The Unheimlich

Dogman and Snakewoman

2010-08-11T04:08:00.000-07:00

Two pictures that I prefer not to look at alone late at night.

Nighcruising screening

2009-11-06T16:45:00.000-08:00

Press reports on our Swedish exhibition

2009-10-11T09:32:00.001-07:00

Articles about our exhibition in Sweden, titled Removed from the Eyes of Strangers.

Nightcruising

2009-10-07T05:27:00.000-07:00

Nightcruising (2009) is a new video that I made to screen at Galleri Andersson/Sandström in Sweden, for the exhibition Removed From the Eyes of Strangers (part of the European tour of "Unheimlich" exhibitions organised by Matt Roberts Arts). The gallery pre-viewed the video and chose to withdraw it from the exhibition due to the sexual content. Instead, two large prints of images taken from the video were exhibited.

For Nightcruising I re-edited video clips from a porn scene shot at night on London's Hampstead Heath, manipulating the sound and speed of the footage to emphasise the ominous character of the nocturnal woodland setting and the activities taking place in it.

Turn the sound up on this one, and if you have headphones then listen to it through them - there's a lot going on in the bass end of the soundtrack to this video, which you won't hear on standard monitor or laptop speakers.

Kittiwat Unarrom cannibal bread

2009-02-24T02:18:00.000-08:00

"Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom indulges everyone’s secret burning desire to engage in cannibalism; since 2006, he has been sculpting severed heads, hands, feet, torsos, and other body parts out of bread. The results are baked and taste delicious (cashew, raisins, and chocolate are included). Sold at his family’s bakery in Ratchaburi, Thailand, the vividly realistic body parts (check out the pictures) are wrapped like food in plastic. Demand is steadily growing. At last, you can experience the fun of eating someone without the guilt."

Svengali

2009-01-14T13:06:00.000-08:00

"Whether any viewers ever found Gabbo or his dummy uncanny I do not know. It does seem to me more likely that such a feeling was elicited by another film of the period, Svengali (Mayo, 1931). In the most famous sequence in this film, the title character (John Barrymore) summons Trilby (Marian Marsh) across several Paris streets to his attic studio.
...
I find this sequence powerfully evoking the uncanniness of early sound films."

Spadoni, Robert pp.41-2 Uncanny Bodies 2007

David Lynch essay

2009-01-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to an essay about Psychological Horror in the Films of David Lynch.

The aim of the essay is, "to investigate the links between psychology, as presented by Sigmund Freud in his essay The 'Uncanny' (1919) and Carl G. Jung in his book Man and His Symbols (1979), and the imagery and tension created by David Lynch in his films."

Kubrick on Freud

2009-01-06T04:35:00.000-08:00

Stanley Kubrick discusses the storyline from his movie The Shining (1980).

"A story of the supernatural cannot be taken apart and analysed too closely. The ultimate test of its rationale is whether it is good enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. If you submit it to a completely logical and detailed analysis it will eventually appear absurd. In his essay on the uncanny, Das Unheimliche, Freud said that the uncanny is the only feeling which is more powerfully experienced in art than in life. If the genre required any justification, I should think this alone would serve as its credentials."

Extreme Scare Pranks (video)

2008-10-19T14:17:00.000-07:00

Child's Play 20th anniversary

2008-09-23T14:31:00.000-07:00

Masked faces and doubling: Actors dressed as horror film star Chucky pose in New York to plug the 20th birthday edition of Child's Play on DVD. This image appeared in The Metro, 11 September 2008.

"Screamer" video: Ghost in the London Dungeon

2008-09-16T05:04:00.000-07:00

An example of a "Screamer" video: Ghost in the London Dungeon

Reactions to Ghost in the London Dungeon

Hans Bellmer and the omnipotence of thoughts

2008-09-07T05:50:00.000-07:00

"Indian disguises and conjuring tricks, according to Webb, were among the toys Bellmer received in 1931, and it was surely from the "pulp writer" Karl May, who wrote adventure stories for young German boys about the American Wild West, that the artist had long before learned of the skills of medicine men. The uncanniness of these childhood memories for Bellmer, tinged with a renewed enthusiasm for the accouterments of magic, has to do with the omnipotence of thoughts, a concept Freud adopted from the Rat Man and introduced in the third essay in Totem and Taboo (1912-1913) and again in "The 'Uncanny'" (1919). Associating the reported behaviours of tribal societies with animistic beliefs and the actual symptoms of his own neurotic patients, Freud outlined the ways that magic satisfies various psychic needs: it subjects natural phenomena (such as illness) to the human will, protects the individual, and provides the power to injure enemies. Ultimately, it is based on "mistaking an ideal connection for a real one": convinced of his or her own telepathic mental capacities, a person can attribute to them coincidental effects in the real world."

Taylor, Sue p.53 Hans Bellmer: The anatomy of anxiety (2000)

Are "Screamer" videos uncanny?

2008-09-07T00:46:00.000-07:00

Recently a number of videos have been posted on youtube, intentionally using the same editing strategy to give the viewer a sudden scare. These videos are known as "screamers".

The uncanny is commonly associated with a creeping unease rather than a jolting shock, but how useful is this distinction in relation to "screamers" and more generally to representational media like film, video and photography?

Freud wrote, "...an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed."

"As soon as something actually happens in our lives which seems to confirm the old, discarded beliefs we get a feeling of the uncanny; it is as though we were making a judgement something like this: 'So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!' or, 'So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activitie!' and so on."

When we are jolted by a sudden sound or image in a representational media (in these video clips, a sudden burst of noise and a close-up image of a maniacal face with teeth bared) it is an example of a primitive belief which has been surmounted momentarily being experienced as confirmed (ie. the belief that images can come to life). Using Freud's formulation: it is as though we were [momentarily] making a judgement something like this: 'So, after all, a picture can have the properties of what it represents,' or, 'So a video of a threatening person can lurch out of the picture into reality and actually hurt me'.

David Lynch interview parody

Ghost in Dumb and Dumber

Scary Car Commercial

Twin Peaks

2008-08-15T07:46:00.001-07:00

Two clips from the 90's TV series Twin Peaks by David Lynch and Mark Frost.

Bitch Killer spoof trailer

2008-08-15T07:28:00.000-07:00

Bitch Killer is a spoof 1970s horror trailer, with Matt Holness. It originally appeared in the TV comedy series Man to Man with Dean Learner.

share your creepy stories

2008-07-07T14:28:00.000-07:00

A wonderful resource of uncanny stories has sprung up in an online discussion board on the International Movie Database website, on the webpage about the movie Vacancy (2007). The title of the board is share your creepy stories, and the link is below.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452702/board/nest/72441100

Iceberg Enters Obelisk

2008-06-09T14:37:00.000-07:00

Iceberg Enters Obelisk is an event that will be held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London on Friday 13th June 2008.

Two figures from Attic Basement Garage will be on display in the gallery, and the evening will include a screening Porn Shoot Off Cuts.

Baudrillard: Symbolic Exchange and Death

2008-06-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

Theorist Jean Baudrillard writes:

Our entire culture is full of this haunting of the seperated double, even in its most subtle form, as Freud gave it in 'Das Unheimliche' ('The Uncanny': 'Disturbing Strangeness' or 'Distubring Familiarity'): the anxiety that wells up around the most familiar things. Here the vertigo of seperation builds up to its greatest intensity, since this is its simplest form. There comes a moment, in fact, when the things closest to us, such as our own bodies, the body itself, our voice and our appearance, are seperated from us to the precise extent that we internalise the soul (or any other equivalent agency or abstraction) as the ideal principle of subjectivity. This is what kills off the proliferation of doubles and spirits, consigning them once again to the spectral, embryonic corridors of unconscious folklore, like the ancient gods that Christianity verteufelt, that is, transformed into demons.

By a final ruse of spirituality, this internalisation also psychologises doubles. In fact it is interpretation in terms of an archaic psychical apparatus that is the very last form of the Verteufelung, the demonic corruption and elimination of the primitive double: projection of the guilt attached to the phantasmatic murder of the other (the close relative) in accordance with the magic of the omnipotence of ideas (Allmacht der Gedanken), the return of the repressed, etc. In 'The Uncanny', Freud writes:

Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old, animistic conecption of the universe. This was characterised by the idea that the world was peopled with the spirits of human beings; by the subject's narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes; by the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and the technique of magic based on that belief; by the attribution to various outside persons and things of carefully graded magical powers, or 'mana'; as well as by all the other creations with the help of which man, in the unrestricted narcissism of that stage of development, strove to fend off the manifest prohibitions of reality. It seems as if each one of us has been through a phase of individual development corresponding to the animistic stage in primitive men, that none of us has passed through it without preserving certain residues and traces of it which are still capable of manifesting themselves, and that everything which now strikes us as 'uncanny' fulfils the condition of touching those residues of animistic mental activity within us and bringing them back to expression.
Freud, Sigmund p.240-1 The Uncanny in Standard Edition Vol.17

This is how psychology, our authority in the depths, our own 'next world', this omnipotence, magical narcissism, fear of the dead, this animisim or primitive psychical apparatus, is quietly palmed off on the savages in order then to recuperate them for ourselves as 'archaic traces'. Freud does not think this is what he said in speaking of 'narcissistic overvaluation of ... mental processes'. If there is such an overvaluation of one's own mental processes (to the point of exporting this theory, as we have done with our morality and techniques, to the core of every culture), then it is Freud's overvaluation, along with our whole psychologistic culture. The jurisdiction of the psychological discourse over all symbolic practices (such as the dazzling practices of of the savages, death, the double and magic; but also over our current symbolic practices) is even more dangerous than that of the economistic discourse: it is of the same order as the repressive jurisdiction of the soul and consciousness over the body's entire symbolic potential. Psychoanalysis's reinterpretation of the symbolic is a reductive operation. Since we live under the unconscious (but is this the case? Isn't it our own myth, marking out and even participating in repression: a repressed thought of repression?), we believe that we are justified in extending the jurisdiction of psychical history as we used to do with history itself, to every possible configuration. The unconscious, and the psychical order in general, becomes the insurmountable agency, giving the feudal right of trespass over every previous individual and social formation. This imaginary also spreads into the future, however: if the unconscious is our modern myth, and psychoanalysis its prophet, the liberation of the unconscious (Desiring-Revolution) is its millenial heresy.

Baudrillard, Jean pp.142-143 Political Economy and Death in Symbolic Exchange and Death

Fright Club

2008-04-28T12:13:00.001-07:00

Fright Club, on London's South Bank.

Pointer magazine advert

2008-04-24T01:25:00.000-07:00

"Dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, as in a fairy tale of Hauff's, feet which dance by themselves, ... all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when, as in the last instance, they prove capable of independent activity in addition. As we already know, this kind of uncanniness springs from its proximity to the castration complex."
Freud p.244 The Uncanny

The Unheimlich exhibition video

2008-04-20T15:28:00.000-07:00

Click above for a video of The Unheimlich exhibition which opened at Leeds Met Gallery on 17 April, and runs until 17 May 2008.

Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

2008-04-04T04:34:00.000-07:00

A still from Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) directed by Romano Scavolini.

Bleeding Eye

2008-04-02T08:27:00.000-07:00

African Union troops arrest an Anjouan man after firing rockets into his house. This image appeared in The Guardian, 26 March 2008.

'[The Sandman is] a wicked man who comes when children
won't go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so
that they jump out of their heads all bleeding.'
E.T.A. Hoffman 1816 The Sandman
We know from psycho-analytic experience, however, that the
fear of damaging or losing one's eyes is a terrible one in
children. Many adults retain their apprehensiveness in this
respect, and no physical injury is so much dreaded by them as
an injury to the eye. [...] A study of dreams, phantasies and
myths has taught as that anxiety about one's eyes, the fear of
going blind, is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated.
Sigmund Freud 1919 The Uncanny

Mugabe Mask

2008-04-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

Children play with a mask of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe capital Harare. This image appeared in The Metro, 1 April 2008.

Chinese Terracotta Army protest

2008-03-19T05:33:00.000-07:00

A British Museum attendant talks to a man hanging pro-Tibetan slogans on China's Terracotta Warriors. This image appeared in The Evening Standard, 19 March 2008.

Alistair Darling puppet

2008-03-18T05:54:00.001-07:00

An image taken from the cover of London newspaper The Metro, 12 March 2008.

Sketches (diving boards)

2008-03-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

Sketches (nooses)

2008-03-13T03:46:00.000-07:00

New sketches for the Leeds Met Gallery work:

Ventriloquist Dummies

2008-03-12T14:59:00.000-07:00

Ventriloquist dummies are an example of the type of life-size model figures that Jentsch sites in his essay on the uncanny, listing "wax-work figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata". Freud and Kelley both quote this passage in their own essays on the uncanny.

The enduring popularity of uncanny ventriloquist dummies is evidenced by the number of horror and thriller movies that include them; There are enough that the ventriloquist dummy movie could be considered a sub-genre in itself.

Examples include:

The Great Gabbo (1928) Dir. James Cruze

The Ventriloquist Dummy (a segment in Dead of Night) (1945) Dir. Alberto Cavalcanti

The Dummy (an episode of The Twilight Zone) (1962) Dir. Abner Biberman

Devil Doll (1964) Dir. Lindsay Shonteff

Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) (1975) Dir. Dario Argento

Magic (1978) Dir. Richard Attenborough

Dead Silence (2007) Dir. James Wan. Notably, the television trailer (below) for Dead Silence includes the tag line, "Just because something isn't alive doesn't mean it's dead". This recalls Jentsch's description of the uncanny effect produced by, "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate".

Wittgenstein: A Family Resemblance

2008-03-11T09:56:00.000-07:00

In his book Philosophical Investigations (1951), Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a theory of "family resemblances" to understand the nature of terms that do not admit of a full and complete definition. This idea is summarised by John Heaton in his book Introducing Wittgenstein (1999):

"We take the words out of their natural place in talking and assume they refer to some essence or ideal entity which we try to define. Because the word is uniform in appearance, we assume it refers to a uniform entity about which we can generalise. We forget the application of the word.

Take the word "good". What is common between a good joke, a good tennis player, a good man, feeling good, good will, good breeding, good looking, and a good for nothing? There is no one common property which the word good refers to.

We cannot analyze the word so that we reach some essence or element from which the concept is built up. But there are resemblances between the various meanings of the term - like family resemblances."
John Heaton (paraphrasing Ludwig Wittgenstein) Introducing Wittgenstein pp.126-127

In his essay on The 'Uncanny' (1919), Freud attempts to distill a definition (or 'essence') of the term "uncanny" by analysing examples of its application. His acknowledgement of the difficulties of this approach are an example of the problem that Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblances describes:

"... the word [uncanny] is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as 'uncanny' certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.
...
In his study of the 'uncanny' Jentsch quite rightly lays stress on the obstacle presented by the fact that people vary so very greatly in their sensitivity to this quality of feeling.
...
Either we can find out what meaning has come to be attached to the word 'uncanny' in the course of its history; or we can collect all those properties of persons, things, sense-impressions, experiences and situations which arouse in us the feeling of uncanniness, and then infer the unknown nature of the uncanny from what all these examples have in common."
Sigmund Freud The 'Uncanny' in An Infantile
Neurosis and Other Works pp.219-220

Mike Kelley also describes collecting a group of examples of the uncanny in order to better define the meaning of the word, in the opening of his essay Playing with Dead Things: On the Uncanny (1993):

"What I'm after is a group of objects that, like the original collection of images I pinned to my wall, share an 'uncanny' quality. What this quality is, precisely, and how it functions, are difficult to describe."
Mike Kelley p.26 The Uncanny

Their feeling that the word uncanny is ill-defined and provisional is indicated by the fact that both Freud and Kelley frequently place it between inverted commas.

One's own reflection

2008-02-29T09:43:00.000-08:00

In his essay, The Uncanny, Freud discusses the uncanny qualities of "the double". In a footnote he writes:

... it is interesting to observe what the effect is of meeting one's own image unbidden and unexpected. Ernst Mach has related two such observations in his Analyse der Empfindungen (1900). On the first occasion he was not a little startled when he realised that the face before him was his own. The second time he formed a very unfavourable opinion about the supposed stranger who entered the omnibus, and thought 'What a shabby-looking school-master that man is who is getting in!' - I can report a similar adventure. I was sitting alone in my wagon-lit compartment when a more than usually violent jolt of the train swung back the door of the adjoining washing cabinet, and an elderly gentleman in a dressing-gown and a travelling cap came in. I assumed that in leaving the washing-cabinet, which lay between the two compartments, he had taken the wrong direction and come into my compartment by mistake. Jumping up with the intention of putting him right, I at once realised to my dismay that the intruder was nothing but my own reflection in the looking-glass on the open door. I can still recollect that I thoroughly disliked his appearance. Instead,
therefore, of being frightened by our 'doubles', both Mach and I simply failed to recognise them as such. Is it not possible, though, that our dislike of them was a vestigial trace of the archaic reaction which feels the 'double' to be something uncanny.
p.248

Sylvia Plath describes something similar in her 1963 novel The Bell Jar:

I slid into the self-service elevator and pushed the button for my floor. The doors folded shut like a noiseless accordion. Then my ears went funny, and I noticed a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman staring idiotically into my face. It was only me, of course. I was appalled to see how wrinkled and used-up I looked.
p.17

Later in the The Bell Jar, Plath repeats the motif with a more dramatic effect:

'Why can't I see a mirror?'
'Because you better not.' The nurse shut the lid of the overnight case with a little snap.
'Why?'
'Because you don't look very pretty.'
'Oh, just let me see.'
The nurse sighed and opened the top bureau drawer.
She took out a large mirror in a wooden frame that matched the wood of the bureau and handed it to me.
At first I didn't see what the trouble was. It wasn't a mirror at all, but a picture.
You couldn't tell whether the person in the picture was a man or a woman, because their hair was shaved off and sprouted in bristly chicken-feather tufts all over their head. One side of the person's face was purple, and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow. The person's mouth was pale brown, with a rose-coloured sore at either corner.
The most startling thing about the face was its supernatural conglomeration of bright colours.
I smiled.
The mouth in the mirror cracked into a grin.
A minute after the crash another nurse ran in. She took one look at the broken mirror, and at me, standing over the blind, white pieces, and hustled the young nurse out of the room.
pp.167-8

There is a similarly disturbing scene in George Orwell's 1949 novel 1984:

'You are the last man,' said O'Brien. 'You are the guardian of the human spirit. You shall see yourself as you are. Take off your clothes.'
Winston undid the bit of string that held his overalls together. The zip fastener had long since been wrenched out of them. He could not remember whether at any time since his arrest he had taken off all his clothes at one time. Beneath the overalls his body was looped with filthy yellowish rags, just recognisable as the remnants of under-clothes. As he slid them to the ground he saw that there was a three-sided mirror at the far end of the room. He approached it, then stopped short. An involuntary cry had broken out of him.
'Go on,' said O'Brien. 'Stand between the wings of the mirror. You shall see the side view as well.'
He had stopped because he was frightened. A bowed, grey-coloured, skeleon-like thig was coming towards him. Its actual appearance was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself. He moved closer to the glass. The creature's face seemed to be protruded, because of its bent carriage. A forlorn, jailbird's face with a nobby forehead running back into a bald scalp, a crooked nose and battered-looking cheekbones above which the eyes were fierce and watchful. The cheeks were seamed, the mouth had a drawn-in look. Certainly it washis own face, but it seemed to him that it had changed more than he had changed inside. The emotions it registered would be different from the ones he felt. He had gone partially bald. For the first moment he had thought that he had gone grey as well, but it was only the scalp that was grey. Except for his hands and a circle of his face, his body was grey
all over with ancient, ingrained dirt. Here and there under the dirt there were the red scars of wounds, and near the ankle the varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it. But the truly frightening thing was the emaciation of his body. The barrel of the ribs was as narrow as that of a skeleton: the legs had shrunk so that the knees were thicker than the thighs. He saw now what O'Brien had meant about seeing the side view. The curvature of the spine was astonishing. The thin shoulders were hunched forward so as to make a cavity of the chest, the scraggy neck seemed to be bending double under the weight of the skull. At a guess he would have said that it was the body of a man of sixty, suffering from some malignant disease.
p.283-4

There is an eerie scene in Mikael Hafstrom's 2007 horror movie 1408 in which the central character, Mike Enslin, looks out of his window across the street and sees a figure in a room in the opposite building. He attempts to attract this person's attention and signal a message to him, but the figure responds by mirroring his movements and on closer inspection is indeed a reflection, but a supernatural one (the room and clothing do not match up). This realisation is quickly followed by a 'shock'. Click below for a video clip of this scene:

Night-duty in the radar bunker

2008-02-28T11:18:00.000-08:00

My grandfather told a story from his time in national service, which he spent working at RAF Ringstead Radar Station, in Dorset, circa.1950. This is what my mother and I can remember of it:

At Ringstead there was a radar bunker built into a hillock in the middle of a large wooded area. It was manned 24 hours a day by one person at a time working in shifts. The over-night shift was notoriously unpleasant due to the isolation from the rest of the camp and the darkness of the forest.

One night the man on night-duty, who had been working the shift for some months, made a radio-call to the camp. He asked to be collected at once. The job had got to him, and the following day he left the station altogether, taken away for psychiatric treatment.

Others were reluctant to take his place, and it came as a surprise that the only volunteer was a young man who was known for being what my grandad referred to as "effeminate". This man went on to work the night shift for a long time without complaint.

When asked how he endured the nights spent alone in the bunker buried in the woods, he replied, "The only thing that irritates me is that the slightest breeze causes the door to rattle against its frame. So I leave it unlocked and slightly open."

Unfortunately, his apparent fearlessness did not last. Eventually he "cracked", as his predecessor had, and was likewise relieved of the post. From then on a new policy was put in place: that the night shift would always be worked by two people at a time.

These photographs are of the RAF Ringstead Radar Station after its closure in 1970. From grandad's description, I'd guess that this bunker is the one from his story. The surrounding area seems to have been partially deforested, and the bunker itself is stripped. However, with a little imagination it is easy to envisage how unnerving a night alone there could be.

(photographs courtesy of Shaun Churchill at www.worldwar2airfields.fotopic.net)

Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

2008-02-27T05:41:00.000-08:00

In his 1899 novel Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's narrator describes a first impression of an infamous ivory trader named Kurtz:

I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks. Kurtz - Kurtz - that means 'short' in German - don't it? Well, the name was as true as everything else in his life - and death. He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it pitiful and appalling as from a winding-sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze. I saw him open his mouth wide - it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.

p.74

Kurtz's gaping mouth recalls H. G. Wells' description of a momentary impression Mrs Hall has of the title character in The Invisible Man:

... for a second it seemed to her that the man she looked at had an enormous mouth wide open, - a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face. It was the sensation of a moment: the white-bound head, the monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it.

p.11

Similarly, Edvard Munch's painting The Scream (1893) shows a contorted face with a gaping mouth.

Inspired by Munch's The Scream, Wes Craven's 1996 movie Scream features a killer wearing a halloween mask that also has a gaping mouth.

Scream (1996) Dir. Wes Craven

Another screaming mouth can be found in Francis Bacon's 1953 Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X.

Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953) Francis Bacon

H. G. Wells' The Invisible Man

2008-02-26T12:04:00.000-08:00

In his 1897 novella The Invisible Man, H. G. Wells creates uncanny effects with his descriptions of the title character's appearance. Heavily disguised, and often lurking in darkness, Wells' invention is a forerunner to the masked villains of 1970s-90s horror movies such as Jason Voorhees in Sean S. Cunningham's Friday the 13th (1980) and Michael Myers in John Carpenter's Halloween (1978).

Here are some excerpts from Wells' novella:

... carrying a little black portmanteau in his thickly gloved hand. He was wrapped up from head to foot, and the brim of his soft felt hat hid every inch of his face but the shiny tip of his nose; ... he wore big blue spectacles with sidelights, and had a bushy side-whisker over his coat-collar that completely hid his cheeks and face. ... standing there like a man of stone, his back hunched, his collar turned up, his dripping hat-brim turned down, hiding his face and ears completely.

pp.1-2

Image: The Invisible Man (1933) Dir. James Whale

For a moment she stood gaping at him, too surprised to speak.
He held a white cloth - it was a serviette he had brought with him - over the lower part of his face, so that his mouth and jaws were completely hidden, and that was the reason of his muffled voice. ... all his forehead above his blue glasses was covered by a white bandage, and that another covered his ears, leaving not a scrap of his face exposed excepting only his pink, peaked nose. It was bright pink, and shiny just as it had been at first. ... The thick black hair, escaping as it could below and between the cross bandages, projected in curious tails and horns, giving him the strangest appearance conceivable. This muffled, and bandaged head was so unlike what she had anticipated, that for a moment she was rigid.

p.7

The only light in the room was the red glow from the fire - which lit his eyes like adverse railway signals, but left his downcast face in darkness - and the scanty vestiges of the day that came in through the open door. Everything was ruddy, shadowy, and indistinct to her ... for a second it seemed to her that the man she looked at had an enormous mouth wide open, - a vast and incredible mouth that swallowed the whole of the lower portion of his face. It was the sensation of a moment: the white-bound head, the monstrous goggle eyes, and this huge yawn below it.

p.11

He felt alone in the room and looked up , and there, grey and dim, was the bandaged head and huge blue lenses staring fixedly, ... It was so uncanny-looking to Henfrey that for a minute they remained staring blankly at one another.

p.14

Image: The Invisible Man Returns (1940) Dir. Joe May

... the stranger was undoubtedly an unusually strange sort of stranger, and she was by no means assured about him in her own mind. In the middle of the night she woke up dreaming of huge white heads like turnips, that came trailing after her at the end of interminable necks, and with vast black eyes.

p.15

The blind was down and the room dim. He caught a glimpse of a most singular thing, what seemed a handless arm waving towards him, and a face of three huge indeterminate spots on white, very like the face of a pale pansy. Then he was struck violently in the chest, hurled back, and the door slammed in his face and locked all so rapidly that he had no time to observe.

p.17

... at twilight he would go out muffled up enormously, whether the weather were cold or not, and he chose the loneliest paths and those most over-shadowed by trees and banks. His goggling spectacles and ghastly bandaged face under the penthouse of his hat, came with a disagreeable suddenness out of the darkness upon one or two home-going labourers; and Teddy Henfrey, tumbling out of the Scarlet Coat one night at half-past nine, was scared shamefully by the stranger's skull-like head (he was walking hat in hand) lit by the sudden light of the opened inn door. Such children as saw him at nightfall dreamt of bogies ...

p.22

Below, a clip from James Whale's 1933 film adaption of The Invisible Man.

Attic Basement Garage video

2008-02-26T04:21:00.000-08:00

A video of Attic Basement Garage on display at Central St Martin's College in London, June 2006.

Mark Seltzer Serial Killers

2008-02-26T03:26:00.000-08:00

Mark Seltzer makes frequent reference to the uncanny in his 1998 book Serial Killers. Here are some excerpts:

There is something uncanny about how these killers are so much alike, living composites, how easily they blend in. The serial killer, as one prosecutor of these cases expressed it, is "abnormally normal": "just like you or me."

p.10

An embodiment of an uncanny spatial relation, the stranger's "strangeness means that he, who is also far, is actually near". ... The stranger, if not (quite) yet the statistical person, begins to make visible the uncanny stranger-intimacy that defines the serial killer: the "deliberate stranger" or "the stranger beside me".

p.42

There is, in the experience of serial killing, a compulsive location of the scene of the crime in such homes away from home - hotel and motel spaces as murdering places. This is one indication of the radical redefinition of "the homelike" on the American scene: not exactly "no place like home," but rather only places "like" home. If stranger-killing is premised on a fundamental typicality, then the making of what came to be called, at the turn of the century, American "hotel-civilization" is premised on the mass replication of ideal-typical domestic spaces. It is premised, that is, on the uncanniness (unhomelikeness) of the domestic as such (an uncanniness perhaps inseperable from the psychic shocks of the machine culture of mass-reproducibility). Hence the repeated location of American serial violence in hotel and motel hells: the murder motel in Robert Bloch's novel Psycho, for example, or the even more lethal tourist hotel in his subsequent novel, American Gothic.

pp.47-8

What I mean to consider here are the relays progressively articulated between bodies and places such that the home, or, more exactly, the homelike, emerges again and again as the scene of the crime.

p.201

There is no doubt always something outmoded about the domestic and its constructed nostalgias - what might be called its uncanniness, if the notion of "the uncanny" (the unhomelike) itself had not by now become an all too homey way of naming that belatedness, its ambiguous causalities and periodizations (in effect, a way of endorsing a sort of better living through ambiguity). It is the vexed status of the homelike itself that I mean to define here. More exactly, it is the way in which the public spectacle or exhibition of "the private" in machine culture - museums or replicas of home as tourist site, for instance - seems to have become inseperable from the exhibition of bodily violence or atrocity that I mean to examine. These haunted homelike places - hotel and motel hells, for example - set in high relief the "gothic" rapport between persons and spaces, the distribution of degrees of aliveness across constructed spaces, the assimilation of the animate to the inanimate and mechanic.

p.202

Hanging Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz

2008-02-17T14:23:00.000-08:00

The scene from The Wizard of Oz in which one of the 'munchkin' actors is rumoured to be visible hanging himself from a tree in the background.

The hanging munchkin was actually the wing of a large live bird. More information about this urban legend here.

Sketchbook

2008-02-13T05:02:00.000-08:00

Sketches for an artwork for The Unheimlich exhibition.

Ghost boy in Three Men and a Baby

2008-02-07T03:32:00.001-08:00

Here is a link to the scene from Three Men and a Baby (1987) supposedly showing a ghostly boy. Below is Jan Harold Brunvand's account of this rumour, published in The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends (2001).

The Ghostly Videotape

In 1990, when the 1987 film Three Men and a Baby was released on videotape, people began to notice for the first time a "ghost" image, apparently of a young boy, in the background of one scene. Stories developed explaining that the son of the owners of the New York apartment used for the film had committed suicide there and had returned as a ghostly presence that could be seen only in the film. Some viewers thought they could also see the rifle he had used to kill himself alongside the spirit; others claimed that the supposed ghost was merely a young relative of the film's director, Leonard Nimoy, who had been promised an appearance in it.
Debunking these stories, the film's producers explained that the New York "apartment" was really a soundstage in Toronto and that the image was an out-of-focus view of a cardboard cutout of actor Ted Danson, who stars in the film, used as part of the apartment decor. Rumors then began to circulate that the film's distributors themselves had started the stories in order to promote video rentals and to draw attention to their sequel Three Men and a Little Lady (1990). Unmentioned in most of the discussion of this short-lived legend was the fact that supposed spectral images of dead persons in photographs have long been a part of folk tradition. Most commonly, such images were claimed to be visible in photographs of groups of miners or other workers who had lost one or more companions in occupational accidents.

Jan Harold Brunvand (2001) The Encyclopedia of Urban Legends

Porn Shoot Off Cuts

2008-02-07T03:01:00.000-08:00

Dead Bodies and Cardboard is an art exhibition running from 9th - 23rd February 2008 at Elevator Gallery, London. I'm exhibiting a new video titled Porn Shoot Off-Cuts in this show.

The video is made from footage shot by cameramen at porn-shoots, using the sequences that would usually be cut out during editing. This gives a fragmentary impression of the events taking place, directing our attention to the surrounding environment, and the mood of the participants.

For me, some parts of this video evoke an uncanny atmosphere.

Attic Basement Garage: Uncanny Figures

2007-12-20T10:07:00.000-08:00

Attic Basement Garage: Uncanny Figures is an essay I wrote to accompany the installation Attic Basement Garage when I first exhibited it. The essay explores the uncanny impression that many visitors experience in relation to the work, referring to similar phenomenon in popular culture.

This is a link to the original essay.

Below is an abridged version:

Attic Basement Garage: Uncanny Figures

FEAR GAMES

Between the ages of 5 and 15 years, my friends and I enjoyed games and incidents involving gratuitous fear; that is, fear of imagined threats.

These activities typically took place after dark, sometimes outdoors, daring one another into lone missions ('run to the edge of the trees and touch the fence before you come back'), or else indoors, inciting a kind of group hysteria, blundering around with the lights off, fleeing or cowering from an imagined terror.

Fear was not fun in itself, for example, when alone in bed at night unable to sleep. It only took on its pleasurable aspect when shared with friends, either in the moment or in recounting ‘scary’ experiences to one another.During adolescence these fear games were superseded by other activities that did not share the same physicality or immediacy: viewing horror movies together, discussing Stephen King novels, telling urban legends.

However, even in adulthood, experiences still occasionally arise that recall the feelings that we invoked with our early games. It is in reference to these that I understand the word “uncanny”.

THE UNCANNY

In 1993 and 2004 Mike Kelley presented an exhibition titled The Uncanny, consisting of sculptures, objects and images that he found “creepy”, with “an ‘uncanny’ aura about them”.

The majority were life-sized polychrome models of the human body in whole or part. This accorded with ‘scary’ experiences of my own involving figurative sculptures, particularly one winter in my early teens when I was repeatedly surprised and slightly unnerved by a deshevelled Guy Fawkes that we had propped in a living room chair awaiting the evening’s bonfire.

Kelley’s exhibition centred on Sigmund Freud’s essay The Uncanny (1919), which draws on Ernst Jentsch’s The Psychology of the Uncanny (1906), in which the uncanny is exemplified by “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate”. It is this ambiguity that I have attempted to give my own sculptures in Attic Basement Garage, which this essay accompanies.

ART AND OBJECTHOOD

Michael Fried’s criticism of minimalist sculpture’s “degeneration” into “theatricality” highlights how objects with very little resemblance to actual figures can still give an impression of human presence:“...being distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly – for example in somewhat darkened rooms – can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way”.

I believe that this disquieting effect can unite people in pleasurable excitement; either when experienced simultaneously by two or more people, or experienced alone, which might be unpleasant at the time, but can provide a cathartic pleasure when subsequently described to others. It is this aspect, the joy of sharing gratuitous fear, that drives my interest in the uncanny.

NOT SCARY ENOUGH

If gratuitous scares are the aim then Attic Basement Garage could be alot scarier. The figures could be hidden behind corners, the room darkened, blacked out even, visitors provided with dim torches, animatronics occasionally launching the figures into grotesque movement. In short, all the strategies of the ghost train or carnival haunted house could be mobilised to provoke the greatest shocks possible, short of cardiac arrest, and why not? Firstly, an out and out sensory traumatisation of the viewer is not an exercise in the uncanny as I understand it; secondly, the more up-front the author is about his intention to create an uncanny effect, the harder he is likely to fall into the trap that Freud describes thus: “...by the time we have seen through his trick it is already too late and the author has achieved his object. But it must be added that his success is not unalloyed. We retain a feeling of dissatisfaction, a kind of grudge against the attempted deceit.”

Hence, when the uncanny aura is understood as the author’s intention, it is often superseded by an aura of pathetic redundancy. The initial effect passes and continued exposure incurs the law of diminishing returns. Knowing that the intensity of our experience is testament to the author’s ability to manipulate us can, in itself, take the edge off. Therefore, it may be that certain uncanny effects are best experienced as un-authored; a difficulty for works displayed in the context of Western art’s attributive tradition. This is also a question for Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics: what is the nature of an authored social relation?

STATUES AND CORPSES

In his essay Playing With Dead Things, Kelley writes, “The aura of death surrounds statues. The origin of sculpture is said to be in the grave; the first corpse was the first statue. And early statues were the first objects to which the aura of life clung.”

This association is made explicit in Dennis Nilsen’s description of the body of a young man he had murdered:“...I gently undressed him and carried him naked into the bathroom. I washed him carefully all over in the bath and sitting his limp body on the edge I towelled him dry. I laid him on my bed and put talc on him to make him look cleaner. I just sat there and watched him. He looked really beautiful like one of those Michelangelo sculptures.”

However, the similarities between statues and corpses (their cold inanimacy), as opposed to living bodies, are not a source of uncanny feeling in themselves. Rather, it is precisely the obvious lifelessness of most statues that forecloses uncanny ambiguity. The marginal status of moving statuary attests to the fact that viewers prefer their statues this way: patently dead.Where performance offers a display of the living body, statuary allows contemplation of a well-kept corpse; the body as a passive object of scrutiny; a face that will never return our gaze. It is this pleasure that the uncanny disturbs.

STANDING SILENTLY

If a statue is posed seated or standing in a comfortable upright position then its stillness no longer guarantees its lifelessness; a living person could easily sit or stand still in the same pose. For me, a still silent upright figure, whether dead, alive, or somewhere inbetween, is the exemplary form of uncanny human presence.

For example, photographs purportedly showing ‘ghosts’ rarely feature spectral figures in motion. For many, the prospect that the figure was there, unknown to those present, is menace enough. This is especially true when the ‘ghost’ is pictured among oblivious living persons, the implication being: these people were in the presence of a figure they could not see, therefore you might be in the presence of a figure that you cannot see – though it might see you.

This, in turn, is a prompt to that heightened attentiveness to one’s environment that characterises gratuitous fear.

THREE MEN AND A GHOST

An urban legend of the early 90s claimed that the ghost of a young boy could be seen standing in the background of a scene in the comedy movie Three Men and a Baby (1987) . The rumours picked up after the film’s video release, allowing people to replay and assess the footage for themselves.

As the camera pans across a room, following two actors in the foreground, a small figure with dark hair is clearly visible between the curtains of a large window. This figure was subsequently revealed by the filmmakers to be a cardboard cut-out image of actor Ted Danson, propped arbitrarily on the floor by the window, and not intended to create an illusion.

A similar effect was deliberately created by the makers of BBC’s Ghostwatch (1992). Imitating live-broadcast factual television techniques, a handheld camera panned quickly around a child’s bedroom, affording a brief glimpse of a tall figure stood infront of the curtains. The camera panned back past the same spot in the opposite direction and the figure had gone. There was no indication in the camera work that the camera operator was aware of the figure.

Unseen figures also populate urban legends. For example, the story of a young woman who returns a borrowed item to a friend’s bedroom at night without switching the light on, so as to avoid waking her; the following morning the same friend is discovered murdered in her bed beside a note that reads “Aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the light?”

Here, we are invited to identify with the heroine’s narrow escape, and therefore to become hyper-vigilent ourselves. In other words, to ‘get scared’.

THE LIVING DEAD

Jentsch lists examples of things that produce uncanny feelings, including “wax-work figures, artificial dolls and automatons,” but also, “epileptic seizures and the manifestations of insanity.”11This reminds me of an uncle of mine who, as a child, would frighten his siblings by “doing the stick-man”. This involved moving through the corridors of their home with his arms and legs held straight and rigid, walking in a fast, jerky, exaggerated manner, his face held in a manic rictus grin.

ZOMBIES

The awkward movements and facial contortions of George Romero’s zombies in Night of the Living Dead (1968) perhaps also exemplify this aspect of the uncanny. However, I have a misgiving about the genre’s convention of zombie ‘death’.

For example, in Night of the Living Dead the living characters are able to ‘kill’ the zombies by shooting them in the head. Clearly, as a plot device this resolves the undecideability inherant in the idea of the living-dead. The problem is that it also suggests that the zombie formula not only plays on the audience’s fear of bodies that are both dead and alive, but that it also satisfies a repressed desire to watch lunatics and the diseased, that is living people, being executed by the sane and healthy.

My least favourite zombie films are those that exhibit this characteristic most blatantly, descending into a thinly veiled form of war movie in which one side (the zombies) are depicted as categorically mindless and abhorent, therefore justifying a lack of empathy for them on the audience’s part when our side (the living) attempt to exterminate them en masse.

Resident Evil (a series of zombie ‘shoot em up’ computer games) literalises this tendency by arming the player with a gun and presenting a succession of zombies that must be killed in order to win the game. Though grotesque, the imagery is barely given time to be experienced as ‘creepy’, and the frenzied action shares little in common with the uncanny figures offered by Jentsch, Freud, and Kelley.

By comparison, a scene from Bryan Forbes’ The Stepford Wives (1975) conforms closely to Jentsch’s formulation. A woman preparing coffee is stabbed but does not bleed or show pain. Instead, she begins to repeat a series of physical gestures robotically, spilling coffee beans and breaking crockery, like a malfunctioning animatronic statue. Here, according to the narrative, what initially appears to be a living person in seizure proves to be a mechanised object.

In other instances, covering the face of a performer with a mask can invoke the dehumanised uncanny air of a statue brought to life. This can be seen in ‘slasher’ movies The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) , Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th Part III (1982) , and also in the art of Paul McCarthy whose work includes performances involving masks, and masked (sometimes animatronic) sculptures.

IDENTIFYING WITH THE UNCANNY OBJECT

There is a temptation to banalise an appetite for the macabre by concealing it with campy excess and ironic humour (common amongst suburban teenaged ‘Goths’), thereby repressing the anxieties on which the appetite is founded. This is a tacit apology to the surrounding community for (indirectly) expressing sadness, anger, and resentment against it. Unfortunately, this apology devalues the ‘loser’s’ taste for the macabre, distracting attention from the shift of view point that it affords: in this case, an identification with the psychopathology of an irrational indiscriminately predatory outsider.

Returning to the example of fear games, this shift can be seen as a movement from the social pleasure of shared gratuitous fear to an identification with the object of fear. This is precisely what would have been unthinkable to my friends and I during our fear games: to identify with the uncanny figure, alien to the group, standing silently, alone in the shadows.

Attic Basement Garage

2007-12-20T09:45:00.000-08:00

Attic Basement Garage is an installation I've exhibited in a number of different permeatations:

June 2006 Central St Martin's College of Art: Graduation show, London

October 2006 The Affordable Art Fair: New Graduates, London

November 2006 Futuremap 06, The Arts Gallery, London

April 2007 Charade, Ada Street Gallery, London

Things that go Bump in the Night

2007-12-19T13:22:00.000-08:00

Things that go Bump in the Night was an exhibition curated by Dominic Mason at the Victorian Gothic, at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe. The exhibition ran from 15 Sept - 1 Dec 2007, and featured work by Nigel Grimmer, Marcelle Hanselaar, Pam Glew, Craig Fisher, Luci Gorell Barnes, Cat James, Suzanne Langston-Jones, Johnny White, and myself.

Here are images of the exhibition, including my scale models of the house from Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), the house from Rosenberg's The Amityville Horror (1979), the house of serial killer Ed Gein, and the White House.

By far the most popular topos of the nineteenth-century uncanny was the haunted house. A pervasive leitmotiv of literary fantasy and architectural revival alike, its depiction in fairy tales, horror stories, and Gothic novels gave rise to a unique genre of writing that, by the end of the century, stood for romanticism itself. The house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" was paradigmatic: "With the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. ... The feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible."

Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (1992)

Ghoul '06

2007-12-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

Ghoul '06 is a digital photograph I made in summer 2006.

The Sandman by E.T.A.Hoffman

2007-12-17T07:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a link to E.T.A.Hoffman's 1816 short story Der Sandmann (The Sandman). The Sandman is Freud's main literary reference in his essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny) (see below).

Jentsch and Freud

2007-12-16T08:30:00.000-08:00

A link to Ernst Jentsch's 1906 essay On the Psychology of the Uncanny.

A link to Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny) .

Introduction

2007-12-16T07:53:00.000-08:00

This blog accompanies the touring art exhibition The Unheimlich, curated by Matt Roberts.

I'm Matt Lippiatt, and I'm one of the artists whose work will appear in the exhibition. I plan to use this blog to collect research material including texts, images and videos, and to explore ideas relating to the unheimlich, or uncanny.