I am currently teaching an online horror literature course in “Psychos and the Psyche” for graduate students in our MFA in Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University. This month we are studying Freud’s article on “Das Unheimlich” and reading a fascinating new anthology of horror fiction called The New Uncanny: Tales of Unease, edited by Sarah Eyre and Rah Page (Comma Press, 2008). The book features some of the best British horror authors alive, including Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, A.S. Byatt, Christopher Priest and many more…even Matthew Holness (whose double, Garth Merenghi, is echoed here). The book definitely deserved the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award for “Best Anthology” for its ambition, and it makes for an interesting study in all things Unheimlich.

Mirrors, Doubles and Masks... Cover art for THE NEW UNCANNY designed by Sarah Eyre and David Eckersall

The book, essentially, is a literary experiment. All its contributors were challenged to read Freud’s seminal essay on “The Uncanny,” and then write a fresh fictional interpretation in order to explore what the Uncanny might mean 100 years later — today — in the 21st century, “to update Freud’s famous checklist of what gives us the creeps.”

The introduction by Ra Page is an excellent survey of “The Uncanny” in its own right, discussing how Freud provided a “literary template…a shopping list of shivers” that horror writers have managed to return to again and again over the past century. Page explains Freud’s essay in one of the most clear and careful ways I’ve ever seen in print. When discussing the tales in The New Uncanny, Page notes that the majority of the stories feature either the double or the doll most often, and turns to another essay on the Uncanny — Rilke’s “Dolls: On the Waxwork Dolls of Lotte Pritzel” (1913) — to discover convincing reasons why. I love the way Page concludes the introduction: “[The Uncanny] puts us on edge — that place we really should be from time to time — and reminds us: it’s us that’s alive.”

Keeping with the experimental spirit of this book, I thought I’d ask my “Psychos and the Psyche” class to review the book as a group. I have assigned each classmate a specific story in the book, and asked them to write a response (in a comment to this blog entry) that addresses the following three questions:

1) How does the author try to “update” the Freudian Uncanny in this story?
2) Does the story succeed as a work of uncanny literature?
3) What does the story teach us about the Uncanny in today’s culture?

[Warning: spoilers are inevitable! SURPRISES WILL LIKELY BE GIVEN AWAY. And all rights and opinions belong to the commenting students themselves. They will appear intermittently between now and the deadline of Oct 6th.]

Update: You can read MY review of this book (with fewer spoilers) on The Goreletter here: “A Double-Take on The New Uncanny” — MAA

You can order The New Uncanny directly from Comma Press online (be careful to note the different options for overseas orders).

The Crowbot by 'Cozy Rampage'

“On a distant Ag planet, there are robotic scarecrows to mind the vast farming fields…” — From toy designer “Cozy Rampage”

There was a particularly uncanny moment last night on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  Wait for it:

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien – Wax Figures, Redux

The wax/flesh boundaries are blurred in unexpected ways in that video that leave even Conan himself speechless about the “horrifying” result.  Wax figures may be inherently uncanny on their own, but the status of these figures as pop celebrities — on a pop celebrity show — placed in a men’s room, shifts the ground of the moment enough to render things even more unstable than they otherwise might be.

While searching for this skit online, I came across a classic Conan video featuring “The VentriloChoir in Budapest” that also was quite funny, with hilarious mockery of the human/puppet divide.  The band is great, but something about the “mass” of ventriloquists, singing in harmony, generates an unusual response — felt as uncanny, but perhaps touchingly beautiful, in its own way.  Another instance of popular folk art turning the uncanny toward alternative ends:

Natural Born Puppets

I thank my colleagues at Seton Hill University, Laura Patterson and Maureen Vissat, for recently passing along a YouTube link to “Doll Face” by Andrew Huang. It’s a brilliant treatment of the relationship between media technology and gender identity, using uncanny structures like automatism and the compulsion to repeat to deliver its message.

The video sent me to Huang’s website, which features many stunningly uncanny animations worth sharing, analyzing, and potentially using in a college classroom. Huang’s art is more than “pop” but it appeals to the popular imagination through iconic treatements of domesticity-made-strange. His excellent short film, The Gloaming features deja vu in a disturbingly ominous way, reminiscent of the work of Jan Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay. Even his advertisements for Moo Studios use fantastic transformations of ordinary furniture and objects, giving them an unexpected life all their own. But his music video for Eric Avery’s “All Remote and No Control” is perhaps the most horrifying and uncanny of them all, as it represents the boundaries between the urban and the domestic under transgression by an almost Lovecraftian representation of nature — with chilling results. Here’s the version from YouTube, but a higher quality version is on Andrew Huang’s excellent website itself.

The Sultan’s Elephant is a giant marionette parade that is so artfully done, it strikes one as uncanny. As I wrote in November, most parade floats have an uncanny appeal, but in this case the doll’s appearance seems much less mechanical (ergo, more organic) than all the visible equipment and support needed to operate it. The eyes are what do it for me: on the elephant, especially, who’s segmented metallic trunk is a monstrosity. There is a backstory here, about an elephant who travels in a time machine, and it is inspired by the work of Jules Verne.

This is a traveling show that has been rebuilt as part of a much larger exhibit: Les Machines de L’ile Nantes (English: The Machines of the Isle of Nantes) — essentially a giant mechanical bestiary!

The video below reveals just how scary-yet-magical this all is. It’s a great instance of the uncanny in popular culture — and also a beautiful example of social/collective art.

[Thanks to writer Steve Vernon for calling my attention to this.]

Here in the USA, it’s Thanksgiving morning.  The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC is just getting started, and while I’ve never been a fan of parades, one can’t deny their significance in both small town culture and in big city holiday fests, alike. The news media treat them like spectator sports. For the event in NYC, millions attend – and millions more watch on television.

The spectacle of the parade “float” has always amused me. There are many variations and technologies put into practice for these objects, from novelty floats to “balloonicles” — and many of them are fictional characters from animation history, appealing to children; chief among them are animal figures, simulacra of the actual animals which used to be carted down the street (ala circus parade). The aesthetic of “balloon animals” sends us back to our childhood, here returned larger than life and, often, animistically empowered.

Which is another way of saying that these moving platforms and inflated creatures don’t merely “parade” down the street: they spectrally float, seemingly on their own accord, and their creators do all they can to hide the mechanics that move them. Parade floats and balloons glide down main street, like stages built upon magic carpets or gigantic ghosts. The spectrality of the parade float is what lurks behind the laughable logic of the possessed Stay Puft Marshmallow Man (pictured above) who attacks Dan Ackroyd and crew in the horror-comedy, Ghostbusters (1984). Parades command attention because of the communal fascination with public spectacles, and the human feats of greatness (from celebrities to heroes to marching bands) compete against spectacles of technological wonder and art. Parade floats are in every way an exhibition of the popular uncanny.

I first began thinking seriously about this notion during an ad I witnessed at the movie theater last week: a rerun of the following Coca Cola Ad aired during the 2008 Super Bowl:

In this advertisement, cartoon characters (Stewie Griffin and Underdog) virtually fistfight over a Coke bottle, careening against buildings and bouncing off one another in ways that look “realistic” — yet also impossibly conscious of what they are doing. It is a neat trick of camera work and choreography (even if one assumes CGI is involved, the trickery is pretty savvy), lending the floats a sense of autonomy in their motivated quest to beat each other to the prize: a bottle of coke. A more peaceful and happy Charlie Brown comes almost out of nowhere to steal the bottle away from the distracted pair, his permanent grin expressing his glee. In the final frame, the Charlie “has a Coke and a smile.”

There’s a lot more going on here than first meets the eye. For instance, the ad uses a lot of “reaction shots” of human beings looking up to the sky or out of their skyscraper windows, which makes the constructed scene appear to be “really happening” in the city. One might even miss, in all of these reaction shots, the inside joke to fans of the Peanuts comic: right before Charlie Brown wins the day, a little brown-haired girl walks in the city park, looking up to the sky while holding a football, as if she was Lucy (known for pulling the ball away from Charlie just as he kicked at it — sending him flying in the air and landing flat on his back. This joke doesn’t just give give Charlie his wings — it elides the difference between human and non-human, real and imaginary, in the few seconds it appears on air. Film, of course, does this anyway: actors are not “really” there before us, but trace images, recorded in light and rendered larger than life.

Even more puzzling: the Coke bottle itself, a float, a commodity as big as the characters who seek it. Clearly it is far too much to consume in reality — yet they are driven to drink it. Unlike the other balloon creatures, it does not act in human ways, but instead seems to function more like a symbol that is preordained to magically find its way to Charlie’s hands. That is, it is a transcendent signifier for the commodity itself that they all represent.

This is all fantasy, framed to pitch a product by processing cultural icons that include not only the floats, but also the “larger than life” setting of the city itself. There may be an uncanny echo of the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks operating in the political unconscious beneath this Coke advertisement. The “soft” bounce of these objects from childhood against skyscrapers may reflect a repressed fear of air attack on the city, here returned to the television screen as something akin to a childhood memory, a flight of animated fancy. The only people “threatened” by the horror of the giant balloons are those who aren’t paying attention to the spectacle in the streets, caught off guard. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the simple ad, but the imagery is striking.

The above image — appearing only for a second on the screen — seems to align Coke with the majesty of the city’s greatest icons. But it also implies so much more than that, especially given the context of “fighting” that it is embedded within. And in the image above, what are we to make of the clouds — the two lines like tracers of exhaust from two airplanes — arcing behind (or toward?) the Chrysler Building, while the shot as a whole is uncannily framed by two other “twin tower”-like buildings? I think it is patently obvious that this image is about fear as much as it is about fantasy.

One must wonder what the narrative of this ad might be saying about consumerism in relation to such cultural anxieties as global terrorism. Does it suggest something about competition, world trade, and terrorism? Is America the Charlie Brown, fooled by so many Lucies, so many wars? I’m not sure what it means, exactly, but I think there is some bottled up anxiety in this advertisement, felt as uncanny when it is uncapped and released.

For Halloween, the readers of Oobject voted for their Top 12 Videos of Creepy Automata. A great theme, from cats in a milk churn to maniacally laughing dolls. One of my favorites is this clip of a Decaying 1880s Automaton Harpist by Vichy:

I won’t belabor how uncanny the signifiers are here, from the doll’s movement on its own accord to the way the eyes seem to cast around and occassionally return one’s gaze. The decaying apparatus is like one of Hans Bellmer’s dolls stirred into life by an electrical current. But it’s the fluid movement of the dead hands and arms that get me — human in their plucking of the strings of an absent (ghost?) harp, as the doll plays along with a creepy tune. Unheimlich!

If you go to Oobject, be careful. You might find yourself spending hours on end in their wonderful “weird” category. Or their list could inspire a day- or week-long browsing expedition in youtube for “automata.”

[See my related discussion of medical mannikins on Oobject in a previous blog entry.]

Today I stumbled onto Oobject — a weird multiuser “curations collection” that exhibits photos that members spot online, organized by offbeat themes.  One of the most uncanny exhibits of them all is a collection of “medical manikins”. The above shot by Tomer Ganihar (a shot taken as part of a series he did in an Israeli hospital in which detailed mannequins of men, women and children maimed by war and terror are used to train doctors and medics) is my favorite.  This doll — head back, mouth agape, eyes askew, probed with wires and tubes — does not merely trigger an orthodox response of the “uncanny” because it is a doll that seems human, but more specifically, it looks like a dead or dying human, expressing suffering.  Indeed, it appears to either be crying out for help or having expired doing so.  The well-chosen angle of Ganihar’s shot, the pose, and so forth drive the image of helplessness home.  And the fact that it is actually an instrument used by doctors as a substitute for a living body makes it all the more disturbing, perhaps because it is as if the real world practice has “magically” caused the doll itself to suffer!

On a related note, here’s an uncanny photograph that my friend Bruce Siskawicz sent me awhile ago.  It has haunted me for some time, and I have mused over what sort of odd person would collect such dolls or have them “mooning” out the window:

On Oobject, I discovered that those creepy “things” in the window are most likely infant manikins that the Red Cross uses to teach CPR!  This knowledge does nothing to change my reaction to the image:  it looks like they are trapped inside the window, darkly askew.  The “twinning” of the dolls in a virtual shot-reverse shot symmetry only makes it more Unheimlich!

[Related link:  Here you can see a funny gag from a German TV show that uses CPR dummies in uncanny ways.]