Uncanny Masks

When thinking about uncanny I thought about what things scare me the most and I think one of the things would have to be masks and I think it’s something about not being able to see the persons eyes or face that makes me feel a bit uneasy. I’m not sure why that is but there’s something about humans and that we like to be able to look into people eyes and see their faces and maybe that’s something to do with a trust issue because we make a lot of assumptions about someone’s character or personality e.g. whether we think they’re a nice person or not, just by looking at their face.

One mask that particularly creeps me out a bit is gas masks and I’m not sure if it’s because the way they look with the big eye pieces or whether it’s what they’re associated with e.g. danger, poisonous gas etc. Linking to that I’ve found that when I watch films that have creepy miners or people dressed up as miners that I find that a bit scary because they usually have on gas masks, overall (sometimes rubber) that cover them completely and then big rubber gloves so not one part of them is exposed.

The film Silent Hill (2006, Christophe Gans) has creepy miners in it and also these weird people that called Pyramid heads, they too are just people like the miners as you can see their bodies are human but because their heads are covered with this strange object it makes them seem a lot scarier. I think it’s clever how you can take something quite normal like just a simple triangle but when applied to something you don’t normally associate or see it with it suddenly because weird and not right.

   

It’s the same case with this realistic baby mask I found, no one is really scared of babies as people think of them as cute innocent beings but by making a realistic uncanny copy of a babies face and then applying it to something else, for example here an adults body, it does not compute as normal to us and therefore we have trouble accepting it.

 

I also think the more realistic the mask (as close to the real thing as what we know it to be) the weirder we think it is because it looks so real and yet it's not so it's not doing or behaving how we expect it to and how we're used to it behaving. We also find things strange if they look like they could be real but something's not quite right for example the mask above looks very realistic with the usual coloured skin, 2 eyes in the right place, nose, ears, mouth etc but there's something slightly off about some of these things and because of that it takes on a whole new form to us. Due to the fact the eyes don't look the normal colour and the teeth are yellow and missing most people would automatically think the thing, in this case the masks, is evil or supposed to be portraying something that is evil or bad.

When looking for scary images I came across this image of 'White eyes' and with it there was a story about miners being trapped and no one saving them and when they finally got out they wanted revenge for this and went around killing the people that didn't help and anyone else after that who happened to cross their path. The story behind the 'white eye's was that apparently they were down in the dark mine for so long that their eyes eventually adapted to this so they could see better or maybe because they weren't needed as much and when they emerged they were sensitive to the sunlight. 

The story is obviously not true but what I like about it is that it is not so far fetched so that you know it has or would never happen, there's something in the back of your mind that thinks this is possible and believable enough that it might just happen and I think that's what makes it scarier because the facts exist on their own - miners exist, mines exist, mines do collapse, people were uncaring enough to not do anything about it in the past, and we know that people can adapt to things (although not sure it would happen that quickly). 

I think the more we understand the prospect that something could happen the scarier it makes it

[Internet] http://www.scaryforkids.com/white-eyes/ - Accessed 13/3/2013