The Walking Dead and our fascination with the Uncanny

“We find your Olympia quite uncanny, and prefer to have nothing to do with her. She seems to act like a living being, and yet has some strange peculiarity of her own” (Hoffman, 14).

These are the words of Sigismund, friend of Nathaniel, in the story “The Sandman” by E.T.A Hoffman. Freud, in his essay about “The Uncanny”, defines the word as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1). Jentsch, whom Freud quotes as the starting point for the discussion of the Uncanny, likened this uncomfortable feel of “unfamiliarness” with the living doll in Hoffman’s story. Freud quotes Jentsch as defining the Uncanny as “‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate’; and he refers in this connection to the impression made by wax-work figures, artificial dolls and automatons” (Freud, 5). Although Freud dismisses this idea quickly, explaining that the purpose of Hoffman’s story was not about Olympia, the living doll, but more about the Sandman and the fear of castration. Masahiro Mori, a Japanese professor of engineering, took Jentsch’s and Freud’s concept and expanded it to create the idea of ‘The Uncanny Valley’. First published in 1970, Mori’s essay explains the uncanny as a strong aversion to objects that hold very human traits, but are, clearly, not human.

Mori uses the Japanese word, “‘shinwakan’ — a created concept that has been described in English as ‘familiarity,’ ‘likableness,’ ‘comfort level,’ and ‘affinity’” as a basis, but as explained in an article by Livescience.com, on the translation of Mori’s original essay, the English translation fail to capture the true meaning (Livescience.com). Karl MacDorman, a translator for Mori’s essay, is quoted by Livescience.com, explaining the concept:

“‘I think it is that feeling of being in the presence of another human being — the moment when you feel in synchrony with someone other than yourself and experience a 'meeting of minds,’ MacDorman said. ‘Negative “shinwakan,” the uncanny, is when that sense of synchrony falls apart, the moment you discover that the one you thought was your soul mate was nothing more than smoke and mirrors.’”

Mori’s Uncanny Valley is therefore illustrated as a graph wherein “in climbing toward the goal of making robots appear human, our affinity for them increases until we come to a valley, which I call the uncanny valley.” (Mori, The Uncanny Valley). Mori’s graph shows a disturbance when people are faced with corpses, but suffer greater disturbance when that corpse moves and its actions become too similar to that of a human being, when clearly it is not. Freud mentions, in testing his hypothesis of the uncanny, how “many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts” (13). He expands on this idea a little bit later, mentioning, “We have heard that it is in the highest degree uncanny when inanimate objects—a picture or a doll—come to life; nevertheless in Hans Andersen’s stories the household utensils, furniture and tin soldiers are alive and nothing could perhaps be more remote from the uncanny” (Freud, 16). An expansion of Freud’s essay, Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley reflects this: inanimate objects with only a similitude of human behaviour is not enough to trigger the Uncanny feeling, yet those objects which hold a human likeness yet are not all that believable, do.

Freud writes in his essay that, “fiction presents more opportunities for creating uncanny sensations than are possible in real life” (19). Curiously, as evinced by Freud’s essay and the fact that the Uncanny Valley exists, there is a strong trend in pop culture to make use of The Uncanny as a means of marketability. This industry is evinced by the variety of stories that make use of the Uncanny to attract people’s curiosity and raise their level of discomfort, from Hoffman’s stories to The Walking Dead, a show that depicts the undead slowly depleting, and replacing, the population of the living as they shuffle around, eating people. The Walking Dead, and other shows, events that are based on it, etc, reflect this fascination with the Uncanny. The zombies raise our discomfort levels, yet intrigue us. Freud might say this is because of inherent curiosity with immortality, an attraction to the ego’s need for self-preservation. The zombies reflect our own fears of death, while their human-like appearance raises in us that feeling of uncanniness that chills us to our very bones.

On a related note, I find it very interesting the effect and influence Freud has on pop culture. The fact that the Uncanny Valley is a theory thought up of by a Japanese man, and is an expansion of Freud’s essay is exciting as it reflects the world’s diversity. In the beginning of Freud’s essay, he cites the very many definitions of the Uncanny in different languages, from Greek to Spanish. It is very interesting that Freud’s theories have not just been translated into different languages, but transplanted into other cultures and to create new theories that reveal the human condition.