Victor Cocco , The Wonderfully Mysterious World of the Uncanny
This uncanny feeling, this feeling that creeps under the skins of everyone ranging from all ages, delivering ice to their veins, causing people to doubt reality. It’s a feeling everyone deals with at some point of their lives and some of the simplest of things can trigger this uncanniness in everyone ranging from realistic dolls to movies to even phobias such as arachnophobia or ophidiophobia (fear of snakes). With the proper knowledge on the subject, haunted trails/ houses as well as Hollywood have learned how to exploit this fear to give their audience the proper scare they’re looking for when they either come to trails/houses/theaters or when they purchase the film on Blu-ray or DVD. The idea of the uncanny was first theorized by Sigmund Freud and many other theorists elaborated on this idea including Masahiro Mori, who discovered this uncanny valley which maps out items that resemble human life and people’s reactions to them. Donna Harroway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” goes in detail on cyborgs being apart of everyday human life. To some, this idea of having cyborgs that not only look, sound and move like a human, is extremely uncanny; giving these people an uneasy feeling of not knowing which ‘human’ is real or not. Freud’s idea of the uncanny can be seen in a multitude of movies and other sources of media. For example, Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” is a great example of being in the realm of the uncanny. With specific angle shots of certain scenes and the way the setting is created, “The Shining” proves that Stanley must’ve read up on his Freud. Further more, Harroway’s piece can also be seen in some movies such as Alex Proya’s “I, Robot”. Both Kubrick and Proya deal with the uncanny in each of their films and each film does an excellent job in diving into different depths of the uncanny.
