Seemingly normal, yet subtly menacing surroundings, anticipations of looming evil, the creeping notion of something or someone being not quite right – perhaps you … A new heyday of sophisticated horror, led by the likes of The Babadook, The Witch, Midsommar and Get Out, brings back a cinematic conception which not only predated the horror genre but helped incite it. The uncanny is rising to new screen prominence. Even before Freud wrote his eponymous essay about it in 1919, movie theaters had already begun to capitalize on its captivation. Uncanniness or Unheimlichkeit shaped a number of early European movies which are psychologically twisted and phantasmagoric. Unheimlich is a weird, complex perception, not simply a milder touch of fear. To be unheimlich something has to appear basically nice, comfortable and familiar while at the same time feeling a bit off. Better than listening to explanations of the uncanny is the experience of it. This list takes a closer look at the cinematic roots of the uncanny. Read more
