Interview with NHRS: The Uncanny in Popular Horror Fiction

A former grad student of mine, WD Prescott, is running an interesting website bluntly called The Non-Horror Reader Survey that is studying what today’s readers think about the modern horror genre. It features interviews with various readers, writers, and scholars, along with a research questionnaire you can fill out, if you want to participate. It’s an interesting idea.

Yesterday, NHRS kindly (and extensively) interviewed me — see “Winter Chills with Mike Arnzen” — and I thought readers of The Popular Uncanny might find it of interest. Here’s an excerpt related to the uncanny, from the top of the interview:

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NHRS: You have a section of your website that is about the instances of the “uncanny,” or “unheimlich,” in popular culture. What are your thoughts on Freud’s theory of the “uncanny” and its relationship to Horror fiction?

MA: Since horror is the genre most associated with fear, it’s a natural that its authors and film directors would draw inspiration from the field of psychology. (There would be no Psycho without psychology!) Whether concerned with the twisted motives of gritty serial killers or the nightmare creatures of the supernatural, horror stories not only try to prick the “fight vs. flight” response of their readers, but also go exploring “the dark side” of the mind for material.

The “uncanny” is a part of that realm of fear. Only it’s less about abject dread and more about the frisson one feels when caught off-guard — it’s that surprising recognition we feel dawning on us, akin to déjà vu, that strange sense of “I have been here before” or that “life is but a dream.” Freud was the first to contemplate what it is that accounts for these disturbing feelings. In fiction, he suggests the “strangely familiar” is present not only in gothic tales of haunting, but also appears in the form of a whole series of icons that we find even in the present day in the horror genre: inanimate objects that move on their own accord, dolls that look back at you or speak with a human voice, dismembered limbs or possessed beings that seem to have minds of their own, the living dead, bizarre ominous symbols (666) that seem to be harbingers of doom, and so forth. He ultimately argues that these are all manifestations of secret childhood wishes we repressed, which shockingly “return” to us as adults with such intensity that we believe — if only for a moment — that our primitive instincts were right all along and that the reasonable, civilized world of adulthood has really been nothing more than a charade, a fiction.

Horror stories conjure those disturbing feelings and represent the “secret wishes” of characters in endlessly fascinating ways. One can study these stories for what they tell us not only about our animal or primitive beliefs, but also our social belief systems. This is what makes the uncanny a rich form of literary criticism, despite the way Freud’s work otherwise seems to serve some of the more problematic aspects of his psychoanalytical theories about castration anxiety and the Oedipal complex.

Nowadays, a possessed doll isn’t as scary as it used to be. Yet if told (or shown) right, it can still “getcha” when you least expect it. Or the doll has become something else: an android, an artificial intelligence, a computer. It’s all the same principle. That’s because we all still dream, we all still are a little uncertain about the universe, and we’re never as smart or in control as we think we are. In fact, that’s probably how I ultimately define horror literature: as the you’re not so smart as you thought you were, are you? genre. It bursts the bubbles of mankind, especially when it comes to our pretenses toward mastery over various domains. Perhaps this sounds like anti-intellectualism at work, but it’s the exact opposite. It questions and challenges what we take for granted. I love that edge of horror fiction, and I think the humorous audacity of it all has a lot to do with this.

Maybe I’m a little obsessed with it, but I see the same uncanny tropes from horror fiction evident everywhere in popular culture, particularly in advertising. To me, the Pillsbury Doughboy might as well be a Chucky doll. To me, the Doublemint Twins are doppelgangers. The Michelin Man is a monster. I am enthralled by the way the uncanny is used to fetishize commodities and sell us things we otherwise wouldn’t see a need to buy. I explored these ideas in my doctoral dissertation, which I’m currently revising into an academic book called The Popular Uncanny, which hopefully will be available from Guide Dog Books in 2011. For now, folks can visit my website to read my continuing notebook on the subject.

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Read the entire interview, where I field questions on teaching horror in college, horror’s relationship with humor and poetry, and the cautionary tale.