Jeff is kinda weird
Sadhika Mani
FY BSc. Economics (2024-28)
Estimated Reading Time ~ 5 minutes
People that blink weirdly should be jailed. Too little is just as unnerving as too many blinks; if we plot blink rates on a statistical distribution, they’d likely fall into the extreme tails—outliers that disrupt the natural rhythm of human interaction. There’s just something incredibly off putting about someone whose smile stretches a little too wide, oddly placed imperfections, perfectly symmetrical body parts that contrast to jerky, inconsistent movements that seem forced to fit into the situation.
While this might seem like me having a go at someone I don’t particularly enjoy being around, there’s a name for the gut feeling that hits you when you look at something that seems human-like but misses the mark by just a smidge- the concept of the ‘Uncanny Valley’.
The ‘Uncanny Valley’ was first discussed by Masahiro Mori, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in a seminal essay for a Japanese magazine. He originally coined it to use in reference to robots that bore just the right amount of resemblance to a person to somehow feel real but also not, at the same time.
(The X-axis represents how human-like something is and the Y-axis our emotional response to it)
The graph essentially describes this canyon between two extreme ends of a spectrum. On one end lay robots and figurines like the industrial robot dog, a Cabbage Patch doll and the entire cast of Muppets– very distinctly not human and somewhat (?) joy inducing. On the other end is a healthy human (not quite as joy inducing, I hate to see the opps thriving). In between these two points, the graph dips into a canyon, where in the process of trying to create robots so akin to humans, we unfortunately end up creating something a human would probably end up having bed-wetting nightmares about.
The very fact that every single human being out there feels this primal, gut wrenching unease when they set their eyes on something almost human, paired with the basic psychological concept of pareidolia, combined, remains the most highly exploited tool in horror media these days. Pareidolia essentially refers to the tendency of the human mind to perceive meaningful connections between various visual stimuli, to try and make sense of what we’re looking at. It’s the monster that stared back at you from the shadows, when you couldn’t really see anything distinct but the mind ended up creating some unspeakable horror by connecting the folds of the cloth hanging behind the door or the heap of laundry on the chair.
But once again, just to avoid turning this into some one-dimensional concept, Pareidolia is also why the masses empathized so much with anthropomorphic characters like the chair from Suzume, the Pixar lamp and BB-8 from Star Wars.
BB-8 the Astromech (Star Wars)
So when it comes down to crafting a character that categorizes under the Uncanny Valley, there’s a list of parameters to be met- which Scream Magazine lists to be:
1. For the character to have a lack of identity
2. For it to be a reminder of death
3. Have the character be immune to disease
4. Have it lack in modern rules or morals
And this is quite the accurate list of requirements too in all honesty, because every one of my favorite uses of this concept (in horror video games) that comes to mind almost all fall into at least one of these categories.
| Lack of identity | Reminder of death | Immune to disease | Lack of rules/morals |
| Possessed from Madison Player’s body from ScornNecromorphs from Dead Space | Rotting nurses from Silent HillNecromorphs from Dead Space | Animatronics from Five Nights at Freddy’s The somewhat pristine corpses from the Mortuary Assistant | Animatronics from Five Nights at Freddys Pyramid Head from Silent HillAliens from Scorn |
The disturbing precision of these parameters begs the question, where did it first stem from? To create the requirements is not that hard of a task, for it only requires one to sit down and really just look at a whole bunch of characters and write down what they have in common.
Phobias are known to be people specific, while there does exist the concept of a ‘common phobia’, there is no guarantee that every person on the planet fears one specific thing.
So, the best way to really form a correlation here would be to compare the fear of the uncanny valley to the fear of the dark. Nyctophobia stems from an evolutionary survival instinct, a result of our prehistoric ancestors having to stay alert at night to avoid predators and just make it through to see the light of the next day.
Fearing something that seems very akin to a human, could also be an evolutionary instinct due to a couple possible factors, also from which the aforementioned parameters might have sprung forth from:
1. The Pathogen Avoidance Theory (Schaller & Duncan (2007)
This theory describes the sensation of disgust felt by humans on encountering something the behavioural immune system deems to be parasitic or causative of infections, as an adaptive system that keeps themselves from coming in contact with the harmful pathogens. This would also include sexual or moral disgust, if having viewed something the subject feels is indigestible, which essentially implies that this behavior is largely a psychological mechanism.
If this theory were to be a major benefactor of the fear elicited by the uncanny valley, it would easily explain the ‘reminder of death’ and ‘immune to disease’ parameters. The sight of pale, ashen skin; rigid movements with bones that seem to refuse to yield to the regular fluidity of the human body; glassy, milky eyes that fail to focus and preternatural facial expressions are all signs that the human hyper-sensitive system has learnt to pick up on as a cue of illness, an illness that could possible transfer over them.
2. The Mortality Salience Hypothesis
Mortality Salience is awareness of oneself’s impending death, which in turn was derived from the Terror Management Theory. To put things simply, I’m referring to how man’s sense of self preservation clashes with the knowledge that he will eventually meet his end one day, which in turn elicits extreme or fearful reactions in the face of something that reminds him of this.
‘This’ is referring to how humans will look at something that falls in the uncanny valley and immediately connect the dots in their head to some fear of not wanting to turn into whatever it is they’re currently looking at. While this might not be an accurate example to use, the sight of the main character’s final form in the movie Tusk, is the closest I’ve come to personally experiencing this feeling as well (I highly suggest you do not watch it, unless you already have had the misfortune of viewing it).
But this also brings me to the next and closing point of my argument.
Humans fear the absence of a soul.
This fear once again, goes far back, because what is a man if not defined by his past? Folklore all over the world will have some iteration of the soul being the one thing that sets humanity apart from other things.
In fact, some cultures will describe everything in this world to have some soul, or some essence. This can be seen in Middle Eastern folklore, if you somehow had access to the true name of a Djinn, you’d be able to actively influence their entire existence, in Egyptian mythology in turn, having someone’s Ren, or ‘true name’ would grant you power over not only a mortal but also over divine or infernal beings. To have a soul, means having control over oneself, over your actions, your thoughts. Jewish folklore spoke of golems that came to life when you breathed a soul into them, beings of mud and other masses.
Our progenitors could have possibly seen the rotting corpses of their kin, seen the light leave their eyes and the soul exit, watching as the body decomposed and turned into one with the soil and thought:
‘Hey that really doesn’t look like Jeff from Berry Picking 101 anymore, that’s kinda creepy man”
And maybe that’s how we came to fear the Uncanny valley.
Our ape-ish ancestors watched as the very thing that made us human ceased to exist, as the body decayed and grew to dread how they started to seem less and less man, though they knew deep inside, that this was certainly Jeff from Berry Picking 101.