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.

CFP: The Other Daemonic: Estranging the Uncanny

From cfp.english.upenn.edu… “The Other Daemonic: Estranging the Uncanny” Brown University Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference March 20-21, 2015 Keynote: Prof. Zachary Lesser, University of Pennsylvania contact email: browncomplitgradconference@yahoo.com Have we started to feel at home in the uncanny? A feeling so singular, yet so hard to define, the uncanny has become quite familiar to literary… Continue reading CFP: The Other Daemonic: Estranging the Uncanny

‘Flo Clones’ and The Saturation of Advertising

If you’re like me, you may have driven through tollbooths on an Interstate highway and noticed that Flo — the spokeswoman in ads for Progressive Insurance, has begun appearing everywhere. The incessant repetition of product advertising across media breeds product familiarity. But it’s a familiarity that doesn’t always register until we encounter the advertisements again… Continue reading ‘Flo Clones’ and The Saturation of Advertising

Data Doppelgangers feature in The Atlantic

There is you. And then there is your alter-ego as constructed by all the hidden marketing that happens behind the scenes due to your social networking. You can try to control it through things like facebook’s latest privacy adjustment techniques. But as tech critic Sara M. Watson points out in a recent article in The… Continue reading Data Doppelgangers feature in The Atlantic

Maytag’s New Maytag Man – Renewing an Icon with Uncanny Magic

If you watch commercial television, you may have been surprised to see this year that the Maytag Man has gotten an extreme makeover. The Maytag Man — aka “Ol’ Lonely” – is one of those classic icons of advertising — as commonly known as Ronald McDonald, the Michelin Man and the Energizer Bunny — due… Continue reading Maytag’s New Maytag Man – Renewing an Icon with Uncanny Magic

Mini-Review: Jamais Vu – The Journal of Strange Among the Familiar

Jamais Vu – The Journal of Strange Among the Familiar has just published its second issue, so I thought I’d mention this new forum of horror and fantasy here, as it relates to the Uncanny in its editorial mission. The journal is published by Post-Mortem Press, primarily known for their horror titles (like the fabulous… Continue reading Mini-Review: Jamais Vu – The Journal of Strange Among the Familiar

We Like Double: the Ford Fusion Hybrid Superbowl Ad

One of the first big budget TV commercials to air during this year’s Super Bowl programming was the “Nearly Double” advertisement for the Ford Fusion Hybrid, starring Rob Riggle & James Franco, which claims to “make history” by airing two commercials back-to-back, or following up the first commercial with a second one that is “double… Continue reading We Like Double: the Ford Fusion Hybrid Superbowl Ad

Bukimi-no-Tani – “The Uncanny Valley Revisited: A Tribute to Masahiro Mori”

Last November, Ken Goldberg at UC Berkeley organized a special conference on “The Uncanny Valley Revisited: A Tribute to Masahiro Mori” — hosted by the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) in Tokyo, and there is fantastic coverage of this event — which includes streaming video of all the presentations — at… Continue reading Bukimi-no-Tani – “The Uncanny Valley Revisited: A Tribute to Masahiro Mori”

Zombie Video Games

In the video article, “Why all the Zombies in Video Games?” the popular gaming review site gamespot turns to Mori’s theory of the uncanny valley for an answer. “[Zombies] seem to encapsulate a perfect storm of repulsion. First off, they have horrible, glazed dead eyes. And eyes appear to be the crucial thing we look… Continue reading Zombie Video Games

AUDIO: China Mieville Keynote Address from ICFA 2012: On Monsters

In the following audio capture, author China Mieville delivers a keynote address entitled “On Monsters: Or, Nine or More (Monstrous) NOT Cannies.” It was presented at the 33rd Annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, in Spring 2012. Mieville performs an entertaining and trenchant re-examination of the term “uncanny” and… Continue reading AUDIO: China Mieville Keynote Address from ICFA 2012: On Monsters