Creepy and Surreal: The Uncanny

In this lecture we faced the topics of Surrealism and the Uncanny, two very interesting topics when applied to art.

As explained, there's a substantial difference between surreal and uncanny.
Surreal is something that is distorted and strange but the viewer sees it straight away. For example:

But Uncanny is something equally strange but the viewer can't grasp it right away:

For an Uncanny effect we can distinguish something strange about something familiar from something strange added to something familiar.

The Uncanny is more disturbing than surprising.

We see this in E.T.A. Hoffman's "Sandman"

Nathanael, the hero, first encounters the Sandman in the form of a grotesque lawyer, who performs alchemical experiments with his father after Nathanael and his sisters have gone to bed. One night Nathanael hides and sees what's going on. But he is discovered, and nearly has his eyes burned out with coals. He escapes but, subsequently, his father is found dead after an accident with an experiment.

"Don't you know?" asks the unfortunate hero's nanny. “[the Sandman] is a wicked man who comes to children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they pop right out of their heads all covered in blood, and then he throws them in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed to his little children; they sit there in the nest, and have hooked beaks like owls, which they use to peck the eyes out of the heads of naughty children."

This Stop Motion Animation is based on the Gothic Horror Story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, and features carved wooden puppets

The Uncanny is a conceptual point in a graph created by Masahiro Mori entitled the Uncanny valley. In this graph we see how the line move between the realism of an object, or in this case a person, and the empathic response of the viewer:

This is also explained in detail in a video created by Vsauce on Youtube: