Uncanny Freaks

The Uncanny is that which is familiar seeming unfamiliar.  One of the powers that horror has for us is to make normal and often pleasant things terrifying.  That sense of dread that fills us, is when we recognize the thing and then we realize that that thing that we recognize is simultaneously not the thing we thought.  Many horror films have made use of this concept.  Dracula looks like a man, a dashing debonaire man, and yet he is also a ghoul.  The physical twisting of his hands and the slow methodical movement exacerbate this sense that he is not what he seems, yet he still looks human.  Boris Karloff’s reanimated mummy is little more than a shriveled old man.  Yet there is something about his voice, his movement, that is alien, uncanny.  Zombies, that have proliferated our cultural conscious are exceptionally uncanny.  They look like humans, yet they move and sound inhuman, and in fact their behavior is terribly inhuman.  In Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead, this is demonstrated by the titular Shaun’s inability to clearly recognize the difference between living and dead.  This familiarity discomfits us because we want to believe that evil is easily recognizable.  We want evil to be alien to us so when it is too close to what we know and love it is threatening.  Recently a co-worker of mine was arrested for sexual abuse of a student.  As I spoke with my own students, they expressed shock and confusion.  The man was as normal as all of us and yet he was “evil”.  This threatened their sense of safety.  The familiar became unfamiliar and they were scared.

While films often use visual cues to make the familiar unfamiliar, they can make the audience believe that the unfamiliar is familiar and no longer a threat.  In Frankenstein, the monster looks very different than human, yet in various moments he behaves as a human might (more interestingly as a child who is even less threatening).  This makes the uncanny familiar and we empathize with the monster.  Then he does something horrible and monstrous and we are again discomfited.  The move from the uncanny to the familiar to the uncanny again is an extremely effective means of extracting horror from a narrative.

Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks uses this method to great effect.  When we are initially introduced to the various circus freaks we find them revolting.  They are like humans, yet different enough to be unsettling.  A man with no arms or legs or a woman who looks like a child yet an adult or a half woman half man all have a familiarity to what we expect a person to look like yet they are different and that difference disturbs us.  After showing off this freak show to frighten us with their uncanny nature, Browning invites us to see their humanity.  He shows them living normal lives, eating, drinking, marrying and giving in marriage.  We see their very human emotions and relationships.  But most of all we see them being persecuted by ‘normal’ folk.  This makes the uncanny familiar.  It connects these people with us.  They have lives like we do, love like we do, talk and play and dream like we do.  And they suffer pain, jealousy, and heartache as we do too.  This brings them into the realm of familiarity and we are at peace with them, we feel for them.  

This is when Browning turns the screws.  Due to a betrayal the freaks band together to seek revenge on the two ‘normals’ that have been bullying them.  During a torrential downpour the wagons that carry them from site to site crash.  At the same time the betrayal of the woman is reveals and the freaks pursue her into the rain.  There are several shots of them crawling through the mud brandishing weapons.  The lightening strikes and the thunderclaps and they no longer seem human.  That which was uncanny and made familiar becomes once again uncanny.  They are freaks made human made monsters.  We are all the more terrified by this transformation.  We are betrayed and angry, yet filled with fear.  

The world of horror is the world of the uncanny.  Directors who can manipulate the uncanny are the most successful at filling audience with dread.  Tod Browning shows his mastery of that craft in his film Freaks.  Perhaps the greatest effect of his film is the conflicting feelings of guilt that this use of the uncanny produces.  We initially feel guilty for judging the freaks harshly.  Then we feel guilty for not recognizing evil when we saw it. Then we feel guilt for hating the bully and also hating the freak.  That combination of the bully and the freak in one mirrors the uncanny and the familiar in one.  And that is true terror.  I am the bully and I am the freak.