The Uncanny

The Uncanny was a very interesting story to me because I’ve always thought about the “what ifs” and supernatural things that occurs in life. It’s learned that the “home” for Freud is something like a secret place, and the unhomely, “uncanny”, is something that was a secret but has been revealed. In Freud’s Uncanny text, it states “ an uncanny effect arises when the boundary between fantasy and reality is blurred, when we are faced with the reality of something that we have until now considered imaginary…(150)”. A good example of something along the lines of the uncanny is the evil chucky doll in Child’s Play. The doll was possessed by a murderer name Charles Lee Ray in which he performed a ritual causing his spirit to live inside of the chucky doll. People started dying because of the doll, and noone wanted to believe the owner of the doll, Andy, when he tried warning people that the doll was possessed and were the reasons for all of the killings happening. People only started seeing the doll in action when they were either going to be killed, or when the doll made an attempt to kill them and wasn’t successful in doing so because Andy would help them get away in time. I feel that this helps us understand the supernatural because just like Freud explained with things being familiar but unfamiliar at the same time, and you’re uncertainty especially when there's a life or death situation and there aren’t clear answers to what is causing these horrific events. It also helps understand the fears because it gives us something to think about much more than human life like what if my doll had the ability to turn on a switch and come to life killing people and people looking at me sideways because they’re convinced that I committed the crime. Growing up watching disney movies like the Toy Story, I always wondered if toys were really alive and socialized like humans when humans weren’t present. Crazy as it sounds I use to talk to my toys to try and see if it would talk to me back. I was so intrigued with the Toy Story movie that I even went overboard once when I was a kid by putting all of my toys on my bed and I set up a camera in my room and watched the toys for hours hoping that they would move, talk, or do something that showed some form of life.