The Uncanny Valley

The concept of The Uncanny was first thrown out there by Ernst Jentsch, a German psychiatrist (“On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” 1906), and later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919). I describe The Uncanny to my students as the unsettling feeling you get when something that SHOULD be familiar is wrong somehow, or almost recognizable but not quite. Freud used the example of mannequins and wax figures–they are so life like, so realistic looking, but not actually real. Not human. We feel this way when children’s dolls are too realistic, too, and when a portrait’s eyes are done so well they seem to be watching us.

The Uncanny Valley, then, is the valley between two mountains marked “Safety” and “Danger.” (“It’s just a doll,” we reason with ourselves, or “It couldn’t be watching me, it’s a painting,” etc.) And this is an idea you can apply to your horror and speculative stories to add a creeping sense of dread.

To further demonstrate the feeling of The Uncanny, here are some questions I like to ask my students. The result? Some shake their heads vehemently, or say “No. Nope. No.” Even imagining these things creeps them out.

-What if, one day, you notice your sibling is suddenly right handed when you know, their whole life, they’ve been a lefty? And when you ask them about it, they say “Stop, I’ve always been right handed.”

-What if, one day, you notice that your best friend’s laugh is different? It’s deep and guttural when it used to be light and tittering.

-What if, one day, you come home to your apartment and all the rooms are arranged opposite of what they were–a perfect mirror image of what you think you remember?

And that’s the thing with The Uncanny–it makes you question yourself, your memory, your perception. Because you don’t WANT things to be scary. So you rationalize. You tell yourself you’re misremembering. Except you KNOW you aren’t.

Something close to this is deja vu; when you could swear you’ve done something or been somewhere before, but to your rational knowledge, you haven’t.

We feel it when we get lost sometimes: “Wait, did I pass that building already? Am I going in circles?” In a fictional narrative, you can make it worse: The person could swear they’ve passed a building already, but they haven’t turned at all–they’ve been driving in a straight line.

Let’s make the above examples worse, too:

-Not only does the protagonist’s sibling suddenly have a different dominant hand, but the freckle that’s always been under their left eye is gone.

-Not only does the protagonist’s best friend have a different laugh, but they bring up a story from their shared childhood that the protagonist has no memory of.

-Not only does the protagonist come home to an apartment that is the opposite mirror image of what they know their home to be, but everything is a slightly different color–the couch and carpet and draperies and bathroom tiles–each a shade darker or lighter than it should be.

Then, like every good writer, you’d ask yourself, “Okay, what’s next?” How does the protagonist react to this subtle, but jarring, change? What are the implications? And the plot becomes a chain of cause and effect. 

So, the next time you’re looking for a subtly creepy story component, why not try out The Uncanny? That valley between safety and danger, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, is nowhere you want to be in real life, but for a story, it can be the perfect place to plunk down your protagonist and see what happens.