“The Oldest and Strongest Emotion of Mankind is Fear, and the Oldest and Strongest Kind of Fear is Fear of the Unknown”: Tracing the Uncanny Across Cultures and Centuries

Written By Jack Taggart

Introduction

Fear. A timeless human emotion traced back to our ancestors that has shaped our own psychological, artistic and social lives, ingraining itself into our decision making and the way we are as human beings. The title quote: “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” is from H. P. Lovecraft’s Supernatural Horror in Literature from 1927 and is still as relevant now as it was 98 years ago (Lovecraft,1927). 

Lovecraft here perfectly captures the essence of the uncanny, what it is and what it means. It grasps and does well to try and explain the ultimately unexplainable feelings of fear that us humans feel by unfamiliar settings or as to why unfamiliar disruptions, those moments that don’t sit quite right, give us a fear so strong and so primal, it remains completely incomprehensible. 

Although this ‘kind of fear’ remains unfathomable, Freud’s 1919 essay, Das Unheimliche, which simply translates to ‘The Uncanny’, gives us some more detail, something more we can relate and understand as he says, “...the uncanny is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” (Freud, 1919). This link to a primal and ancient instinct that lives still within us after thousands of years of evolution makes us question what is what that brought this direct fear on, why it still remains, and why it is something the human body can’t and won’t shake off.

This unfamiliar feeling and ‘class of the terrifying’ that Lovecraft and Freud try to explain at the best of their professional abilities is something that authors and artists alike have taken advantage of, introducing it into their work. Whether it be ever so subtly or blaring in the fact of the viewer, the inclusion of the uncanny brings an odd yet familiar feel to a piece of work, reinstating those primal instincts, reactions and feelings that observe something strange and unfamiliar, yet not able to identify it, thus stimulating and even tormenting the human psyche. 

Julia Kristeva further expands on the uncanny by introducing the ‘abstract’ linking its connotations of a non-physical existence but rather an idea that lingers in the mind, plaguing our thoughts as it says in The concept of abjection in the philosophy of Julia Kristeva, “...the abject presents an eternity of threatening and redrawing of one’s own borders.” (Pournami, 2024). The idea of individual borders details the fact that the uncanny portrays itself differently to every human, something one person portrays as something, another may portray as something else, thus exemplifying the true horror and distortion of the uncanny.

Within this essay, I will trace how the uncanny unfolds itself and manifests across cultures from across the world, the evolution of the uncanny through centuries of literature, and how, although time has passed, the uncanny remains just as prominent within our psyche. I will analyse it’s origins and its first portrayals in gothic literature, how psychologists see, understand and explain this unfathomable component of who we are, and global examples that demonstrate that the uncanny is something manifested within all of us, something we can not get rid of, and something we will never escape. 

Gothic roots of the uncanny

Emerging from the enlightenment period from the early 17th century to early 19th century, gothic literature was a response to the recognised reason of the world and the belief that logic and observation could be progressed through human understanding, by exploring a more irrational aspect of the world and human mind, undermining what the enlightenment stood for. 

Whilst the enlightenment stood for the positive aspects of what humans are, nature, the progress of time and even reason itself, gothic literature became an expression for writers to flip this by examining the human mind at its rawest. The scrutiny of the human psyche by centering their themes on obsession, guilt and madness, and our own downfall through the destructive potential within us as individuals was the centre point of what gothic literature became.

Horace Walpole’s 1765 novel, The Castle of Otranto, was the first text that undermined the enlightenment period, thus becoming the first recognised gothic text. It said the boundaries for what this genre of literature should be by exemplifying the madness of the human psyche by portraying the castle itself as liminal space that lingers between what is known and considered safe, and at night, within the darkness, becoming a place of unfamiliarity, a place of uncertainty, and a place that epitomises the uncanny. Within this text, the power of this liminal space is shown as it says, “if she could not escape from the castle, she was in danger in a few moments of being made miserable for ever.” (Walpole, 1765). Through this quote, the castle is seen as a location that will eventually ruin the human psyche due to its “embodiment of liminality, blurring the lines between reality and the supernatural, the known and the unknown” as Mariyam Farzand states in her essay, further demonstrating the use of liminal spaces as a way to create an disturbed feeling within the characters, a place of complete unfamiliarity with a home to distort minds and lead to complete insanity (Farzand).

Another gothic text that explores the uncanny in a unique and groundbreaking way is Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein. The fear that this text presents was a perfect representation of the panic that the public had for science and creation and the dangers of going too far. Shelley expertly explores the fears of unnatural creation, thus showing a damaging impact and an almost ‘dystopian’ way that technology and creation can be used for power, as well as delving deep into the themes of scientific transgression by crossing the line between life and death, destroying and completely dehumanising the human body and hubris manifests in his reckless pursuit to create life, believing he can rival nature and defy the limits of human knowledge.

Abjection and this idea of blurring and distorting the boundaries between life and death, and between human and inhuman is displayed by Shelley frequently within the novel, painting a picture of the monster that fills the reader with disgust and revulsion, thus showing the effect of the abject, this human-like form evoking pure horror. Frankenstein describes the monster itself as “...beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath” consequently, he almost romanticises the 'monster' he has created, even as he describes it in grotesque and uncanny terms—particularly through Shelley’s depiction of its mismatched skin tones and the horrors that lie beneath (Shelley, 1818).

While earlier Gothic writers such as Horace Walpole and Mary Shelley employed the uncanny to evoke fear—Walpole through the ominous architecture of the castle in The Castle of Otranto, and Shelley through her grotesque depictions of the human body in Frankenstein—Edgar Allan Poe radically redefined the concept. Rather than relying solely on external settings or physical distortion, Poe internalised the uncanny, exploring the psychological and existential disturbances that blur the boundaries between the familiar and the unfamiliar, thus transforming our understanding of its power and reach.

This idea that Poe evokes in his work radically changed what we knew of gothic literature and awoke something within literature of a deep exploration into the psyche of the human mind and that, although we can not escape it, fear is formed in our own minds, rather than something external. Poe’s 1843 short story, The Tell-Tale Heart, demonstrates this vulnerability of the human mind and the fears it evokes itself by the use of auditory hallucinations to manifest the narrator’s guilt, thus symbolising a fractured and fragmented mind. The quote from the text, “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night.” is a perfect summarisation of the fear that Poe aimed to evoke to the reader by demonstrating the human nature of the inability to control one's thoughts and how the gap between reality and complete fantasy is only a thin and delicate line (Poe, 1843). 

Continuing this theme that Poe subtly yet reverberates in his work of the fine line between sanity and insanity is demonstrated in no better fashion than his 1843 text, The Black Cat. Poe demonstrates a point of view of what would happen if this thin, delicate line that the human psyche holds would break as it says within the text,  “My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight.” (Poe, 1843). Claiming to have lost his ‘original soul’ after a violent outburst in which he murdered his own cat and wife, Poe presents the narrator of having broken this line, showcasing a psychological split within him, as if a darker version of himself, a version that lives deep within the human psyche of every living being, has taken over him in a primal and brutal way. Poe knew that some liminal spaces used in prior gothic literature such as castles, and the use of inhuman like beings such as the monster in Shelley’s, Frankenstein may not be something all readers and audiences alike could relate to, but this distress, torture and fear of what lives in the human mind that Poe evokes in his writing is something that, although people may not want to accept, is something will never be able to escape. 

While Edgar Allan Poe pioneered the psychological dimension of Gothic fiction—delving into the internal terrors of the human psyche and exposing the mind’s intrinsic fragility—Dracula (1897) marked a pivotal shift toward the externalisation of fear. Stoker’s novel transcends the trope of the monstrous vampire to dramatise a broader cultural unease: the fear of the unknown as a locus of the uncanny, embedded in the shifting socio-political landscape of late-Victorian Britain. At a time when the British Empire still projected global dominance, there was nevertheless a pervasive anxiety that its supremacy was faltering. 

The notion of ‘reverse colonisation’—the colonised returning to infiltrate and destabilise the heart of empire—manifests in the figure of Count Dracula, an Eastern European aristocrat who penetrates the symbolic and geographic centre of British civilisation: London. This fear of the racialised, foreign ‘Other’ did not merely evoke xenophobic anxiety, but also threatened the ideological foundations of British identity, order, and religious orthodoxy. As Taylor Kerns observes in The Dracula Difference: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Threat of the Other, “Foreigners introduced other gods and beliefs that permeated English thought, and in Dracula’s case, godlessness,” positioning the Count as both a literal and symbolic threat to national and spiritual integrity (Kern, 2020). Dracula, then, is far more than a Gothic thriller—it is a cultural artefact that registers Victorian Britain’s dread of moral, imperial, and epistemological decline. In doing so, it transforms supernatural horror into an allegory for a society haunted not only by external invaders but by its own collapsing certainties.

Psychological Foundations

As mentioned previously, Sigmund Freud’s Das Unheimliche links his understanding and conception of the uncanny as something that is not new or alien, but rather something that, surprisingly, is deeply familiar to us but has been repressed, muted, and hidden somewhere deep down in the human mind that, when returned, reemerges as a distorted and unsettling form. Freud argues within Das Unheimliche that us as humans all repress common unconscious thoughts such as desires, memories or fears - especially those that are considered unacceptable, taboo or even fantasy. When something causes these repressed elements to resurface at some point again in your life, their return is met in a strange, distorted way, often through dreams, art or moments of dread. Fatima Alves, Katrina Jaworski and Stephen Butler delve into this in their text, Madness in Plural Contexts, as they state that Freud’s definition of the uncanny and link with repression is simply when the “hidden becomes unhidden as familiar becomes unfamiliar” (Freud, 1919).

This idea that Freud explores in Das Unheimliche — the concept of the “deeply familiar” becoming unsettling — is a recurring motif not only in Gothic literature and media, but also in psychological horror and thriller narratives that aim to evoke fear, paranoia, and emotional unease. In Black Swan, identity itself — a key component of familiarity and belonging — is gradually stripped away and distorted to the point of both psychological and physical deterioration. Nina, the film’s protagonist, exemplifies Freud’s argument that repressed desires, fears, and impulses return in distorted and destructive forms. As Maddison Farr argues in The Uncanny, The Abject, and The Monstrous Feminine in Contemporary Body Horror, “Nina’s descent into madness is marked by an increasing inability to distinguish between herself and the women she projects her anxieties onto” (Farr, 2025). The anxiety Nina carries intensifies throughout the film, ultimately leading to her self-destruction as she attempts to suppress and eradicate the parts of herself she has spent years repressing. 

A poignant recurring theme throughout Black Swan and wider psychological horror and thriller media is the gradual destabilisation of the protagonist’s sense of self. The audience is encouraged to identify with and emotionally invest in these characters, making their psychological deterioration increasingly unsettling. Central to this genre is the use of the ‘Doppelgänger’: an evil or distorted ‘double’ that functions as a manifestation of repressed desire, fractured identity, and inner duality. In his essay The Return of Negation: The Doppelgänger in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that “the Doppelgänger has been commonly viewed as an aberration, the stencil of a symptomatology of the self,” further suggesting that “repression, anxiety, and the castration complex” allow this ‘other-self’ not merely to emerge, but to assume control (Vardoulakis, 2006). Within the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, both Freud’s theory of the uncanny and Vardoulakis’ interpretation of the Doppelgänger are embodied through the divided identities of Jekyll and Hyde. As Juraj Schweigert argues in The Uncanny: The Double as a Literary Convention, the novella “is another literary inquiry into the problem of the double, this time, with an emphasis on schizophrenia” (Schweigert, 2010). Stevenson therefore transforms the Doppelgänger from a symbolic manifestation of repression into a destructive autonomous force, creating fear through the physical realisation of humanity’s darkest impulses. Ultimately, the emergence of the ‘other’ leads to the protagonist’s demise because the character falsely believes they can control and contain the darker aspects of their psyche, only for those repressed desires to overpower and consume them entirely. 

Although the notion of the repressed self manifesting through the ‘Doppelgänger’ is central to Gothic and psychological literature, Carl Jung’s concept of ‘The Shadow’ presents a more psychologically complex interpretation of internal conflict. Unlike the Doppelgänger, which externalises repression into a separate and often antagonistic figure, the Shadow suggests that the darkest impulses of the psyche originate from the self and remain inseparable from individual identity. In The Influence of Carl Jung’s Archetype of the Shadow On Early 20th Century Literature, Dana Brook Thurmond defines the Shadow as “the often-hidden, repressed part of ourselves that we choose to ignore, often because it contradicts with our personal values,” further arguing that “the more we repress it, the stronger and more dangerous it grows” (Thurmond, 2012). Thurmond’s interpretation fundamentally reframes the Gothic ‘other’: rather than functioning as an external corrupting force, the Shadow exposes the self as inherently divided and psychologically unstable. This destabilisation of identity becomes especially prominent in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, whose fiction repeatedly rejects the idea that violence and depravity originate from an external evil. Instead, Poe’s narrators are consumed by impulses that emerge from within their own consciousness, suggesting that monstrosity is not separate from the individual but embedded within the human psyche itself. Moussa Pourya and Atikah Rushda Ramli support this interpretation in Grotesque, Shadow and Individuation: A Jungian Reading of Selected Short Stories by Tunku Halim and Edgar Allan Poe, arguing that Poe’s Gothic tales — particularly The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart — reveal “the mysteries and the unknown of the Shadow” while leading towards “the discovery of the self” (Pourya & Ramli, 2021). Poe therefore transforms horror into an exploration of psychological self-destruction, demonstrating that repression does not create a separate ‘other’, but instead intensifies the darkness already present within the individual until it inevitably overwhelms them. 

Despite writers such as Poe, Stoker, and Shelley forming the foundations of Gothic literature and its early articulation of the ‘uncanny’, the concept has not remained static. Instead, it has evolved alongside shifts in technology, culture, and perceptual experience. While Gothic fiction continues to influence contemporary media in the twenty-first century, Irina Rata argues in An Overview of Gothic Literature that the “Gothic genre ended in the nineteenth century,” suggesting that the uncanny has since migrated across genres rather than remaining confined to its literary origins (Rata, 2014). One of the most significant modern manifestations of this shift is the ‘uncanny valley’, a psychological phenomenon describing the discomfort produced when something appears almost, but not fully, human. Karl MacDorman defines this as the “eerie, cold, repellent feelings that arise when confronting the imperfectly human” in Chikamatsu, Mori, and the uncanny valley (MacDorman, 2025). Crucially, this suggests that uncanniness is no longer restricted to narrative or thematic devices in Gothic literature, but is now embedded within visual perception itself, particularly in relation to digital representation. Even when intentionally designed, hyper-realistic CGI can unintentionally evoke these “repellent feelings,” revealing that technological attempts to simulate humanity often intensify, rather than resolve, psychological discomfort.

A clear example of this can be seen in the 2004 film The Polar Express, which, despite its technological innovation in motion-capture animation, was widely criticised for the unsettling quality of its character design. A contemporary CNN review described the film as resembling “The Night of the Living Dead” due to the disturbing appearance of its characters (CNN, 2004). As John Carey notes in Unmasking the Uncanny: The Effect of the Uncanny Valley in 21st Century Character Design, the film was instrumental in popularising the term ‘uncanny valley’ within discussions of filmmaking in the early 2000s (Carey, 2024). Ultimately, this continuity between Gothic literature and modern digital media suggests that the uncanny is not bound to a specific historical genre, but is instead a persistent psychological response to ontological instability — the moment where representation becomes almost indistinguishable from reality, yet fails just enough to produce unease. Whether in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction or twenty-first-century CGI animation, fear emerges from the same structural tension: the collapse of certainty between the human and the non-human, where familiarity itself becomes the source of dread.

The uncanny across cultures

Unlike the predominantly Western Gothic tradition explored throughout this essay, Asian horror frequently constructs the uncanny through different cultural and aesthetic mechanisms. While many of the same underlying concerns with fear, uncertainty, and the disruption of familiarity remain present, Asian Gothic narratives often reject the overt spectacle commonly associated with Western horror in favour of subtle psychological disorientation. Rather than overwhelming audiences through excess, they frequently generate unease through absence, silence, and the destabilisation of sensory expectations. In these texts, horror emerges not from what is present, but from what is unexpectedly missing.

This subversion of expectation is exemplified by Iqra Farooq in Gothic Urbanism in South Asian Fiction: The City as a Site of Decay, Division, and Dissent, where she argues that a traditional Gothic setting such as the graveyard is “not a space of silence or death but of unexpected life” (Farooq, 2025). Farooq's observation fundamentally challenges conventional Gothic assumptions. The graveyard, a location culturally associated with stillness, mourning, and death, is transformed into a site of activity and vitality. Consequently, the source of uncanniness lies not within the setting itself but within the audience's disrupted expectations of that setting. The familiar becomes unsettling precisely because it no longer behaves according to established norms, forcing readers to question the reliability of their own assumptions and perceptions.

Beyond this manipulation of sensory expectations, Asian horror frequently employs architectural spaces to evoke feelings of emptiness, alienation, and psychological vulnerability. One of the most prominent examples is the 2002 film Ju-On: The Grudge, which transforms the domestic home from a site of comfort, safety, and familial belonging into a location characterised by anxiety, surveillance, and perpetual threat. The horror of the film does not stem solely from its supernatural entities but from the corruption of a space that should offer protection. This inversion of the familiar is central to the uncanny effect. As Colette Balmain argues in Inside the Well of Loneliness: Towards a Definition of the Japanese Horror Film, “despair, emptiness and isolation” underpin the architectural environments of many Asian horror narratives (Balmain, 2005). The physical space therefore becomes an active participant in the production of fear, embodying emotional and psychological trauma rather than merely serving as a backdrop for it.

This relationship between space and trauma is further evident in the recurring 'haunted house' motif found throughout Asian horror, from Ju-On: The Grudge to Nothing But Blackened Teeth. As Monica Michlin observes, “the haunted house trope is predicated on the house itself having been the locus of familial trauma” (Michlin, 2012). Significantly, these narratives suggest that horror is not imposed upon the home by an external force; rather, it emerges from the lingering traces of violence, grief, and suffering embedded within the space itself. The house becomes uncanny because it occupies a liminal position between refuge and threat, simultaneously retaining its familiarity while becoming psychologically alien. Ultimately, Asian Gothic demonstrates that the uncanny does not require monstrous doubles or overt supernatural spectacle to provoke fear. Instead, it derives its power from exposing the instability of everyday spaces and experiences, revealing that the environments designed to provide security may conceal the deepest forms of trauma and unease. In doing so, these narratives reaffirm a central principle of the uncanny: that the most profound horror arises not from encountering the unknown, but from recognising the unfamiliar within the familiar.

Across the world, folklore and oral traditions have long blended the supernatural with the uncanny, transforming the familiar into something unsettlingly unfamiliar. Although these narratives vary significantly between cultures, many employ a similar psychological mechanism: the distortion of recognisable human features, behaviours, and environments to provoke fear and uncertainty. In this way, folklore often functions as an early expression of what Freud would later identify as the uncanny, whereby something known and familiar returns in an altered form that destabilises perception and understanding.

This phenomenon can be observed in Chilean folklore through the figure of the tue-tue, also known as the chon-chon. As Pelayo Benavides explains in Uncanny Creatures of the Dark: Exploring the Role of Owls across Human Societies, the creature is described as possessing “the human head of a sorcerer, with overgrown ears used as wings. When it calls ‘tue-tue’ close to a home, somebody will die” (Benavides, 2021). Significantly, the horror of the tue-tue derives not from complete otherness but from its partial humanity. The creature retains recognisable human features, yet these features are grotesquely transformed and displaced from their natural function. Ears become wings, the human head becomes detached from the body, and familiar anatomy is reconstructed into something simultaneously recognisable and impossible. The resulting image occupies a liminal space between the human and the inhuman, making it difficult for the audience to categorise or rationalise.

This distortion of the body reflects a recurring pattern throughout global folklore, in which physical transformation becomes a vehicle for psychological unease. The uncanny emerges because the audience is confronted with a figure that appears close enough to humanity to be understood, yet different enough to resist comfortable identification. Consequently, the fear generated by the tue-tue extends beyond its supernatural abilities or association with death. Instead, it stems from its violation of familiar bodily structures and its challenge to established notions of what it means to be human. Folkloric creatures such as the tue-tue therefore demonstrate that the uncanny is not exclusive to Gothic literature or modern horror media; rather, it represents a fundamental psychological response that has shaped storytelling traditions across cultures for centuries. By transforming the familiar human body into something simultaneously recognisable and alien, these narratives exploit a universal anxiety surrounding identity, mortality, and the fragility of the boundaries that separate the ordinary from the monstrous.

The uncanny in modern media and technology

Although traditional Gothic horror continues to thrive within contemporary cinema, the uncanny has undergone a significant transformation in response to rapid technological and cultural change. Modern filmmakers continue to draw upon the conventions established by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Gothic literature, yet increasingly adapt them to reflect contemporary anxieties surrounding identity, space, and digital existence. The works of Robert Eggers exemplify this continuation of the Gothic tradition. Films such as The Witch (2015) and his 2024 reimagining of Nosferatu preserve the genre's preoccupation with folklore, isolation, religious paranoia, and the supernatural, demonstrating that the psychological foundations of the uncanny remain remarkably resilient despite changing historical contexts.

However, while filmmakers such as Eggers preserve the aesthetic traditions of Gothic horror, contemporary digital culture has fundamentally redefined where and how the uncanny is experienced. As everyday life has become increasingly mediated through digital environments, fear has likewise migrated into virtual spaces that audiences are no longer confined to observing but are instead able to actively explore. Consequently, the uncanny has shifted beyond literature and cinema into participatory forms of horror in which the boundary between spectator and participant becomes increasingly unstable.

Perhaps the clearest example of this evolution is Kane Parsons' The Backrooms. Emerging from internet folklore in 2019 before developing into an expansive multimedia phenomenon and, eventually, a feature film directed by Parsons himself, The Backrooms reimagines the traditional Gothic concept of the liminal space for the digital age. Rather than castles, abandoned monasteries, or haunted mansions, its horror is constructed around endless, monotonous office corridors that appear simultaneously familiar and profoundly alien. These environments are uncanny precisely because they resemble ordinary spaces stripped of their social function, creating a sense of ontological uncertainty in which the viewer instinctively recognises the setting yet cannot explain why it feels fundamentally wrong. In this respect, The Backrooms modernises the same liminality that characterised earlier Gothic fiction while relocating it within contemporary architectural and technological landscapes.

Unlike traditional Gothic literature, however, the horror of The Backrooms extends beyond its narrative content. Its greatest source of uncanniness lies in its accessibility. Existing primarily through freely available videos, images, online discussions, and collaborative storytelling, The Backrooms blurs the distinction between fiction and lived digital experience. Audiences do not simply consume the narrative; they actively navigate its fragmented mythology, contributing to and expanding the world themselves. Consequently, the uncanny becomes increasingly immersive, as the digital environment mirrors the endless labyrinth it depicts. Much like Freud's conception of the uncanny itself, the internet becomes a space where the familiar repeatedly returns in altered and unsettling forms, leaving audiences suspended between reality and fiction. In this way, digital horror demonstrates that technological progress has not diminished the uncanny's psychological power but has instead provided entirely new environments through which it can evolve, ensuring that the fundamental anxieties first explored by Gothic writers continue to resonate within the digital age.

It is this manipulation of familiar space that makes The Backrooms such a compelling contemporary expression of the uncanny. Rather than constructing an overtly frightening environment, Parsons deliberately reconfigures spaces that appear recognisable—empty office corridors, fluorescent lighting, yellowed wallpaper and endless carpets—before introducing subtle yet inexplicable alterations that destabilise the audience's perception of reality. The horror therefore emerges not from the presence of obvious danger, but from the unsettling recognition that these spaces resemble environments encountered in everyday life while simultaneously resisting rational explanation. By corrupting the ordinary rather than inventing the extraordinary, Parsons demonstrates that the uncanny derives its power from making the familiar appear psychologically alien.

This relationship between space and psychological perception is explored by Tomasz Dyrmo in Mapping Textual Horror: A Cognitive Linguistic Exploration of the Backrooms Discourse, who argues that:

"Its importance is based on the habitual frame of reference that people assume is constant. When disturbed, it leads to sensory disorientation so that those suffering ‘cannot any longer keep up with the rest of us as four-dimensional spectators and travelers’, influencing balance and coordination, wayfinding, movement planning, cognitive load and memory, as well as emotion regulation and sleep pattern" (Dyrmo, 2026).

Dyrmo's argument reinforces the notion that the horror of The Backrooms is fundamentally psychological rather than supernatural. Human beings rely upon familiar spatial environments to orientate themselves physically and cognitively; consequently, when these environments cease to conform to established expectations, the individual experiences a profound sense of perceptual instability. This directly reflects Freud's conception of the uncanny, whereby something intimately familiar becomes unsettling through subtle distortion rather than complete transformation.

Unlike traditional Gothic settings such as abandoned hospitals, ruined castles or dark forests—which openly signify danger through their associations with death, isolation and decay—The Backrooms derives its horror from spaces that appear entirely benign. The endless fluorescent lighting, immaculate carpets and vacant hallways should evoke feelings of normality, yet their overwhelming emptiness and repetitive uniformity instead generate profound unease. As Thomas Fuchs argues in The Uncanny as Atmosphere, "the uncanniness increases with the invisible-ubiquitous presence which accrues to the anonymous power all the more as it hides itself and its true nature, leaving its true intentions in indeterminacy" (Fuchs, 2019). Parsons therefore demonstrates that contemporary horror no longer requires visible monsters or overt supernatural threats. Instead, the absence of explanation itself becomes the source of fear, as ordinary architectural spaces are transformed into psychologically oppressive environments whose familiarity makes them all the more disturbing.

Conclusion

Although the manifestations of the uncanny have continually evolved throughout history, adapting to different cultures, literary traditions, and technological developments, its psychological foundations have remained remarkably consistent. From the supernatural landscapes of early Gothic fiction and the divided identities of the Doppelgänger, to the uncanny valley of digital animation, liminal internet spaces such as The Backrooms, and the architectural horror of Asian Gothic, the uncanny repeatedly demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to reinvent itself whilst preserving the same fundamental mechanism first articulated by Freud. Regardless of its form, it derives its power from disrupting the boundary between the familiar and the unfamiliar, forcing individuals to question the reliability of their own perceptions, identities, and understanding of reality.

This continuity suggests that the uncanny is not simply a literary or cinematic device but a universal psychological phenomenon that reflects humanity's enduring anxieties surrounding uncertainty, repression, identity, and the unknown. As society has progressed, so too have the environments through which these fears are expressed. Gothic castles have become suburban homes, abandoned hospitals have become endless fluorescent corridors, and folklore has evolved into digital mythology; yet the emotional response they evoke remains strikingly unchanged. The uncanny therefore survives not because its settings remain constant, but because it continually adapts to whatever society considers familiar before subtly corrupting it.

Ultimately, the enduring power of the uncanny lies in its impossibility to be fully understood or overcome. It exists within the liminal space between certainty and uncertainty, reality and imagination, the known and the unknowable. It reminds us that fear rarely originates from the completely unfamiliar, but from the disturbing realisation that the ordinary can, at any moment, become profoundly strange. As long as humanity continues to construct ideas of normality, familiarity, and identity, the uncanny will continue to undermine them, ensuring its place not only within Gothic literature and horror media, but within the very structure of human perception itself.

Bibliography

Jack Taggart
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