Academic text review

Reviewing Sigmund Freud's text "The uncanny" 1919

An academic text that has influenced the creation of the practical response but also helped to better understand how to label the direction in which all of my work takes, this of course is the uncanny valley which has been theorised and investigated by Sigmund Freud and his works on the valley are very rarely recognized by people other than those who adopt his theories and explanations. The text I am reviewing is his essay entitled “The Uncanny” written in 1919 by Sigmund Freud, it explores various realms that the uncanny valley creates but this isn't from an animation point of view, due to the fact it was written years before animation was created, but it explores the fundamentals of the uncanny and describes some of the elements and theories involved with the uncanny.

Freud starts quite vague, he states that the uncanny’s purpose is to insight dread into the viewer, he goes on to say that the uncanny is representative of all things fearful which doesn't relate to my previous understanding of the uncanny valley, but as we move on through his essay we discover that he elaborates on this theory and sheds some light of other possible representations of the uncanny.

This next segment is the most crucial part of the essay, as it explains one of the crucial fundamentals of the uncanny valley, and it reflects on the work in which people have done and also creates the fine line between the uncanny and horror. This is described by referring to one of the first people to explore the uncanny, Ernst Jentsch, he goes on to explain that the effect and representation of the uncanny all depends on how susceptible the viewer is to such aesthetics as the uncanny, similar to horror, some are more susceptible to horror films than others.

The main debate in Freud’s essay is trying to interpret how all things terrible, represented by the uncanny, can seem so familiar to us and in what circumstances the familiar can become uncanny and frightening. One theory that has been reflected upon by my animated response is one supported by Jentsch’s works, this is the theory: one of the most successful devises in creating a story is to leave the viewer into questioning whether a certain character or figure is a human being or an automaton and to do so by not directing the attention directly towards his uncertainty, as depicted in the animated response, the reason in which the viewer is running through the hotel is due to a mannequin that seems to be following the viewer. This is exactly what Freud was explaining, the audience doesn’t know for sure whether the mannequin is a real human or an inanimate objects being controlled by a third party, which adds to the overall uncanny aesthetic, it is only when there is a jump scare that it is questionably a horror, but this just leads me to slightly disagree with this text due to the way that if there wasn’t a jump scare there wouldn’t be anything frightening about the animation but instead there is just a creepy aura because of the uncertainty described by Freud which proves that there doesn’t have to be horror for something to be uncanny.