The other day, I went down a dark and scary road on YouTube.
It started innocuously enough. Someone found my blog by searching for “the dancing gnome scary”, which struck me as odd and/or hilarious. So I did my own search and found this video.
Now, this video is probably very offensive to little people. There is absolutely no reason why this person is scary. He’s just little, with some difficulty walking and dressing himself. However, the way the video is set up and the way the video is filmed, is a little creepy. I think we have been trained to believe that anything filmed with that grainy night vision is automatically creepy.
In any event, the related videos on the side of that led me down a whole cadre of frightening videos. I just couldn’t stop clicking on them. Ghost sightings, unnamed mutant creatures, demons, aliens. There’s a lot of creepy stuff out there! It can be hard to find it, because there’s also a lot of people goofing around and making silly things, but there’s plenty to see if you look.
I don’t remember how I originally stumbled upon this years ago, but it was something that always really stuck with me. You know how in really creepy horror movies or even video games, the ghost or whatever it is will seem mostly human, but it will just be…off…a little bit? Like it will move a little jerkily, or it’s face is a little messed up or something? And this is way creepier than something that looks totally inhuman. Those usually just come off looking comical.
Let me give you an example. Make sure you watch the part about 35 seconds in when he kicks it and it recovers, and there is another good part about 1:25 in when it is on ice. Aw heck, just watch the whole creepy video! (You might want to turn down your sound a little, it is loud)
Do you see how creepy that thing is?? Well there is actually a term for it, with research and everything to back it up! It is called the “Uncanny Valley“.
Basically, the theory says that when things are completely inhuman looking, we don’t like them. As they start to get more and more human looking, we like them more; we think they are cute. However, at some point the curve has a sharp downward spike (a valley if you will) where something is a little too close to being human and it creeps us out.
There are two parts to the explanation of why this is that make sense to me. The first is that when things don’t really look much like us, we tend to focus on the positive ways in which they ARE like us. “Isn’t that monkey cute, he looks so human like!” But when things look a lot like us, we tend to focus on the negative ways in which they AREN’T like us. The second part is that we seem to have a built in survival instinct that makes us shy away from messed up looking people (that’s the scientific term). Biologically, these people are probably diseased or, basically, no good for us.
Notice that zombies are the pinnacle of scariness. 🙂 There is a good biological reason for us to be afraid of decaying flesh. Also, a zombie might eat your face.
Consider the pictures below. The first one is an industrial robot. It is neat when it does things that humans normally do (like pick something up) but I have no attachment to it. If it is destroyed, I won’t shed any tears. The second one has arms and legs and sort of moves around like a human. It can also talk, and laugh, etc. It is, of course, the beloved robot from Lost in Space. The third robot is just creepy. Look at the way it moves.
This probably explains why I find cartoons where people are drawn with computer animation to be way creepier than regular old Scooby Doo style cartoons.
What’s worse than asking someone who is not pregnant when they are due? Asking someone when their TWINS are due 3 weeks after they were born. Out of courtesy, I will not name the person who made this mistake because they are a reader of this blog.
An odd story:
The other night I heard a sound in the night, sort of a soft thump. It half woke me up, so the details of this part are kind of hazy and dream like. My recollection is that I heard a thump and then Sara handed me a double-A battery. We didn’t know where it came from but I just assumed it fell from the sky and thumped onto our bed. I set it on my nightstand. The next morning, I happened to notice that the clock was on the floor and eventually we pieced together that it must have fallen off the wall in the middle of the night, (and not made a sound?) hit the ground face down thus catapulting the battery up over the foot board and about 5 feet into our bed.
A creepy story:
We were standing in Walmart making a pet tag for Nala and this creepy old guy came over and was just sort of hovering around staring at our baby. I kept glancing up to see if he had left but he hadn’t! Lurking and leering. Finally as we turned to leave he mumbled, “Keep her bashful. There are a lot of nitwits out there who will do things to little girls.” It was creepy to the max.
This is the creepiest video ever. I mean, even creepier than that video in the Ring. If you manage to make it through the begining though it sort of turns into a music video and isn’t all that scary anymore.
Shane Halbach 