What is the uncanny valley to you?

Post Reply New Topic

Personally what gives you the creeps that isn't intended to be that scary?

One of the things that's in the uncanny valley for me is hair that is in a red or orange afro, with a pale, young face, like Winnie in Hocus Pocus or that queen or whatever she is in the Alice in Wonderland Through the Looking Glass film. Looking at people like that seems to scare me for some reason, and it's probably an uncanny valley feeling.

Also the animatronics at Disneyland gives me the creeps, especially when they malfunction. In fact I've actually had nightmares about them before. Disneyland itself scares me because of all the hundreds of robots. God help me if I ever went there.

What gives you a discomforting or uneasy feeling?

Henchmen getting killed in action movies.

I feel very weird but it always bothers me seeing them get killed by either the hero or their villain boss. They get treated so callously and sometimes they die some pretty gruesome deaths because they are just following orders.

Even seeing innocent people get killed in horror movies doesn't bother me as much as that.

Also whenever the power in my house goes out for whatever reason I tend to panic.

I find it eerie the way some people drive. They make weird, unnecessary, lane changes and sometimes they look as if they can't decide where they want to go. Also, when people are in my blind spot when I'm backing out of a parking place, it's really eerie.

I've seen plenty of dolls and puppets that were Uncanny Valley. Usually with the dolls it's because they were designed to be super realistic, like those "reborn" babies that some adults collect. They look like they're dead!

But some adults don't just collect the dolls, they use them as therapy for "Empty Nest Syndrome" or because they're unable to have children but want to, so I don't really know.

There have been a lot of puppet shows that try to be like the Muppets, but instead of being cute and lovable (or even ugly and lovable), they're so creepy I don't know how kids sleep at night after seeing them. For example there's low-budget knockoff of Sesame Street called Peppermint Park where the puppets are not only really ugly but the acting and "education" is hilariously terrible. And Christian show puppets are *always* like this.

Very cheap and poorly-made CGI animation is also like this. The characters just looks so hideous. This also happens a lot in Christian kid's shows, along with Video Brinquedo and Spark Plug Entertainment, both of which make terrible knock-offs of successful or popular Pixar and Dreamworks movies. They have to be seen to be believed, and then unseen to keep your sanity.

I was never a fan of puppet shows when I was a kid. Some of them were kind of creepy.

Japanese dolls

Looking at myself in a mirror and, especially, watching videos of myself (I only discovered this quite recently when smart-phones became ubiquitous.)

The mirror thing doesn't bother me too much, and often makes me giggle, as I've always had that weirdness; my brain seems to get a bit confused about whether it's controlling my real body or the reflection, and then gets flummoxed when my motions don't quite match what I intended. Watching video of myself is really freaky, though; I recognise my own appearance, but my facial expressions, posture, gait, gestures, prosody, etc. just don't match how I imagine myself in my head at all - it's like watching a replica of myself which has been very badly programmed to copy my behaviour.