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• 1 media/maxresdefault.jpg 2017-12-15T00:11:50-08:00 The Uncanny and Children 17 image_header 2017-12-15T14:26:43-08:00       The uncanny plays on the film characters' childhood memories that they try to forget. Even though the events happened when they were children it still affected them when as adults. This also happens in the tale of The Sand-Man. Freud mentions The Sand-Man and the effect it had on children in his writing about the uncanny. The Sand-Man is a made up figure that only comes around when children do not go to bed when they are supposed to, another version of what people refer to the Boogeyman now. The idea behind it is to frighten the children so that they will go to sleep. If the children do not go to sleep, then the Sand-Man comes and rips out their eyes. Once he takes their eyes "he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the moon to feed his children" (5). What really makes this tale spooky is that not only does the Sand-Man rips out the eyes of children, but he goes and feed the eyeballs to his children. In the story there is a young boy, Nathaniel, who never sees the Sand-Man, but hears stories about him. An associate (Coppelius) of Nathaniel's dad stops by one day, and Nathaniel is immediately put off by how strange the man looks, and immediately references him with the Sand-Man (5-6). Nathaniel took something unfamiliar, the Sand-Man, and mixed it with something that was familiar, his dad's associate, which makes the Sand-Man so uncanny to Nathaniel.  Every time Nathaniel sees Coppelius, even when he becomes an adult, Coppuelius is the exact replication of the Sand-Man, and bad things always happen. 
         
          In Flatliners death is something the medical students are unfamiliar with, because they never experienced it. Death combines with something that they are familiar with, their repressed childhood memories, which then makes death uncanny for them. In Hollywood, filmmakers that make horror movies with children make the film uncanny because the children's worst nightmares come to life. In the film IT (2017), Pennywise the clown can shape shift into many things.Stanley, a character in the movie, is afraid of a picture that hangs in his dad's office. In order to scare the boy, Pennywise turns into the exact picture that frightens him. Pennywise also does this to every other child in the movie. The only time that Pennywise stays himself is if he is around multiple children at once, or if a child is afraid of clowns. Sigmund Freud also talks about certain dolls can be uncanny because their is no clear distinction on whether the doll has life or not, because it looks so real (8). If one can clearly distinguish whether or not a doll is alive, then it is not uncanny. Films like Child's Play (1988) and Annabelle (2014) play with this concept because people cannot distinguish if the doll is alive or not. In both movies, dolls that are meant for children to play with spring into life and do sinister things.