ĒlectricaestuŠ: They are watching

Warning; the following post is about the creeps, literally about why people feel like something is creepy, so if you are an easy scare and would not like to see things that are designed or specially hand picked by myself to get a reaction of fear out of you the reader, than please leave.

You have been warned.

The feeling of fear can come in many ways, and it reflects in our language. Things that are horrible are horrific, it is bad no matter how you look at it. But things that are terrible are not terrific. This brings us to the kind of fear that i want to talk about, terror or the creeps. The feeling you would get if you looked at yourself in the mirror, but instead of you being there, there is a copy of you with one thing changed, but you cant tell what it is. That is Terror.

Stephen King said this amazingly, he said “The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”

When it comes to Terror there is some hypothesis that goes alone with this, it is called the Uncanny Valley. This states that "as the appearance of a robot is made more human, some human observer's emotional response to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong revulsion. However, as the robot's appearance continues to become less distinguishable from that of a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once again and approaches human-to-human empathy levels"

A graph of this looks like this.

This explains why a corpse is weird or scary looking. Because something has changed about it, something that moves it from being Human, but only a little. However this graph only shows a few things. I went on a search for things that also invoke a fear response because of this exact thing.

This video causes the creeps, but it isn't just because it is creepy but because there is something off, but it still holds that Humanoid look to it. Its limbs are to long and the body is misshapen.

This video can also cause the feeling of terror because of its attempt to replicate a humanoid c=shape but changing something alone the way that makes it look as though something is off.

This does the same thing, although this is getting farther away from human like.

The movie Eraserhead is a fantastic example of this.

Lets move away from that and get onto something other than videos. Dolls. Dolls are creepy because yes they imitate humans but they also give off the feeling of being dead, there is no 'life' coming from them. And this is the same reason as to why corpses and zombies are scary.

These pictures can incite fear based on that they try to be human and yet they can not be. Forever staring at anything.

This picture is called The Hands Resist Him, it was created by a Bill Stoneham. According to the artist the boy is supposed to represent himself, and the doorway is supposed to represent the dividing line between the 'real' world and the world of fantasy. The doll next to him is supposed to represent the guide through each.