Eyes! Mirrors! Body Doubles!

How These Three Classic Horror Films Execute Uncanniness to Perfection

In 1919 Sigmund Freud published a piece called The Uncanny, which became one of the most influential theories in the psychoanalytic approach to anything horror.

The Gothic novel The Sandman acted as inspiration for Freud’s writing as they both explored the ways horror is aroused. The book discusses the paradox of something being both frighteningly alien and strangely familiar.

Freud makes it abundantly clear that the word uncanny “belongs to all that is terrible- to all that arouses dread and creeping horror.” In that book, he also discusses the fear of losing sight, as one of the primal forms of fears, as seen from psychoanalytic experience (according to Freud), and its relation to the castration complex (ex. Oedipus).

As Freud goes on, he discusses the idea of the double. This concept has been thoroughly explored by Otto Rank, who Freud explains has “gone into the connections the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and the fear of death.”

He further explains, “For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’ as Rank says.” Otto Rank’s, Dier Doppelganger. Eine Psychoanalytische Studie was first published in 1925 (written in 1914) and comprises topics such as identity, fear of death, and narcissism.

The idea of the double can be seen in the appearances of replicas, cyborgs, shape-shifters, projections, robots, and apparitions in horror films.

Here are three classic horror films that demonstrate Uncanniness.

Wait Until Dark, the 1967 home invasion thriller starring Audrey Hepburn, features a blind woman as she navigates her apartment and the strangers that encroach upon it.

The Fritz Lang classic M is about a town coming together in order to capture a child killer.

The cult classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about a doctor in a small town dealing with its residents being replaced by aliens who look identical to the residents.

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