Writing tips: Freud's idea of the uncanny and why it helps horror writers
Typed for you by a severed hand.
Freud was a bit of a dick
He would argue this is psychologically true, although I suspect he’d resent the metaphorical meaning.
Despite Freud’s shortcomings, his idea of ‘the uncanny’ brilliantly outlines a powerful idea for all writers, but particularly for those of us who enjoy the spookier side of life.
Heimlich and unheimlich
In German, the uncanny is ‘das unheimlich’, meaning the opposite of ‘heimlich’.
Heimlich has a few meanings, each of them are useful facets of the uncanny.
Heimlich = homely, i.e. belonging to the house
Heimlich = secure, comfortable
Heimlich = tame (like an animal is tame)
Heimlich = private, hidden from others, secret, or even deceitful.
You might notice that last one is a bit different in tone from the others: while the earlier definitions are comforting, the last is guarded or even misleading. It’s a complex word.
Flipping this into ‘unheimlich’ then gives us a few different meanings:
Unheimlich = unhomely, belonging to outside the house, weird, or eerie
Unheimlich = insecure, unsafe, uncomfortable
Unheimlich = untamed and wild
Unheimlich = revealed, inadvertently disclosed.
The last definition here might remind you of the famous ‘Freudian slip’ or ‘parapraxis’, i.e. where a person reveals their true thoughts by saying the wrong word or phrase, such as a lover calling out the name of another person in a moment of passion. There is a link here, stemming (in Freud’s view) from a common root.
For Freud, the sense of the uncanny is triggered by a break in the logic of reality which pulls us back to reveal earlier, more primitive ways of thinking and understanding the world. These primitive ways can be our beliefs and values from childhood, or they can be non-scientific interpretations of the world from earlier in the history of humanity, e.g. folklore.
When the uncanny is triggered, it’s because we’re thrown out of rational life and into a sense of unease because something we thought we’d intellectually or emotionally surpassed resurfaces inside us and asserts its reality.
Uncanny moments force us to doubt whether we truly understand the world, or if there is a deeper and more unknowable reality beyond the comfortable, homely view of reality we’ve constructed.
Examples:
A disembodied hand that moves by itself: we know that it cannot be alive, and yet it moves. No rational force could be driving it, leaving us only irrational possibilities that disturb us.
Inanimate objects (such as a robot) acts like they are alive: we know that metal is not alive, but when it is sufficiently lifelike it makes us feel like inhuman spirits may haunt the world. (See also: ‘uncanny valley’.)
Doppelgangers (people who look identical) make us question our uniqueness. They trigger sense of dissolving boundaries between ‘me’ and ‘other’. These boundaries are profoundly important to our sense of identity and stem from early childhood.
The dead returning: we know the dead do not return, crave for anything, or express emotions or desires. If they can return, it breaks a fundamental rule of reality.
Voices in the darkness: darkness is simply the absence of light, but fearing spirits or malicious entities in the dark speaks to primal fears of the unknown.
A room where, on the edge of your vision, the walls breathe.
A disconnected fairground ride that springs into life.
A balloon that follows you.
Toys that play with themselves.
A face slowly growing in a tree, which becomes more and more familiar as the seasons pass.
To put it another way, the uncanny stems from us doubting all our rational ideas about the world because something out-of-place has happened, forcing us question whether the old folklore or beliefs might be more accurate than our scientific perspectives.
The uncanny is fundamentally unscientific, and unsettling because it signifies a break in a unified, stable world view.
The uncanny is typically a subtle, creeping sense. Often it comes before a true threat occurs, because the uncanny is easily (temporarily) supressed by more urgent drives for survival.
Breaking the world’s rules
The uncanny relies on an unexpected disruption of seemingly trustworthy rules. This will be easier in some genres than others.
If you’re writing high-fantasy, your readers might get a tickle of the uncanny from a demonic spirit in your story but, in a world of elves and dragons, the setting is already outside of our typical ‘homely’ and ‘secure’ rules. A demon isn’t very disruptive in a world with sorcerers. You’d have to truly establish that the character knows demons and sprits aren’t real for a demon’s appearance to be uncanny.
However, if your character is on an empty London underground station platform, with a bag of chips wafting oil and vinegar into their nostrils and a 10 foot tall ‘get beach body ready for this summer’ advert on the wall across the track, when a translucent figure with its head smashed open rises from between the railings… That ghost breaks clear and deeply held rules of how the world is supposed to work: People aren’t see-through. People aren’t supposed to be on the tracks. People with those kinds of wounds don’t live, or stand, or shuffle closer and closer AND CLOSER.
Importantly for the second example, it starts with the uncanny but it quickly moves into dread (intense foreboding) when the ghost moves closer.
These examples are disturbing because humans are pattern-finders, and if we see one important thread of our pattern is pulled loose then we don’t know how far things will unravel.
If ghost are real, then what else might I be wrong about? What other horrors am I unprepared to face?
Feeling unprepared, outside of our ‘home’, outside of the ‘tame’ and facing the unlimited wild, feeling like a repressed secret fear from childhood might actually be real… All of this is scary. This is the unheimlich.
Recipe for the uncanny
As writers, what can we learn from these examples?
The uncanny needs:
a protagonist with whom the reader feels connected.
the protagonist’s world view to have strict and relatable rules. Arguably, the rules of the fictional world should be realistic.
something that calls these rules into question in a way that ties to earlier human and/or childlike beliefs.
If you like your recipes even simpler, ask yourself about your writing:
How can the familiar become unfamiliar?
Or
How can the unfamiliar become familiar?
I like to occasionally revisit the definitions of ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’ (at the top of this newsletter) to help myself think about ways in which elements of wrongness can be introduced into situation.
I often use something small, but it’s enough to get a protagonist to sense that something is wrong, like a small patch of trees left alone in the middle of otherwise excellent farmland. Using uncanny elements gives a creepy tickle to readers which works as an on-ramp to feelings of unease, dread, and terror.
Freud argued that the uncanny can only truly exist in fiction, because the rules of the real world are consistent: the dead don’t come back to life, severed hands cannot type. If we feel the uncanny in our everyday lives it’s only because we are not being rational.
Except that isn’t true.
Your usual host, Mata, is not typing this.
It is being written by dead fingers, scuttling over the keyboard.
Flakes of skin crack and tumble between the keys as it moves.
Each word you’ve read was sent to infect your mind.
Deep inside you understand the world is unknowable, your readers do too. Let them embrace their repressed fear that the old ways, the old rules, their old wrong-but-not-wrong dreads may just have been true all along.
Sweet dreams, and see you next week.