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Freud explains that the "uncanny" is in reality "nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old - established in the mind that's has been estranged only by the process of repression" (Rivkin p. 427) . Because of this definition, we understand that everything that creates an "uncanny" feeling has to be inside of us, repressed but still present. If this is true, how can a writer or director generate the feeling of uncanniness in the audience without knowing everything that lies inside them? Is either the ability of the creator that lets him guess and pull out the repressed feelings, or there is something else?.
Let's examine a regular horror movie. In a certain moment the victim approaches a closed door. We, the audience, don't know what is on the other side of the door, nor the victim. Why does a closed door scare us and make us feel the "uncanny" feeling? Maybe the music is helping, the angle of the camera, the lights, the speed of the movements; we can feel in the air that something is going to happen. And in a lot of movies, it does, the killer (zombie, dead man, wild dog, alien, crazy wife, somber blond child) opens the door and the victim screams and runs away. We wait for this moment; we pay for this split-second of horror and the moments before when the music and tension is almost unbearable. Some good directors let the victim open the door and continue the search, maintaining the tension or breaking it anticlimactically
That is a common example of how the director can use that which we have inside us, like the fear of the unknown or the dark, but transform it into a feeling that could be easily turned on and off using simple tricks. I know this example is not about the "uncanny" but about the "fear". But because this two concepts lie together it can help to illustrate my point.
Baudrillard talks about the progression of the image from the reality to its mere simulacrum. The horror movies and books constantly embody that definition. First The fear of the unknown, the darkness or the pain is a reflection of a basic reality, (which lies down inside us, in our subconscious). Second The fear of a killer hidden in the darkness is a perversion of a basic reality. We have the fear, but we move the fear from the unknown and the night to the killer itself. Third The closed door is the absence of a basic reality. Nothing tells us that there is a killer ready to cut our insides out, but the construction around the fear - the music, the angle of the camera, the lights and the movements - generate the same fear effect. Fourth But we are talking about a movie where there is not possibility of real danger, it's only a fictional experience, but we, in the theater, eating popcorns and sipping cola, can feel a real sensation of fear.
How can this example can help us with the "uncanniness" talked about by Freud; this "something (that) ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light". (Rivkin p. 427). Baudrillard talks about the simulation as "the generations of models of a real without origin or reality" (Baudrillard) . Today, as in the example of the simulacrum of fear, we lived in a moment when the uncanniness can be generated, not only in the experiments of creating deja-vu or inducing new memories in therapy patients, but in the creations of the same sensations in literature, movies, art, etc. The capacity to create the "uncanny" in most of the audience could be not only explained with a common repressed feeling, but rather with the creation of a simulacrum of a repressed feeling. So, as Baudrillard says, "the real is produced from miniaturized units, from matrices, memory banks and command models [this common repressed feelings] and with these it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times".
The good artists can create uncanniness because they known their own repressed feelings and can model and create a construction (like the music) that emulates the real thing by forming a simulacrum.
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