The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations” — are dedicated to science fiction, fantasy and horror television. My favorite section is the Weirdness Isolation category, collecting tropes which are “based around making the world stay close to ours with the sole exception of specific strange things.” Those “strange things” are elements of the uncanny that are often brought to the surface of popular television programs.
Take, for example, the trope they term the “Weirdness Censor” — a story universe where “it seems that with your average person, their attention span is wholly taken up with the gray mundanity of their everyday lives. Literally, they [the minor characters] can’t see anything too strange” and therefore ignore the weirdness that surrounds them…while the main characters in the story are entirely focused on interacting with it. This trope is otherwise known as “Sunnydale Syndrome” — named after the setting of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where everyone is oblivous to the vampires and other evil creatures who walk around right under their noses (quite literally, the high school is located right on top of a portal to hell, the Hellmouth).
Sunnydale Syndrome is, essentially, a social allegory for what psychoanalysts term “disavowal” on a cultural scale. Like “living in denial,” disavowal is a process where the mind unconsciously refuses to acknowledge something potentially traumatizing to the ego when confronted with it in reality — the very idea is instead “inconceivable” to the mind. This is closely related to the repressive nature of the Uncanny; that is, the “return of the repressed” is at once felt emotionally and yet also disavowed as irrational or impossible.
I find such psychoanalytical approaches interesting because they expand our understanding of horror stories beyond such “reductive” notions as battles between good and evil. Thus, for example, when Buffy and her pals battle the demons of Hellspawn, we are witnessing something symbolically healthy and pragmatic in contradistinction to the culture in which the story is staged, which is treated as unhealthy in its passive, perpetual state of denial. That denial, that passivity on the cultural level, is what contributes to the social problems that the heroes of the story are symbolically grappling with.
This schema allows for some interesting play on the field of the uncanny throughout the Buffy the Vampire TV series. See, for example, Kelly Kromer’s essay, “Silence as Symptom” in Slayage: The International Journal of Buffy Studies (5.3).
