Horror That Lingers - How the Uncanny Instills Fear - Extra Credits

How long has it been since somebody created a piece of horror that really stuck with you? One that chilled you to the bone and left you looking behind your shoulder, or made you pause before you turned off the lights at night. It's been some time for me. Most of the horror movies released today just don't really get to me. Even a great film like Cabin in the Woods, it's strong because it's a deconstruction rather than because it offers us a real step into the darkness. And horror games have been trending further and further from that grim reflection of ourselves that we saw in the old Silent Hills or Fatal Frames. Some horror games have drifted toward the action-packed zombie-stomping power fantasy side of things. Experiences which may be intense from moment to moment, but certainly don't qualify as true horror. Other horror games, especially recently, have delved into the jump scare hide from the monster type of experiences. Games which are very much about terror, but they aren't exactly what I'm talking about either. I'm talking about real psychological horror. The kind that sticks with you long after the experience is over. PT is in many ways masterful. Something we

should talk about in its own right, but it stands as an exception to the long-standing rule. So what's happened? At first, I thought perhaps it was just that I've grown old, that the terrors of my youth are but fancies in my age. But then I came to the realization. Much of modern horror is actually created to make us feel safe. Sure, it'll give us a jump scare here and there. It'll throw in some gruesome imagery, and it'll surprise us or fill us with disgust in the moment, but these feelings are meant to be fleeting. You're intended to leave the theater or put down the game and laugh about how silly you were to jump or to be frightened. You're supposed to feel powerful for not being scared, or for knowing that you can overcome that horror. You're supposed to go joke over coffee about how not scared you were, or snuggle up to a loved one. In general, you're supposed to leave the experience aware of how comfortably safe your real world is. And it's not that this is supposed to happen on a conscious level. Often, only the best creators of this form of horror are even particularly aware they're doing it. But insofar as this form of modern horror works, it works because it leaves you on some subtle level feeling safer about the real world we live in, rather than leaving you scared of the possible world

it created. Now, there's nothing wrong with this kind of horror. I think it has its place, but it's not what someone like James wants, and he will be the first to admit that perhaps he carries some damage with him. That wanting horror experiences to linger in one's mind long after the experience is over might be kind of weird, but it's what he looks for when he enters into a horror experience. He wants to feel that fear. He wants to know that side of himself. There are a thousand thousand ways to do this, as we explore different sides of fear, some of which we've talked about in previous episodes, but today we're going to go into more depth talking about one, the uncanny. The uncanny is that sickly creeping sense that something is wrong. It's this feeling that you can't shake, that gets under your skin. You can't put your finger on it, but something is out of place or not quite right. Long, long ago, we talked about the uncanny valley, that place where a robot or a 3D model looks real enough for your brain to interpret them as being human, but something about them is just slightly off. Enough so that it triggers a feeling of revulsion and disgust. That's sort of a microcosm of the uncanny in general. You ever wonder

why a flickering light in an otherwise normal scene makes it so much more ominous? It's not even about fear of the dark. We get this sense even when we see a flickering light in an otherwise well-lit scene, and it's not just the irritation of something flashing on and off, either. Otherwise, we'd just be feeling annoyed rather than unsettled. It's the fact that it doesn't belong there. Our brains understand what a normal house or a hallway looks like, because we see them every day. On some subconscious level, we know that the flickering light is wrong somehow. Any well-maintained place wouldn't have such a thing. Thus, it makes us tense. It makes us feel like something is wrong in this room, and it makes us look for whatever else might be wrong. It sets up that anticipation that horror pieces so desperately need before they throw the main scare at you. David Lynch is a master at this. If you want a doctoral class on the uncanny, just watch Twin Peaks. Every scene, every line of dialogue, even the way the actors deliver their lines is stilted and unnatural, yet not so unnatural that you can resign it to the realm of fantasy. The reason we can so easily brush aside many of the monsters in modern horror is

that they so clearly exist outside of anything we would accept in our real world. And because they obviously can't exist in the real world, all you have to do is put down the film or the game and bam, you're safe. The true master of horror's trick is convincing us that their monster might exist in our real world, and the uncanny is a very good tool for achieving this. If Gone Home got to you at all, it's because of the uncanny. There was nothing actually frightening in that game, but they intentionally tried to leave you with a sense of unease as you explored that house, and they used the uncanny to do it. These sorts of moments can be found in a lot of games, usually in the environment design or the enemy models. Silent Hill 2 is perhaps the game most famous for playing on our sense of the uncanny. When you weren't in the other world, you were in a world just like ours, only subtly and horribly wrong. There, the most disturbing moments usually weren't during combat with the monsters, but rather your encounters with other human beings in the town, who were just off in a way that you couldn't totally put your finger on, but boy were they unsettling. In fact, I would go so far as to say that many of the best horror works in any medium use the

uncanny as one of the key drivers behind the tension and release cycle that's so essential to horror, and we've never talked about the tension and release cycle in horror before. That is shameful. Oh, and PT is the perfect example, too. You know what? Screw it. People, find yourselves some more costumes. We're keeping this Halloween thing going. See you guys back here next week.