking through an Alaskan town, in day time even, and things just felt off. It was quiet, yet there were people around…they just stared at me. As I kept walking, they would start to walk behind me, still staring. They walked like normal people, but the way they did it made it look like they were walking with purpose. I was afraid every time I looked away that their pace might’ve quickened. I woke up from that nightmare rather quickly.
Not a movie but a game Crimson Snow reminds me of the uncanny. The way the woman monster walk is so creepy like she's walking on reverse and it's kind of evident on her hair. So weird
Imagine if a ghost in film was literally just the naked, lifeless, pale, motionless, malnourished body of an old man, but it keeps moving to different places and the protagonist has been told they will die if they touch it.
What is your favorite uncanny movie scene?
The shot inside the UFO in Nope, the sound design especially lends to the creepiness
The video scene from Lake Mungo! Or well, basically the entirety of Lake Mungo
The one that plays in my head when The Other arises within...
I mean I guess it’s got to be the mystery man encounter from Lost Highway! Btw, what’s the title of the B&W film at 1:16?
The refrigerator scene from requiem for a dream
This video actually made me more scared than any horror movie has in a long time.
It's like a concentrated dose of horror without any breathing room.
I had to watch it in intervals 😭
@@magnetdance I’m glad I’m not the only one 😭🤣
The first time I saw the woman fall in Kairo i jumped.
@@cavemanzach9475 it's one of the only times I can remember feeling like my blood ran cold during a movie scene. Just an overwhelming feeling of "oh shit".
You guys are pretty soft. :)
The uncanny valley effect is almost definitely a subconscious disgust at partly decayed human corpses
You are right.The uncanny valley is the moment you realize that a person you are spending time with is a narcissist. It is why it was termed this way. In modern film it is as you describe - the fear of the unknown.
@@Yatukih_001 That's not true at all, the term is derived from studies on robotics. It refers to a line graph on which the X axis is how similar a robot is to a human and the Y axis is how appealing a human viewer finds the robot's appearance. There's a steady trend upwards from 0% similar up until the point it looks very very similar but not quite the same as a human (let's say 95% for argument's sake). When it gets to that point the approval of human viewers plummets and they find them repulsive until they attain near-complete similarity (say, 99-100%). The "Valley" in uncanny valley refers to that sudden drop and re-rise on the graph as it approaches total similarity.
@@michaelwood368 whoosh.
The point isn't the terminology, the point is *why the uncanny valley exists at all*. We have had robotics for what, half a century? The visceral reaction of the uncanny valley speaks to something much more intrinsic to human psychology without an obvious evolutionary cause
@@Langtw They said "It is why it was termed this way.", to which I disagreed and gave the actual origin of the term, which is robotics.
"The visceral reaction of the uncanny valley speaks to something much more intrinsic to human psychology without an obvious evolutionary cause"
There is an obvious evolutionary cause, that's what my initial comment was about. It's a repulsion at fresh human corpses.
Also we've had robotics for centuries my dude.
yes partly, but also mimicry.
For me, it’s an obscure horror film from the ‘70s called “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death” The whole film has an uncanny feeling to it. What makes it more impressive is that a lot of these scenes are achieved in broad daylight. Something in the way it was filmed and the soundtrack gives me the chills to this day.
There is one scene in particular that stands out and it involves a lake and a very creepy looking pale woman rising out of the water. Nightmare fuel.
That film is a textbook on how to use the uncanny, and I agree with you: the moment when someone slides into the water, and then walks out as a different person... that moment stuck with me for decades.
there's another obscure 70s horror film called Messiah of Evil. it has scenes that can almost drove anyone to anxiety. it's really good actually, the cinematography and direction is very solid and still holds up to this day
Thanks! I'm adding this to my movie watchlist. I've always heard the title, from back in the Blockbuster Video Store days.
I've heard of this movie but never knew what the story or horror consisted of, but now that you've explained, I want to watch it now. Thanks 👌
@@Thewritingelf Right! Same here
The most uncanny thing I experienced in real life was as a child. There was this old abandoned property that the neighborhood kids rumored to be haunted. One night, I decided to try and explore it. Before going inside, I looked into a window, and saw something very large moving around in darkness. After observing for a while, I realized it was a white horse. It probably just wandered in through a busted entryway, but it blew my tiny mind. I still don't know why it scared me as much as it did. Living room horse!
Then that year, _Twin Peaks_ started airing. My parents made a big mistake by letting me watch it with them.
Watching Twin Peaks at any age is a big mistake. I'm 32 and I still have several scenes that are too visceral for me to ever watch again. Pure single-blend nightmare fuel.
@@NorthernRealmJackal Agreed. But it also has its good comedic points.
Twin Peaks just sticks with you. Clings like plastic.
Yeah, the scene with the white horse is interesting. They are said to be a symbol of death by native Americans. When Mrs. Palmer sees it, it's taken to be a premonition she has of Madeline's imminent death. Still great after all these years.
Your rationalization does not hold water.
Did you live in an area near any wild horse populations?
If so, how did it make it into your suburb without being detected and why would it enter that derelict property?
I don't doubt your experience, only your attempt to explain it away.
@@KittSpiken sometimes “rationalizing” is a defense mechanism our mind unconsciously uses when we face something beyond logic and that could defy our sense of reality
Whenever the concept of "uncanny" is mentioned, a particular tale comes to my mind, which I heard long ago on the radio while I was laying in my bed getting ready to sleep:
"One night, a man was walking through the forest near his house. Nothing special about that forest, he knew it like the palm of his hand, as well as the sounds of all the creatures living in it. It was like his kingdom, no reason to be afraid of it.
Then suddenly, he heard a baby's cry. Being both surprised and concerned by it (no families lived in the immediate vicinities), he followed the noise, until he reached a creek deep into the woods; the baby was laying there, on its shore. Couldn't be more than 5 months old.
As he grew closer to it, it noticed his presence, and the constant wailing stopped. Its stare was locked on him, as he came closer and closer. Then finally, once he was right in front of the baby, it gave him a wide smile.
*The baby had all of its teeth."*
i love simple short stories like this… it sounds like it came right out of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books 👹👻 i remember a story called The Farm Visitor that always stuck with me
Bruh, thank god Iam reading this on the toilet. That last sentence gave me mad primal fear. One hell of a story
i thought this posted 😩
The Farm Visitor
Author: unknown (jezebel dot com)
I was 7, my brother 10, my mom in her early 40s, my grandmother (her mom) in her 60's. So we were all cogent. No one was too young or too senile to not recall this nonsense. Yet, still no bloody answer.
Grandma lived on an isolated country road in NC that was named after her family since they were the only crazy fuckers who lived on the land for about 1000 acres. And I *do* mean crazy. We have stories about relatives that start with, "You remember that time Uncle Bob was in the ditch with a shotgun?" "WHICH TIME?!"
Her house had been empty for several weeks while she'd been visiting us in Florida, but we were all back, spending the weekend with her before trekking back to the Sunshine state. The house is in the foreal country, literally over train-tracks, past a salvage yard and her nearest neighbor (a cousin - everyone is related to everyone who owns a house on the road) ain't within screamin' distance. Yes, that seems to be a real system of measurement - "screaming distance."
It's early in the AM, like just before daybreak. We're awake because these are farm freaks who wake at the crack of dawn from sheer ingrained habit. We're eating cereal when we hear someone pull up outside. Curious, we all run to the big picture window that looks onto the front yard. There is a strange truck there. No one seems to be behind the wheel, though the engine is idling. The truck is... well, old, for one thing. It's old-timey like from maybe the 1930's? You could picture the Joad Family heading to California in this thing. It's rusted but it was probably once painted blue.
We stare at the thing, bewildered. Mom asks grandma if she knows who that is. Nope, not a clue, says grandma. She runs to get the phone to call her cousin and ask him to come up - she thinks maybe it's a hired hand and he's just at the wrong farm. Just as she asks him to come on down, the phone goes dead. Well, that's unsettling.
All at once, there is a loud, insistent banging on the front door. We all scream. My grandma, who is terrifyingly resourceful, huddles us all into the living room, away from a window where anyone can see us. Then, while mom, me and my brother tremble there on the couch, she grabs a serrated bread knife from the kitchen and cautiously approaches the front door. She peeks out a side window, very stealthily. She turns back to us and looks confused. She shakes her head, like, "No one is there." We all kind of breathe easier.
Then EVERY goddamn door in the house is banging - relentlessly. I can still hear it. Rhythmic and terrifying, like all the doors are about to splinter and crack. There were two doors in the basement beneath us, so the sound is also a reverberation at our feet. The three ground-floor doors are shaking - we can see them trembling and jerking on their hinges from our vantage point on the couch. Finally, mom runs to the window - either from a psychotic break with reality or terror, I have no clue. She cries, "Oh thank Christ - Cousin is here!" We run to her and peek out the picture window - there is no one that we can see in the yard, but we can't see all the doors from our viewpoint.
Cousin walks by truck with a shotgun in his hand. Cousin, it should be noted, has pretty much every gun ever made. He looks puzzled, looking at the rear of the truck, then he glances in the cab window and he stops. He goes pale, runs a hand down his face. Then he RUNS towards to house, towards us.
My grandmother flings open the kitchen door as she sees him coming. He shouts, "Everyone get behind the couch! Get DOWN!" He runs past us as we bolt for the couch. The banging starts AGAIN, all the doors and now we can hear the windows rattle. It's like a tornado or the end of the world. We are too scared to even scream. Cousin flings open the front door and fires the huge shotgun, once, BANG, deafening. As he does, the truck roars into life and it sounds like a train. We scramble up; the banging stops, mercifully. Cousin is advancing onto the lawn, gun leveled at the truck. We run behind him, wanting to be out of that shaking, quivering house and near the dude with the gun. The truck peals out, backwards, cutting across the yard and racing into a breakneck speed. Tires sqeal, rubber is burned. Cousin fires again and we all cower behind him. He blows out the back window with the sound of a thousand plates smashing into linoleum but the truck never even hiccups, just roars down the road. No tags, not even a vanity plate on the back.
There was NO ONE behind the wheel of that thing.
We all had a clear view. Everyone agreed. Not a driver in the cab.
Well.
Not anything we could SEE, anyhow.
The police were called. The phone line had been cut. There was not a single boot print in the entire yard except Cousin's, from where he'd run into and out of the house. Cousin reported that there had been no plate but when he looked into the cab, it looked like "something from a horror movie." He said there were all kinds of weird restraints - handcuffs, c-clamps, nylon straps - and he said the floorboards looked covered in what "smelled like" blood to him (Cousin was famous for his keen sense of smell and the window was down, so it's possible).
Cousin said he thought he saw a blur of something out the picture window and ran to fire the first shot, but "missed" because, once he stood there, nothing or no one was on the lawn or in the truck. Then it shot backwards out of the yard and out of our lives, leaving no answers, just a deep sense of unease every time we'd visit.
Grandma and Cousin have passed. Deeply religious people, they stuck by their unchanging versions of the story until they died. My brother, mother and I have never been able to figure it out - neither did the cops, I think it should be noted. We don't know how all the windows and doors were banging, and we don't know why we never saw a SOUL anywhere or how they could get around the sides of the house without leaving a trace in the damp earth.
@@iluvbooty this is gonna turn into a legit reading club...
@@ryuoh6928 i mean i wouldn’t mind discovering some more stories like these 👽
I would think the uncanny is a feeling that arises when our normal predictive models for reality are flouted. Being able to predict what will happen is one if our great survival skills. If we see actions that appear nonsensical, it means our existing models are incomplete. Fear (adrenaline) is very useful for learning, so we might just be trying to understand what so far we do not.
That's the best explanation i heard so far
Quite possible. It's something I've heard put very well that one of our main psychological flaws is that our fear response doesn't have a separate level for things that aren't life or death -- everything that stresses us is taken as a threat to our lives.
@@johnathanmonsen6567 Well stress can kill you. Thats why cancer is so rampant nowadays.
I saw a woman in a supermarket. She just stood still in front of a mirror starring at her reflection. I told my little sister something like, "nope, we're not going to the supermarket today" and we headed home.
Definitely a crackhead
You missed one more way to create the uncanny: messing with the camera footage, like when the screen becomes staticky for no reason or when someone is slowly walking toward the camera and the footage glitches and they appear right in front of you. They used that a lot in those creepy VHS films in The Ring.
Oh so true and yes the one where they're suddenly close to the camera gets me every time
@@tangerinestreet1512 One of the most effective jump scares that doesn't even need sound.
It's not the uncanny, it's jumpscare
As soon as you started playing That Scene from Mulholland Drive, I had perhaps the most violent onslaught of post-traumatic unease I've ever felt
Ugh god that clip should have warnings for people with heart problems
The guy behind the wall?
It's such a masterpiece of writing and direction, because the actual visuals aren't that terribly scary (look up a screenshot, the face is creepy but not scary in a traditional way). But the tension buildup and something unexpected in the timing of the reveal has it etched in the minds of all who've seen it.
wait when was it in the video lol
@@voidd.4095 He didn't show the full scene. You could still find it on RUclips. It's absolutely traumatizing if you weren't preparing for it 😅
Kairo (Pulse) is a work of ART
Amen brother
It created this terrible sinking feeling of dread and despair for me. It took me a while to get out of that funk upon my first viewing. Really stuck with me for a while. Honestly, I have a difficult time re-watching it, or even suggesting it to my friends. I don't want them to get pulled into the same depression I felt. That's not to say it isn't good . . . Just . . . Handle with care.
its so good... most horror cannot incorporate good character development. this movie excels in that
I'm not a fan of the ending, but its themes and individual scenes, especially the one mentioned here, are wonderful.
It's one of the most depressing movies I've seen. It's a good movie and I enjoyed it, but took me a while to "recover" from its effect.
Seems like there's a kind of uncanniness that is linked to survival instinct. Grins with sharp teeth, wide-open eyes and still or slow movements (stalking) can all be linked to the behavior of predators, and I believe they lose their impact if the viewer isn't specifically targeted. I believe these aren't truly "uncanny", but more overtly threatening.
What I think is a more pure "uncanniness" is for example the images in The Ring cursed video tape of the chair and the ladder. There's literally nothing scary or predatory in the picture of a ladder or a chair, yet these are some of the images I remember most vividly from that creepy tape when I watched it as a child.
this! that chair spinning gave me nightmares for days
Not a movie, but the titans in Attack on Titan are a great example of weird but disturbing. The way some of them move and behave are kind of goofy in by itself, but how strange they are make them very terrifying.
Yes! Specially in the first seasons when their origin was unknown, it added a lot to the mysticism and horror of watching big “humans” eating other humans
They are not disturbing
@@diegone080 don't worry... It's okay to be wrong.
@@diegone080 You would definetely be scared shitless If a 6'5 dude confronted you now imagine a 20 meter giant
@@donnienarco144 yes in real life, but i'm talking about their look in the anime
We had a story in our school back in 1999 that a kid hid away in a broom closet after lessons to mess around the empty school at night, but fell asleep in there. He woke up in the very beginning of the first lesson on the next school day, and when he came into the classroom he saw his exact copy sitting at his desk. It was acting like he would, messing with its books and chatting away with classmates, but when its eyes met with the original kid who just stood in the door shellshocked, it started screaming and howling and twitching and it shook itself apart into like chunks in a violent full body seizure. Then the teacher ran in and covered its remains with a sheet then scooped them into a body bag... That part freaked me out back when i was little. The teacher had a sheet and a bag, which means this happened from time to time so much so they had equipment for dealing with the doubles
This made me think of that scene from the Australian horror film, Lake Mungo, where a girl is filming as she walks alone in the dark. She approaches a figure in the distance, and as the figure gets closer, she realizes it’s her own bloated, decomposing corpse. The scene itself is horrifying, but what makes it truly unsettling is that it’s not some monster or ghost of a stranger, but it’s HER. SHE’S the figure - her own future corpse that’s supposed to be at the bottom of a lake. Truly unsettling and a highly underrated film.
The whole atmosphere in The Shining is uncanny; probably because the hotel feels like it has different time periods mixing in one… That’s where this movie’s genius resides. The timelessness of pure evil.
I can say with all certainty that Inland Empire is the creepiest movie of the last 30 years. Only David Lynch could make a lamp terrifying.
It has a lot of great elements, but it’s about an hour too long to me
I’m an avoid horror movie fan and nothing NOTHING has made me jump out of skin more then the usually beautiful Laura Durn’s face from the thumbnail. Nightmare fuel
The creepiest uncanny moment for me was when was from a show called "The White House." The president in the show started shaking hands with the air after mumbling incoherently through a speech. I realized something was wrong when I couldn't understand what he was saying. It was like he was possessed by an otherworldly force. But then he shambled away from the podium like a puppet being controlled by invisible stings and stuck his hand out to shake hands with somebody, but nobody was there. It was creepy and chilling at the same time. I don't know how they pulled off making a corpse look so lifelike and yet his movements are so eerie and unsettling.
Then, there was another episode where there was a gathering including some politician's family. The corpse of the president came shuffling up behind a little girl and placed its hands on the girl's shoulders. She tried to pull away, but he held her in place. Then, with the creepiest and most uncanny grin on his face, he proceeded to lean down to her ear and slowly sniff her hair. It whispered something about how hot she was going to look when she grew up and then placed its hands on her sides before backing up, but the grin never left its face. I still get goosebumps thinking back to that moment. Hollywood has really outdone itself in that horror show.
The Uncanny is definitely my favorite horror element. Excellent video y’all!
As a cinema projectionist, I sat in my chair next to the projector, watching the movie (not a scary one at all), when I clearly saw a ghost, a translucent figure walking through the auditorium in the middle of thin air. I nearly shat myself a second time when I realized that it wasn't a ghost at all, but somebody's reflection in the window. Somebody real had suddenly appeared behind me, having come into the projecting room by the unusual route (which cannot be overseen from said chair).
The Haunting (1999). When Eleanor looks in the mirror and her reflection is slightly distorted. You can't tell exactly what's wrong, but I remember getting very upset watching that scene.
This is such a good video. I felt like in a nightmare just from seeing the examples, really well curated! I think the reason we can't stand the uncanny is because of that feeling of chaos you mentioned, like the world we know has just been turned upside down. My boyfriend (who's really into psychology) tells me we usually establish a map of the world around us, we understand how it works, what to expect for the most part, etc, and it's like a framework for us to interpret events through. But when major trauma happens that "doesn't make sense" ie someone dies, or you get cheated on or some other major news, it feels like the rug has been pulled out from underneath you because your framework was wrong to begin with, or it is incorrect now. I think something similar happens with the uncanny, and that's why the nightmare situation is so effective IMO, because we expect the world to be a certain way, our framework for our expectations seems to be confirmed (eg it seems like a normal day) and then suddenly it's not what we're used to; something's wrong. Makes us feel that feeling of chaos. That's my interpretation!
It's true fear of the truly unknown. It creates a fear so deep in your being it's like being fearful for the lost of your soul. It's what causes people to largely freeze up because the brain freezes up because it cannot compute what it's encountered. However, it follows the rules of fight or flight (which also includes a third reaction which is paralysis). A smaller percentage of people will go into flight mode while an even smaller percentage will actually go into all-out fight mode. I actually learned how to combat my nightmares as a young child when I started getting ANGRY at my nightmares. I had so many that trapped me in my sleep (couldn't wake up from them or get away from whatever was confronting me), that I finally chose the option of fight. Summoning up so much anger that I channeled it towards the entity in the nightmare. The result? After a short battle of wills, my anger vs. the entity, it ended up in the nightmare dissipating or me waking up - problem solved.
A great example of uncanny Valley Is the film "Lake Mungo", so underrated and profoundly unsettling more than scary, the ending blew my mind
There is also that scene in Hereditary where annie is looking through her mom stuff and when she flicks the light off she sees her covered in shadow in the corner of the room, nightmare fuel
This is what I mean when I say I like creepy, not scary, *creepy* movies
The strangest uncanny valley I’ve experienced through dreams, was the same dream I was continuously having in my child room. All my settings were the same and I always felt that I was in a normal environment, but no matter who I spoke to - they wouldn’t be talking they’d be shouting. For example one was my mother - and her mouth would be moving very normally yet her dialogue was loud and really overwhelming, the amount of nights this kept me awake for
The most uncanny thing I experienced was when reading an article about an opera singer. There was a picture of a pair together with the singer. He had make up on up to the point where he looked downright terrifying. His face had the same color palet as that of The Joker from Batman along with the same freakish smile. He was also very overweight and combined with how his face looked it was just nightmare fuel. Worst of all. The article never mentioned how freakish he looked.
probably a fat suit
Can you name the article?
I also had an experience of the uncanny. A while ago i experienced a long period of a phenomenon that is called depersonalization/derealization or dp/dr for short. I'm still not sure what caused it (probably weed though) but it felt like i was living in the uncanny valley. Everything around me just looked and felt off. Almost like a copy of the world i knew before. I felt like i was living in a waking nightmare, felt like i was caught in between worlds, halfway between dream and reality. It was not psychosis, i had no delusions or hallucinations, i was fully aware of what was happening, but it constantly felt like my mind was slipping away. It never did though and luckily it eventually passed.
Careful with drugs kids.
And some people think that drugs are nice. Pathetic
I have only experienced depersonalisation/derealisation twice in my life (occurring from SSRI adjustments), and both of them were wholly unpleasant. The first time was utterly terrifying, because it had never happened to me before and I was not entirely sure what was happening, but it was like suddenly the indefinable thing that makes reality distinguishable from unreality was just... gone. It was exactly as disorienting and existentially destabilising as if an object had just turned and started talking to me.
@@sandyposs2693 that's an appropriate description. I felt the same.
I don’t know if this qualifies as “uncanny”, but damn is it a great moment that always creeps me out is in Jaws when the shark bites the guy’s leg off. It’s not what happens, it’s how Spielberg shoots it and how he uses an overhead shot to emphasize how huge the shark is, but as soon as it pulls the guy under it disappears. Not only is it powerful, but it’s deceptively quiet, hard to see, and intelligent. John William’s score goes from tense down to absent so that we simply hear the man take a last breath before being pulled under. It’s one of my favorite shots/scenes in film history and it’s easily the furthest Jaws delves into true “horror” rather than suspense/thriller or drama.
A recent uncanny movie scene that has stuck with me is from "Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum." There's that horror trope of someone's back being turned to the character, indicating something's not right. But the combination of face distortion and fast whispering when revealed freaked me out.
I fell that. The wide black eyes, the wet hair and the fast talking just made me look away.
OMG I LOVE THAT MOVIE. The black eyed woman scene always got me shock
The hotel in The Shining is a fantastic example of an uncanny setting. The main one that springs to mind is room 237. We are first exposed to it's negative and frightening connotations when Halloran tells Danny to "stay out!". Then when we enter the room, we're struck by a faux sense of normality, like an imitation of an inviting hotel room. It's hard to pinpoint specific elements which make it uncomfortable, and yet we feel fear. The normal room is accompanied by an ominous score, which features a heartbeat-like rhythm.. making the room feel alive. If we look more closely we can spot things that just look... off. There don't appear to be any windows. The carpet is strangely designed, like an optical illusion that draws your eyes towards the bathroom. The room and the pacing of the scene makes it feel like one of your worst nightmares.
Really interesting video that actually goes somewhat deeper into the concept of Uncanny Valley than when people usually talk about it. The examples you gave are great. I'd like to add that the best example of the embodiment of more subtle uncanny valley i've ever seen is Unedited Footage of a Bear by Alan Resnick. The whole short is full of these subtle but jarring little moment that just feel super uncanny and weird, like the doppelganger sprinting towards the main character in an odd way or the mother staring at her children through the window in a very strange position.
Lynch is an absolute master of that indeed. Other examples can be seen in Blue Velvet, where a disturbed Frank Booth breathes whatever from a breathing mask to calm himself down after assaulting a woman and yells 'baby wants to fuck', the singing scene after Jeffrey gets roughed up too.
Kairo and that walking ghostly figure scene makes my skin crawl, litteraly. There is another seriously disturbing scene, the revelation scene. Another contributinf factor is that both characters walk and move slowly, too slowly for humans, even when we walk slowly. Terrific flick overall.
Both Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini were uncanny af in Blue Velvet, but overall Inland Empire has to take the cake for me in terms of uncanny-ness. Brutal fking murder gets me every time lmao
I wanna watch all of Lynch's filmography, but I cannot deal with the nightmare after sitting through Mulholland Drive, Twin Peaks and TP: The Return. I'm 32.
@@NorthernRealmJackal aw, don’t give up now. There’s still Eraserhead, Fire Walk With Me, and Inland Empire lol the Twin Peaks return was insanely good, and I probably watch Mulholland Drive once a month, just to set that certain mood
@@NorthernRealmJackal Then you might wanna watch The straight story. It's a beautiful, peaceful movie. Very nynch-esque and at the same time, not lynch-esque at all. No nightmare fuel inducing imagery to be found here. And as always, a very nice soundtrack by the very recently deceased Angelo Badalamenti.
A David Lynch movie produced by Disney. No joke. Wrap your head around that.
Twin peaks: the return also has a lot of very uncanny elements, especially the scenes with cgi
definitely less about "the jolts' and more about the unsettling sensation of something not being "quite right", despite initially seeming familiar, it's skewed. Distance is a great unsettler as well as obscuring. prolonging a shot (very much something i learnt from David Lynch, also allows the viewer to have to go through more than one emption (per shot) so that something like Laura Palmer's mother (played brilliantly by Grace Zabriskie) crying/screaming in "Twin Peaks", can leave us feeling more than the initial shock she's experiencing. we can end up sensing pity, discomfort, but then because the scene goes on longer than 'we'd normally get from any other director (and the emphasis of the soap operatic music pushing the poignancy to extremes), it almost become ludicrously funny and pathetic, which is even more disconcerting. to be made to feel some kind of "humour" in what is essentially a traumatic scene makes us question this experiential empathy. "why is the director doing this to us?", "are we supposed to laugh or feel less sympathy for Sarah Palmer and what's happened to her daughter?". the longer we're made to look at a shot, i think the more likely our emotions will change towards that shot.
Freud wrote a brief book about the uncanny ("The Uncanny"). One more thing he connected to this feeling is repetition. The repetition of a place (like the hallway in "Shining"), of an event or of a movement.
Las year I saw "I'm thinking of ending things" on netflix, and there is this weird scene with a dog wich I found unsettling: basically we see a dog scrolling his head, a very natural movement, but the dog doesn't stop, he keeps moving the head over and over.
Partially why liminal spaces are so creepy
That’s dog thing is such a perfect example of this. It’s just went on for a little bit too long and was such a normal behavior but it was so deeply disturbing in a way that can not really be expressed
@@Creatureofclay it was also perfectly cyclical.
This reminds me of reaccuring settings in my dreams. Every once in a while I while have a dream with a setting that seems so familiar, I may even have a map of it in my mind, I just know where everything is. But the place doesn't really exist, and sometimes this will be a reaccuring setting in my dreams.
The uncanny is best felt when, in trying to explain the uncanny, everyone turns to you in unison, their smiles drop..
and they say
"The uncanny valley does not exist, it is just a human response to corpses"
That's uncanny
yes, I'm familiar with this effect, but mostly from the other end. when I went through my deep literally me phase people always looked at me like I was looking at them like an uncanny valley
Why do people say this? Everyone I've talked to in person has never hear of it so I rarely get to get others opinion on it save for online.
@@alc3062 why don't they say "uncanny valley"?
oh i hate that
"that one scene" from Kairo killed me.
The Mandela Catalog, an analog horror series here on RUclips, does a fantastic job at creating and playing with the uncanny to create horror. I highly recommend it!
A good example is the stonemason dream sequence in Sopranos with the lady(Livia?) standing on top of the stairs. Throughly disconcerting.
Hereditary. The moment where Tony Collette is crying hysterically and then drops into an expressionless stupor.
not a scene but a short film, possibly in michigan comes to my mind. i still get chillls whenever i think of it. awesome video btw
That scene from We’re all going to the worlds fair at 6:17 literally made my stomach drop.. 😳haven’t been this spooked in a min 😂
alex g getting his name out there doing the score
@@_scabs6669 I like to thank that film for introducing me to Alex G.
@@MrStubbs1995 Alex G introduced me to creepy pasta
A movie which is very much based on an uncanny crescendo is "The visit" by M.N. Shyamalan
The scene that makes me feel this way is the end of Sleepaway camp that heavy breathing and facial expression disturbs me so much, it gets so bad I gotta look away
Seriously, the first time I saw the movie, I thought the killer was a werewolf 🤣. The hairy body and grunt made my skin crawl.
I'm a full grown adult with kids and saw this for the first time recently and it actually kept me up. It's because of the crummy special effects of super imposing the teenage girl's unmoving face frozen with her mouth open on a grown man's body made it so deeply unnatural. Ironically, low budget made something 10x worse than any CGI could have done
Same. It's so creepy.
Ikr? The entire movie falls into the "so bad it's good" category, then all of a sudden that stare in the end is just.. unnerving to say the least. I've gone back and seen the film numerous times, but have always skipped that part. It really made me upset for some reason the first time I watched it.
List of movies?
First time I got the uncanny feels was when I saw the MV of Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. I was young and had nightmares. Those eerie smiles, it was like a surreal type of hell to me.
I still remember when i watch the 3rd Shrek movie, there is a scene where Shrek woke up and he saw Puss and Donkey had his children's faces. I found it funny yet terrifying at the same time.
One of my favourite moments of the uncanny appears not in a film, but in a short story: Turgenev's "Bezhin Meadow," when something appears on the grave of a drowned man -- something utterly simple, but utterly wrong.
No other filmmaker has disturbed me as much as David Lynch! I was 11 when Twin Peaks first aired and anything involving Killer Bob (slowly entering the living room and getting closer and closer and closer to the camera, crawling over the bed) freaked me out for life.
He goes even further into disturbing horror in Fire Walk With Me
that was excellent! I'm a big fan of the uncanny while, you know, hating it. The familiar twisted into the unfamiliar is such a good way of looking at it. Thank you.
That’s Freud definition, quite spot on but, strangely enough, not mentioned in this video
The communal cry in Midsommar definitely 🔥🖤😳
Lovely video, brother. I absolutely love this type of horror that relies more on subtlety instead of gore and unjustified jumpscares
This is your best vid yet!
This is EXACTLY the type of "horror" I love. Could you recommend some movies like that? (Besides the ones in your video, cause I've seen those). I HATE the "boo" horror. most of the time it doesn't even scare me! They had ONE JOB!
The most uncanny thing I lived? My friend sleeping. She sleeps with opened eyes. The first time, I panicked, now it’s just concerning.
помню это чувство, когда идёшь ночью в туалет по темноте мимо зеркала, видишь своё отражение, и какое то время не можешь вспомнить, что там зеркало и это всего лишь твоё отражение. И даже когда потом вспоминаешь, некоторое время тебе ещё страшно от происходящего.
Exorcist III - THE hospital scene...
Don't run with scissors!
This was super well done!
As usual, what a crazy good video ! I didn't saw earlier that you have 300k followers now, you deserved that since the beginning. :)
I love this video, thank you. I enjoyed every minute of it
Fantastic and insightful as always...
The dream scene in Wild Strawberries is so unsettling even if the film is so beautiful
Mine would be Bob screaming in Twin Peaks season 2 premiere, I think. Boy, that was unexpected, and made me scream and stand up, all shaken 😅
I have a much more mundane version of the uncanny feeling. When I was a kid I live in the middle of a forest. A taxi would drop me at the end of a long single track road. Half way along the road there was a small stone quarry where I could see the front of my house as it sat on a hill before it disappeared from view. As I was walking home one day I saw my dad in front of our house. Nothing too strange about that. He was usually at work, but it could be a day off etc. But something gave me a really weird uneasy feeling of wrongness. He was a fair distance off but still recognisable as my dad. He was wearing a red sweater though and the feeling intensified. My dad didn’t have a red sweater. I’d never seen him wear red before, ever. Still, could be new? I walked the rest of the way slowly, wary, my scalp prickled with unease. When I got home my dads car wasn’t there and he wasn’t outside now. As I called out my mum approached saying to come in as we had visitors.
My uncle, my dad’s elder brother was visiting which was rare as we lived far apart but he’d been in the neighbourhood. He looks a lot like my dad and it’s only close up you can see differences like my dads eyes are bigger, his nose is less pointy. He was dressed in a red sweater. It was such a relief. My brain had obviously noticed more details than my conscious mind and triggered the wrongness, “that’s not what you think it is” reactions.
After that I always followed my instincts in situations. I may not know why but they are warning me for a reason and I trust them.
Pulse, It 1987, Phantasm, Lost Highway and Dracula 1992 are great examples of uncanny valley in film
What specific parts of Dracula ‘92 do you mean? I always thought that movie was kinda ham-fisted. I’ll see your It ‘87 and raise you a Tommyknockers tho, the sequence where that kid learns how to make his little brother disappear in a magic act comes to mind, but I remember the whole thing being just eerie af
@@jasonkh4 any scene involving the castle in Dracula 92 were unsettling.
@@jonathanmulondo9206 to each their own. I personally couldn’t get past Keanu’s intermittent English accent lol the costumes and set pieces were pretty cool tho, it was what it was for ‘92. Dracula is definitely one franchise that could stand to see a film version that does the classic epistolary source material proper justice. I’d actually like to see it modernized somehow with texts and/or emails instead of handwritten letters.
@@jonathanmulondo9206 if you want unsettling, you should delve into David Lynch if you haven’t already. Basically the modern-day master of the uncanny. Eraserhead, Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, and Inland Empire. Delightfully bizarre stuff. Edit: NVM I see that you put Lost Highway in the OP
The uncanny is the feature of horror movie that I've always prefer, until I didn't know even the meaning of this word.
Thanks a lot for adding Lynch to this!
Quite true. I was a scare actor this past Halloween season and extended my smile (showing off my missing tooth and other decayed teeth) and holding perfectly still. 95% of people (mostly) believed I was fake, making it effectively scary when I moved and did my thing. When I tweaked the smile, I heard some people whisper "Why does he look like... that?"
I have been super interested in this sorta of thing in horror. Your video was great!
The only part of The Exorcist that has ever scared me was the dream sequence. Karras' mother singing silently on the street before descending into the subway is just creepy for me.
Same with the dream sequence in Excorcist 3 with the dream sequence in Heaven's waiting room. The band playing with unblinking smiles, the obviously out of place cameo actors just staring blankly, good shit
and the start with the dogs barking
That scene in the shining also works so well bc you know that nobody but them are there. But yes this too. Dope video
DEAD OF NIGHT (1945), when a ventriloquist is bitten by his own dummy, followed by a close-up of bloody tooth marks on the ventriloquist's hand.
This video scared me a lot and i was not prepared
When I was in a mental hospital we had exercise every morning and the lady who exercised with us seriously looked like from a horror movie, I'm serious.
She was _very_ tall and _very_ skinny, had weirdly long limbs and short torso and extremely big eyes with too much eyeshadow and looked like she was forcefully holding her eyes open and never blinked and a GIANT smile.
Freaked me out every time I was getting up, half asleep and she bolted into my room and said "GOOD MORNING COME TO EXERCISE" every. Single. Day. Like it was a record being played, always sounding the exact same. I can pick up extremely subtle nuances in sound that most people cannot and it was always the fucking exact same. Pretty freaky for someone admitted for psychosis.
That sounds really scary in an already stressful situation. I think, people trying to create an emotion in others by exaggerating their own emotions (such as by smiling really big) also triggers that sense of wrongness.
That's a very creepy situation, but I also kind off feel bad for the woman, seems that she's suffering from something
in the babadook there is another scene that made me feel this and i cant forget. the part where she goes to the police station and realizes the babadooks gloves are there, looks at the policeman and cant tel whether shes crazy or that is real
The crying in midsommar was hilarious I thought they were making fun of her at first
great vid!!
I think it was ringu 2 but when the guy is rewinding the footage of the girl shaking her head and he keeps rewinding it and eventually it won't stop even when he tries to pause it and the ghost starts manifesting on the screen.
this is legit the best way of fear that there is , it allways lets me traumatized but i keep serching for more sources of it
Yep.
You creeped me out, guys. 😨
I once saw a female assistant in a surplus shop near my school stare at me with an unsettlingly deadpan look. Sometimes, whenever me and my friends would make our way home from school, we'd catch her staring through the window stiff as a mannequin. We never heard her speak, nor saw her around town. Probably the most uncanny thing about her was that her face looked too smooth to be real, almost like a life sized doll.
I love this channel so much
Blue Velvet. When Jeffery discovers the man in the yellow suit just standing there- still, and apparently dead.
...with his brain exposed, presumably not dead, but so brain-damaged his body just locked up that way. Yeah, that got to me, too. So did Dean Stockwell in white makeup lip-syncing "In Dreams" into a utility light.
@@racookster but Ben was so fucking SUAVE, that candy colored clown
@@racooksterexactly. I couldn’t get past the white makeup.
I was shocked by the B&W film scene, with the old man.
It’s terryfing, what is the name of this movie?
Wild Strawberries
I remember seeing a robot as a kid at a science fair I felt so terrified by it walking up stairs and moving its "head" while everybody around me was so fascinated by it. Me. No. I wanted out and away from it so fast.
The ghost walk from Pulse is hands down the scariest thing I’ve seen put to film I still think about it to this day
goddamn the walking lady, The Babadook scene and that face at 9:22 gave the Heebie-jeebies
Thanks for including Ingmar Bergmans “Wild Strawberries”, that short clip. Check out “Hour Of The Wolf” for nightmares, his only real horror movie. Throughout his movie career he was a master of that uncanny feeling.
That's probably the most disturbing scene in the Babadook and the movie is full of disturbing stuff.
I had an uncanny dream once where I was walking through an Alaskan town, in day time even, and things just felt off. It was quiet, yet there were people around…they just stared at me. As I kept walking, they would start to walk behind me, still staring. They walked like normal people, but the way they did it made it look like they were walking with purpose. I was afraid every time I looked away that their pace might’ve quickened. I woke up from that nightmare rather quickly.
Not a movie but a game Crimson Snow reminds me of the uncanny. The way the woman monster walk is so creepy like she's walking on reverse and it's kind of evident on her hair. So weird
Loved the video
The Woman In The Furnace is actually called The Lady In The Radiator.
You've put my thoughts into video
Imagine if a ghost in film was literally just the naked, lifeless, pale, motionless, malnourished body of an old man, but it keeps moving to different places and the protagonist has been told they will die if they touch it.
Wow. This video is incredible
The Art behind the Alien franchise and in general H.R. Gigers works are so uncanny to me.
I knew I was going to be uncomfortable watching this video. Watched it anyway.
Thanks for the spoilers warnings!
Watching this with the lights off at 12 is not a good idea
That’s literally what I’m doing right now