Ever had the feeling that you are being watched?  Or been disturbed by being left alone in the dark?  Or suddenly become frightened by an otherwise familiar object?  Or even felt threatened by a deserted landscape?  Then you’ve experienced an uncanny moment – that flicker of the mysterious between the unsettling and the creepy that is fleeting but bewildering and disconcerting, sometimes provoking a deep sense of dread.

An Uncanny Landscape

Uncanny experiences happen all the time.  Most people can tell of their own encounter with an eerie moment or two – the reluctance to enter the room at the top of the stairs, or a premonition about the arrival of an unexpected visitor, or a feeling of unease when confronted by a clown or a puppet, maybe.  They don’t seem to trouble us much, these experiences – a shiver down the spine and they’re filed away with the rest of the day’s events.

But still ….

The uncanny continues to unsettle me.  It seems to be interwoven with common experience, but at the same time invisible, or at least little discussed.  So I thought that in this blog I’d look at how the novels, films, images, sounds, and even created objects that make up our popular culture deal with uncanny experiences, events, and situations, and try to understand how the uncanny moment is created.

There’s no logical order in the pieces I’ll be posting (just as there’s nothing logical about the uncanny itself). I’m just going to write about what catches my imagination as I go along.  Hope you enjoying reading!

Here’s the blog.