Author: Michael Arnzen

Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his disturbing (and often funny) fiction, poetry and literary experiments. He has been teaching as a Professor of English in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University since 1999.

Parade Floats and the Uncanny

Here in the USA, it’s Thanksgiving morning.  The annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in NYC is just getting started, and while I’ve never been a fan of parades, one can’t deny their significance in both small town culture and in big city holiday fests, alike. The news media treat them like spectator sports. For the… Continue reading Parade Floats and the Uncanny

Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection

Photoshop Disasters is a funny weblog that collects flawed design elements in advertisements and elsewhere (like the above image from a Sears Catalog). The accidental amputations, bizarre hands, and other forms of freakish anatomical blunders strike a viewer as uncanny when you spot them in what would otherwise be a “picture perfect” advertisement. We always… Continue reading Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection

Call for Papers: Thinking After Dark – Horror Video Games

Ludicine has posted a call for papers to an intermedial conference focused on horror video games (and films and books and such), entitled “Thinking After Dark.” With a focus on such topics as “figures of interactivity specific to the survival horror subgenre” and a featured guest in Barry K. Grant as a keynote speaker, this… Continue reading Call for Papers: Thinking After Dark – Horror Video Games

Slideshow on Freud’s Uncanny

[UPDATE 4/29/12…] Dr. Rob McMinn (the UK teacher behind the We Study Media edublog) gives a succinct overview of Freud’s work on the uncanny (das Unheimliche) in relation to horror texts and the media, in the following slideshow (formerly a “slideshare”, now a google document) related to one of his courses: I particularly liked this… Continue reading Slideshow on Freud’s Uncanny

TRON, Gaming and the Death Drive Crash

Software designer Daniel Wellman writes about an uncanny experience where a game he was programming seemed to come to life with a will all its own in his essay, “Real Life Tron on Apple IIgs”: One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to… Continue reading TRON, Gaming and the Death Drive Crash

30 Rock Popularizes the Uncanny Valley

There’s a lot of talk lately about how uncanny Tina Fey’s impression of VP hopeful Sarah Palin really is, and with the next season of her Emmy-award winning TV show,  30 Rock, getting ready to launch at the end of the month, I thought the timing was right to post a consideration about this very… Continue reading 30 Rock Popularizes the Uncanny Valley

Uncanny Media 2008 Reflections

Conference reports and reflections from the Uncanny Media conference in Utrecht, Netherlands (2008) are starting to pop up online. Since it relates to my work on The Popular Uncanny, I was very interested in attending this event, but was unable to, so I’m seeking as many discussions and reports from the conference as possible online… Continue reading Uncanny Media 2008 Reflections

The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction — “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” — just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. Here’s the opening passage: I. Introduction: Fear is Never Itself The horror genre has many reasonable lessons to teach us, even though it is perhaps… Continue reading The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory

Irony and The Return of the Repressed

“The unconscious is very serious today — even a little bit sad — because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and off-handedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which… Continue reading Irony and The Return of the Repressed