And this is why things that are close to humankind (yet aren't quite there) are scary.
Chip: I think we're in the valley... the Uncanny Valley.
Dale: The what?
Chip: Do you remember that weird animation style in the early 2000s where everything looked real, but nothing looked right?
Dale: Oh, yeah... that stuff was creepy.
Chip: Well, I think this is where they ended up.
Dale: The what?
Chip: Do you remember that weird animation style in the early 2000s where everything looked real, but nothing looked right?
Dale: Oh, yeah... that stuff was creepy.
Chip: Well, I think this is where they ended up.
Sometimes, things that aren't realistic look pretty similar to things that are realistic, yet something about them seems wrong in some way and ends up being unsettling.
While the uncanny valley is usually known to be unintentional, it can also intentionally be used in a work — either for creeping out the characters In-Universe or for deliberately creeping out the audience. As a result, someone or something whose appearance exists in the uncanny valley can be offputting and unsettling to interact with, even though the thing or character being encountered may very well be harmless. If it's another character rather than an inanimate object who comes across as unsettling, that character may end up wondering why others are afraid of them, especially if they're otherwise good-natured.
Turn this trope up to 11 and you'll most likely have a Humanoid Abomination.
See also Unintentional Uncanny Valley, for when the reaction comes from viewers seeing something that wasn't meant to be creepy. Related to Otherworldly Communication Failure, in which a supernatural being's uncanny appearance can impede their ability to communicate with others who run away in fear, often with disastrous results. Can overlap with Brown Note Being if a character's unsettling appearance causes physical harm or psychological damage to those that encounter it. Compare Uncanny Valley Makeup.
Not to Be Confused with the video game Uncanny Valley, the fifth anniversary Channel Awesome special The Uncanny Valley, or the character named Uncanny Valley from Miraculous Ladybug.
Note: In Universe Examples and Intended Audience Reactions only and No Real Life Examples, Please!
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Advertising
- A Carmax ad intentionally invokes this trope for a point. In it, a man stops (presumably) at a strange gas station when, in a short while, a small group of 1950s Style Stepford smiling gas station attendants start to wash and do the standard old "Full Service" to the car (checking oil, gas, air, etc.). The man becomes visibly unnerved by this and demands they stop but they don't. Now frightened, the man runs out and accidentally bumps into an equally odd milkman, who, while some of his milk bottles (also in fifties style) are smashed to the ground, can only react with "Oh Dear" in an equally Stepford-like fashion. Finally the man runs (possibly into the bowels of Hell by mistake) screaming away from the scene. Apparently the whole point of the commercial was that our modern world is far too cynical for Good ol' fashioned "Full Car Service" and Carmax is here to ease us back into this (presumably by not hiring robots or Demons in Human form to work their Customer Service hotline).
- A late 2014 ad campaign by Old Spice delibearately invokes this trope. It has an android get tons of action from using their product. The android has visible seams on its joints, and speaks in a stilted Machine Monotone. In one ad, it rotates its head 180 degrees and then its face falls clean off, revealing a circuit board and making the distinctive screech of a dialup modem. The woman it's chatting up is still interested. The idea being, of course, that if even this dead-eyed, waxy, lurching abomination can Get Lucky by using Old Spice, so can you.
- The infamous Quiznos Spongmonkeys
, who are a pair of rodent-like tarsiers with realistic bulging eyes and malformed teeth. Interestingly, they were originally an obscure internet meme before they were turned into mascots.
Anime & Manga
- Attack on Titan does this with the designs of the Titans. The majority are deformed humanoids measuring anywhere between 4 — 15 meters in height, with Barbie Doll Anatomy and creepy, cheerful smiles that never waver regardless of being blown apart or in the midst of devouring their victims. This is further used with the unique, deviant types encountered throughout the course of the story. Eren's Titan form has pointed ears and a skull-like face, while Ymir's Titan form looks animalistic with shark-like teeth, claws, Creepily Long Arms, and fur sprouting along its shoulders. As a result, both look more like traditional non-human monsters in a reflection of their being on the side of humanity. The Armored Titan has an almost robotic appearance, due to the armored plating covering its body and is less creepy than the Colossal Titan and the Female Titan, who are essentially skinless but otherwise very human in appearance. This seems to hint towards Reiner's Becoming the Mask, in contrast to the more more ruthless Bertolt and Annie.
- Azumanga Daioh references this in one of the Extra Lessons chapters, in which Sakaki admits to being afraid of the mechanical crossing guards at construction sites.
- In the Battle Royale manga, Kazuo Kiriyama was deliberately drawn with no reflection in his eyes. While barely noticeable, it still manages to give his face a look beyond creepy.
- Berserk:
- When Guts and Puck encountered Rosine's minions for the first time. They looked really similar to Puck's elf kind, he said.... but there was somethin' off about them.
- Griffith after he was reincarnated. He is now so beautiful that he both awes and frightens people at the same time and the fact that he's a Humanoid Abomination. Hell, even before becoming a demon god, Griffith was just unnaturally beautiful, especially in Berserk: The Golden Age Arc, in which the artists do their best to make◊ Griffith's face look angelic but completely alien compared to everyone else.
- In Bubblegum Crisis, some characters complain about how creepy the human-like boomers are, such as Nene in Tokyo 2040 regarding the secretary boomer she works for. And that's not counting when they malfunction and transform into Mechanical Monsters. Another example happens in the AD Police Files Prequel, which has a case involving a boomer prostitute going berserk. It turns out that there was a brief market for Ridiculously Human Sexbots until this trope kicked in — most of the sex organs were illegally recycled and used for maidbots and waitress bots that weren't designed for them, causing some of them to go insane (due to a combination of hormonal imbalance and traumatic memories that can't be erased).
- Buso Renkin: While most homunculi look convincingly human until they transform into spawn of the devil, Papillon's human persona in particular just looks odd. His eyes are always fixed on a lifeless stare bordering between condescension and rage, regardless of the actual emotion he's trying to express, and his pale skin just makes him more unsettling.
- Death Note aims for this with L's design, with his rather unhealthy, pale skin tone, huge eyebags under his bulbous eyes, and his facial features and expressions overall being drawn in a more exaggerated way than the other characters. He also doesn't blink, and is more often than not staring right into people's souls. Given the numbers of fans L has who think he's adorable and/or sexy, this backfired.
- Dragon Ball:
- The creepiest example in the early series was the Goku doll◊ the equally creepy Mr Popo created for kid Goku to train with. The doll is completely silent and just stares blankly at normal Goku with its emotionless Mr Popo-like eyes and even more creepily when the doll does the Kamehameha he doesn't speak the words, he just mouths the words. The English dub makes it more creepy by giving the doll raspy noises when he uses Kamehameha instead of saying the words. When the doll dies, it turns back into a Goku-shaped mold of clay.
- Chiaotzu was also example of the Uncanny Valley himself when he first appeared, until Defeat Equals Friendship kicked in and he gained more emotions and facial expressions. Considering he was based off a Jiangshi (Chinese Vampire) this is very fitting.
- There's also a very disturbing example in the King Piccolo saga Filler. When Goku is in the cave of darkness he comes across a copy of Kame House full of copies of his friends. Goku is fooled briefly despite the gang all talking in creepy high pitched voices and acting unnatural.
- Android 15 and Android 14 from Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13!. While the titular 13 avoids this just looking like a muscly human redneck before hulking out into a blue and grey goliath, his teammates dip into this. 15 looks like a small man in a garish yellow suit and purple skin with promient lips very similar to blackface while 15 looks like a burly Native American man with chalk white skin and yellow eyes. In the Japanese dub all they say is "Son Goku" in a monotone to heighten this effect, averted in the Funimation dub though which gives them one liners making them funnier and much less unsettling.
- Whenever a character transforms into a higher form, even the good guys, the new form almost always fall into the Uncanny Valley:
- Super Saiyan 4 is very strange looking as red fur covers the user’s torso covering everything except for the pecs (which no longer have nipples), the abs and the hands. The user’s eyelids turn red and their irises go golden, making for a simian appearance which is quite fitting.
- Super Saiyan God also gives off a subtly off feeling due to its more lankier physique it endows the user and the eyes becoming much larger wide cutesy eyes with large red irises with visible red pupils.
- Super Saiyan God SS Evolved, Vegeta gains dark blue eyes with visible black pupils, giving him a look that's edging uncomfortably closer to realism.
- Goku Black and his oddly pink Super Saiyan Rose transformation initially isn't too unsettling, even coming off as rather pretty in many ways. What hits the UV so hard is how as he gets stronger, he starts using Goku's powers more efficiently... he fights in a manner completely opposite to Goku entirely, eschewing instinctive and free movements for a far more rigid and almost over-controlled style. While many of his movements during battle are graceful and elegant, they are often so artificial and unnatural in some ways that he appears more like a possessed shell, or a doll on strings.
- BROLY'S FORMS. Take the burly, muscular design philosophy of the original DBZ, throw in some of the painful looking and distorted manner by which his original movie counterpart transforms, and throw some mind shattering anger on top. The result is a warrior who can't even be called a warrior, but more a rabid animal in a humanoid body just wildly swiping at Goku and Vegeta. And poor Broly only gets more savage and animalistic as it goes, all the while his body goes from yoked but rather feasible, to Hulk-sized. His Super Saiyan forms especially invoke this due to eschewing the archetypal Golden Super Mode the form codified in favor of his classic Sickly Green Glow. Only now he has a helping of glowing scarlet light amid his completely blank irises and feral movements only made worse by his completely overswelled body and the implication that just being in the state has him locked in a painful Unstoppable Rage. And THIS monstrosity is considered the true form of the Super Saiyan, retroactively adding further Humanoid Abomination traits to the Super Saiyan form.
- Vegeta's Ultra-Ego form rolls all of the above into one ugly package. His eyebrows are replaced by a neanderthal ridge, which when combined with his hairline makes his whole face look downright reptilian. The pigment in his eyes changes while giving Vegeta distinct pupils. His hair gets extra spiky while retaining its darkness, making it look like he was electrocuted. His muscle mass becomes so pronounced he looks like Tetsuo mid-transformation. And then Vegeta starts to lose himself to his bloodlust, which leads to bloodshot eyes and slasher smiles.
- With Cell himself, he plays it straight with his Semi-Perfect Form. Unlike his animalistic Imperfect Form and his much more appealing Perfect Form; his Semi-Perfect Form has gained the Androids' Icy Blue Eyes as well as a set of uncomfortably prominent, pink humanlike lips on a still monstrous looking humanoid, he's just off to look at. When not seen as corny by some fans.
- Fat Buu transforming his face to look like a handsome man to impress a woman without changing anything else on his body, not helped that he extends his lips while in his temporal handsome guise, freaking the woman off.
- Super Buu undergoes this the further he becomes more humanoid with each absorption- gaining a nose and later a fully formed chin; while retaining his Black Eyes of Crazy and increasingly elongating head antenna, making him look even creepier than he had been before.
- Much earlier than Super Buu and even Cell himself, was Freeza's final form. Unlike his initial three forms that were deliberately as monstrous and inhuman as possible, Freeza, aside from his ears, tail, and purple sections, looks like a pale white human, in which he's at his most violent. His narrow slanted eyes with his red pupils being larger than his previous forms and almost perpetual calm expression while doing heinous violence, give off an unnatural creepiness to his form that his more obviously evil preceding forms didn't.
- Merged Zamasu] the final opponent of the Future Trunks Arc, looks unnaturally beautiful for all the wrong reasons. Firstly, it's the disgraced Kai Zamasu fused WITH HIMSELF, a.k.a. Goku Black, his alternate timeline self who stole Goku's body, making his existence on a fundamental level blasphemous in the eyes of the gods. He retains Zamasu's facial features and hair color, but everything else is superimposed over Goku's features, from his chin, height, to even the hair being simply Goku's Super Saiyan hair but slightly morphed. And for all of Zamasu's self-aggrandizing in this state, it is a completely unstable fusion, and the pretty facade quickly falls apart to belie a horrifying, multiverse-level threat and a completely broken mind. You wouldn't believe such a pretty face would turn into a living Giygas reference over the span of three episodes.
- Moro, antagonist of the Galactic Patrol Prisoner Arc, begins the arc as a decrepit, hunched over old figure who resembles western demons in look. Initially not looking too threatening beyond his design seeming a little too keen on adhering to classical mythology amid the classic shonen look of the other characters, he loses his elderly and withered look over the course of the arc by literally draining life energy from his surroundings. By the arc's end, he goes from looking like a supremely muscled goat demon straight out of biblical text throwing hands with Super Saiyan Gods, to a completely human-like form after swallowing the android 73 whole, only more powerful than ever and still possessing some of his monstrous traits such as horns and red eyes, owing to the series trend and keeping him just humanoid enough to look more powerful and combative, yet still demonic enough that it just looks WRONG. And then this ends up subverted too he starts devouring energy he can't control, and ends up needing to abandon a humanoid body completely just to survive a few more minutes. In his final moments, he looks more like a rabid, mutant goat, completely alien to any of his previous looks, and fundamentally cannot even comprehend what he became anymore.
- The creepiest example in the early series was the Goku doll
- Franken Fran: Fran Madaraki is a Frankenstein-style creature stitched together from dead body parts. She has visible stitching on her face and her eyes are usually drawn to look tired and lopsided.
- Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex:
- The Tachikomas discuss the trope, musing that they are allowed advanced A.I. because they are not humanoid, and that advanced A.I. in an android would creep humans out.
- Proto just so happens to be an advanced A.I. in an android. Even before this is revealed, there's clearly something... off about him.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Since the Stands are an extension of one's self, the more psychopathic characters often have Stands which are humanoid but have features which trigger mental alarm bells, not unlike a psychopath's public persona. For example, Yoshikage Kira's Killer Queen◊ is always seen with an expressionless skull-like Frozen Face, Dio's The World◊ has enormous lips and dead monotone eyes, and Anjuro "Angelo" Katagiri's Aqua Necklace◊ has a mouthful of fangs and is covered from head to toe in giant eyes.
- Nui from Kill la Kill is a unique take on this, as her constant Leaning on the Fourth Wall (i.e., leaning on her own Boss Subtitles, stroking a character's hair through a split-screen divider) and the very simple way she's animated (at one point dodging attacks by having her animation cel rotate around them) add to the feeling that there's just something seriously wrong with her.
- The Kindaichi Case Files uses this as a plot point in "House of Wax". The killer intentionally makes wax statues of his guests that are fantastically detailed but look a little off. This is so that during a series of crimes when it appears that the wax figures are being set up to resemble the scenes of people who will be found murdered, the murderer can pose as a statue using a mask, and no one will examine it too closely since it so clearly looks inhuman.
- Mazinger Z:
- The Gamia from the original manga and Mazinkaiser are three identical robot girls. Outwardly, they seem to be three ordinary human girls... except that their skin is unusually pale, their motions are eerily mechanical, their expressions are completely aloof and unchanging, they are nearly always silent, and they never blink. Anybody who sees them can immediately tell that there's something seriously wrong with them... before they begin punching holes in walls and shredding things with their razor-sharp hairs.
- Most of the human-looking androids which Dr. Hell builds are sufficiently well done to reasonably pass for humans — except for an android which looks just like Kouji but which behaves in a different way and can't speak.
- Discussed in Medaka Box as the reason of why Medaka's drumming solo fails to elicit any kind of reaction from her audience. Her playing is perfect to the point of coming across as cold and mechanical, lacking human emotion to it. Akune expresses that it's similar to the Uncanny Valley effect, although Zenkichi claims it's the opposite: that while Medaka's playing is technically perfect, it lacks any kind of self-expression, making it come off as inhuman and somewhat disturbing.
- Naruto:
- Even though Sai is actually a human, he has the inhuman feel of a robot, mostly because he's effectively emotionless. His vampire tan doesn't exactly help.
- Gaara, with his missing eyebrows and heavily sleep-deprived eyes. Justified, as he starts out as a villain. Later, his eyes (though still retaining those traits) become softer and gentler, because Gaara himself has become softer and gentler.
- Sasuke as well especially when he goes off the deep end after he kills Danzo, he goes from pretty boy to freak boy◊ in the space of seconds. This may be a case of Evil Makes You Ugly.
- The Six Paths of Pain are merely corpse puppets, controlled by Nagato. When they fight, all of them, except Deva Path, Nagato's go-to body, and the corpse of Yahiko, have blank, expressionless faces, usually. The anime goes further and makes them incredibly pale.
- Edo Tensei shinobi. They're effectively zombies. When being fully controlled by Kabuto/Tobi they become emotionless and fight with blank, expressionless faces. Doubly so for the revived jinchuuriki who are being directly controlled by Tobi. Like the Six Paths of Pain before them, they are merely very powerful corpse puppets. Note that In-Universe, these shinobi are all identified by their blacked-out irides and cracked, pale skin.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion:
- The Mass Production Evangelions from End. The masochistic cyborg harpies who are The Faceless except for their ever-smiling bright-red lips just get to people.
- Lilith to an extent as well. There's something about a crucified humanoid being that resembles a bloated corpse and with a mask that gives it the appearance of having no face at all that tends to creep some fans of the series out.
- One Piece: Oda just loves to make Gonk characters so the Uncanny Valley is no stranger to the series.
- Played straight with Laffitte◊ whose face doesn't change at all, even when damaged.
- Satori from Skyepeia is just odd, with his completely round glasses, his high voice and "dumpling"-like body.
- Fukuro of CP9 is just plain weird, thanks to his big round body and his vaguely disturbing, rotten-looking zipper teeth. Plus, there's the insistence of having him be voiced by a female seiyuu in the anime, which just adds to the uncanny.
- Kumadori is another weirdo who invokes this reaction. However, since he's based off Kabuki theater, as shown by his appearance/behavior, it's more understandable.
- Most of the villains and zombies in Thriller Bark go straight into Uncanny Valley territory, though it's mostly Played for Laughs. The tree zombie is very creepy since it's got a human face stitched to a tree trunk. Hogback and Absalom are very off-putting, especially in Absalom's case since he's not a zombie but still has the mouth of a lion and other "parts". Perona and Cindry are more attractive but still have their creepy moments. Finally, Gecko Moria looks like an outright monster despite being supposedly "human".
- The Homies from Whole Cake Island. While a lot of them are merely talking animals (something not unique to One Piece), others are talking inanimate objects. This, combined with the Alice in Wonderland aesthetic, results in an extremely eerie effect. Made all the more creepy by the fact Homies are actually made from people's souls.
- Duval's original face◊ is very uncanny before Sanji rearranges it. Of course, thanks to his personality, he's still pretty freaky◊ even with his new face.
- Due to the fact that the admirals are based off of famous Japanese actors, this can happen. While the first admiral shown, Aokiji, does look like a normal character, Kizaru is slightly more realistic, and Akainu, espacially early on, doesn't even look like he's part of the show, looking exactly like the actor. Fujiora is the same, to Akainu-level creepily realistic.
- In Dressrosa, three individuals are deep in the Uncanny Valley thanks to personality quirks.
- First we have Cavendish, or more specifically his evil alter ego, Hakuba◊, who has bright white eyes and a Slasher Smile that looks oddly mask-like.
- There's also Sugar of the Doflamingo Pirates, mainly due to the fact she looks like she's 10 when she's actually 22. This, mixed with Sugar's Soft-Spoken Sadist nature, makes her very off putting.
- Finally, there's Dellinger, who doesn't seem too bad at first, but then it's revealed that he's a human/fighting fish fish-man hybrid, and can grow a set of razor-sharp teeth and a dorsal fin. When he does this, his eyes turn red.
- First we have Cavendish, or more specifically his evil alter ego, Hakuba
- Pudding, thanks to her Split Personality and her deranged distortion of her face.
- Wano arc
- The SMILE users from Kaido’s army who have eaten the artificial Devil Fruit that gives them various animal-like appearances. Except unlike Zoan users who just look like perfect human-animal hybrids, SMILE users with only a few exceptions (such as Speed) have animal body parts growing out of them in all sorts of bizarre places◊. Although the effect is more amusing than unsettling.
- The failed SMILE users definitely invoke this being very disturbing and extremely tragic. As seen with the poor people of Ebisu Town and Killer who unknowingly ate inefficacious SMILE fruits and now are incapable of showing any emotion beyond joy and laughter even while sobbing in despair.
- The SMILE users from Kaido’s army who have eaten the artificial Devil Fruit that gives them various animal-like appearances. Except unlike Zoan users who just look like perfect human-animal hybrids, SMILE users with only a few exceptions (such as Speed) have animal body parts growing out of them in all sorts of bizarre places
- Played straight with Laffitte
- Parasyte: The titular monsters, while usually looking human, never blink and have very limited understanding of facial/emotional subtleties that place them quite firmly in this trope. They also are drawn with slightly elongated eyes with sharply pointed ends, giving their faces a distinctly inhuman aspect. Even scarier is that near the end, when police start using these attributes to recognize and kill the parasites, they occasionally kill ordinary (but crazy) humans by mistake.
- Perfect Blue's Mima goes through a journey filled with all kinds of things nightmarish throughout the movie, and while most of the character designs lean toward realistic, there are two notable exceptions: Me-Mania◊, who is obviously hideous from the start, and Rumi◊, who, like him, has eyes that are too widely spaced. Likely to hint towards her similar unhinged mental state.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: While the rest of the characters are drawn and animated in Ume Aoki's style, the witches are each given their own unique styles. Gertrud, the first Witch with a proper fight, has butterfly wings a deformed rosebush for a "head", both of which depicted by paper cutouts of real images. Walpurgisnacht is a giant, upside-down clockwork harlequin doll with no facial features except for lips, and so on.
- This is used in Rozen Maiden whenever the dolls have to act like regular dolls, as shown in the first season's opening. In addition, when Suigintou and Micchan encounter another creator's attempt at making a living doll, they find it unsettling.
- Saber Marionette J: For the most part, the saber marionettes act as Ridiculously Human Robots, but on two separate occasions, one of them has something happen to her 'maiden circuit' which controls their emotions. They then nosedive instantly into Uncanny Valley territory, marked mostly by their vacant stares and completely lack of movement except when prompted.
- Squid Girl: Eiko pulls out a really Creepy Doll in episode 11 of Season 1. She later finds the doll's partner, which is broken up a little, freaking out all the girls looking for it.
- Tiger & Bunny: The Deceptively Human Robot Cis from episode 15 seems to have been deliberately made to look and act just slightly off.
- Time of Eve: The robots are all clearly identifiable and do not act human in the slightest — but only because society demands it. Any notion of treating robots as human (or that robots can act human) is vehemently opposed, as shown by the constant anti-robot rights ads that play on TV.
- Evoked in Trigun whenever the Plants are involved. Vash is a Plant himself but doesn't cause this reaction compared to other Plants and especially his brother, Knives, who is just unsettling◊ and even more◊ so◊ in the manga. In the anime, Vash and Knives were perceived as Creepy Twins for this reason.
- Wonder Egg Priority: The first few Wonder Killers look like normal humans but with their eyes pixelated out and their mouths drawn far more realistically than the other characters.
- Referenced offhandedly in The World God Only Knows. One unique girl is trying to make a 'human' out of a remote-controlled box, but people laugh at it. Keima draws a little smiley face on it and adds a cute note, and suddenly people start to help out. The girl then decides to put a mannequin head on it to make it even more human... and it creeps people out to see a box with a human head on top rolling through the hallway.
- For the most part, Yamishibai: Japanese Ghost Stories is animated through still images in order to invoke the feeling of a paper theatre. So when traditional, fluid animation is used, it’s jarring. Special mention goes to the segment "Tormentor", which uses this style heavily to heighten its premise.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- Dark Yugi, early in the manga, somehow managed to make not having a nose terrifying.
- As a whole, Bakura fits in the valley. If you think that Bakura is actually very cute, then Yami Bakura is VERY much in the valley. Aside from some slight differences, he has the same features as Bakura, but there's something very wrong with his expressions... also, Yami Marik would look okay if it weren't for the veins that become more and more prominent on his face, and the way he sticks out his tongue.
Comic Books
- If you have ever wondered why certain characters — such as Batman — have irisless white eyes in their masks, it's actually meant to invoke this. Lee Falk, the artist of The Phantom, claimed that he was inspired to give the Phantom white eyes after looking at Greek statues, with an "inhuman" effect suitiable for a masked vigilante. Ironically, this trend has stuck so well that it's actually more uncanny to see the likes of Batman having normal eyes.
- Astro City: Beautie is a living, life-sized Barbie doll who can pass for human at first glance but soon reveals her artificial nature through her mannerisms. She's also painfully aware of it, and deeply disturbed when men find her attractive.
- Batman: The Joker's appearance in Death of the Family takes the cake, since he had his own face sliced off and wears it like a mask, often using it to make himself even more unsettling... especially when he decides to wear his face upside-down. What's even more disturbing than Joker grinning is whole Justice League of America getting infected by the Joker gas and grinning evilly in Batman: Endgame. It's especially uncanny because the League (minus Batman) don't instantly have the smile on their faces, but it's still clear that there's something wrong with them◊. When Superman does crack a grin◊ like a madman, Batman immediately knows who's behind it.
- Fall of Cthulhu introduces a brand-new character to the Cthulhu Mythos: the Harlot, a keeper of all men's secrets, whose giant green head houses a nose too flat and a pair of juicy red lips a little too big. She's a wonderful example of what a Humanoid Abomination would look if it took up burlesque fashion.
- The Immortal Hulk:
- The comic in general has a lot of this, thanks especially to Joe Bennet’s artwork◊ which amplifies the Body Horror and Painful Transformation of Hulk and his Gamma-powered friends and foes to In-Universe Humanoid Abomination levels. Heck even when nobody is Hulking Out, the art style for characters' faces is pseudo-realistic, making for an unsettling effect. Given the Surreal Horror tone of the series, it works perfectly.
- Even the beautiful covers drawn by the aforementioned Alex Ross have this effect. Perhaps even more so, as while Kingdom Come and Marvels mostly depicted human-looking characters, the Immortal Hulk has the titular Jolly Green Giant and co in painted photorealism which is pretty weird looking to say the least.
- The comic in general has a lot of this, thanks especially to Joe Bennet’s artwork
- Lee Bermejo's art, is so photorealistic and uncanny that he can even make someone like Superman look like something out of a◊ Slasher Movie (source: Lex Luthor: Man of Steel), though this works◊ wonders◊ when drawing already creepy characters like the Joker or the Green Goblin.
- Smut Peddler Presents: My Monster Boyfriend: Buddy from "Face Value" owns several human-like faces that would let him kiss his human girlfriend, but they all just come across as creepy.
- Spider-Man: The Symbiote characters, unlike Spider-Man, completely fall into this trope, especially Venom and Carnage with the former's Overly Long Tongue and the latter having More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
- Spider-Woman: In the early issues of Spider Woman 1978, this is Jessica Drew's curse, such that the comic's early tagline is "To know her is to fear her!", and later "Marvel's Most Misunderstood Heroine!" Biologically part spider and raised among the High Evolutionary's beast men, there's something subtly but indisputably "off" about her body language and demeanor that makes most people instinctively afraid of her, making it almost impossible for her to find a home or earn an honest living, let alone have any friends. She eventually learns that she's been emitting a pheromone which creeps everyone out (though some men find it very attractive) — when she learns how to control it via medical means, she's able to live a much more normal life.
- The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: This is a big reason why Empurata victims are shunned by society: the amputation of their faces and hands strips them of their Cybertronian identity, while they can still speak, move and transform. For Cybertronians, Empurata victims are horribly disfigured, even though to the readers, they're still just robots (since Cybertronians are already on the far side of the valley).
- Ultimate Marvel:
- Ultimate FF: Sue finds it disturbing to see Reed twisting his body into several arms and asks him to look "normal" for a moment.
- Ultimate Spider-Man (2000): The thief who kills Ben Parker is scared out of his mind when he is attacked by Spider-Man: a man with a full body costume and weird eyes who can stick to walls! Keep in mind that at this point, the only superhuman who people knew about was Captain America, back in World War II.
- The Vision is noted at various times to cause this In-Universe, particularly both him and his family in The Vision (2015). They have emotions, but their emotional responses seem "off" compared to most people (sometimes muted to the extreme, sometimes well beyond what would be considered normal), and their bodies feel "off" when touched (one character likens the title character's handshake to a warm sandwich bag).
- Basil Wolverton's "Robot Woman!" from Weird Mysteries. Discussed. Despite being billed as the perfect mate, Fozzmo's creation makes people uneasy with her caricatured features and wide-eyed glare◊.
Fan Works
- Advice and Trust: When Ritsuko increases Rei's emotion-dampener medication in chapter 8, Rei crosses the limit between "emotionless girl" and "creepy person who doesn't seem quite human":
If Doctor Akagi had been watching, she might of [sic] noticed the careful rigidity that Rei held her face to melt swiftly into a far more eerie stillness.
- Alien/Species Crossover: Return to LV-426: Because of his behavior, Pike falls into this. The other Marines are uncomfortable around him because he's too still, too stoic, too disciplined. He doesn't relax, he seems incapable of relaxing, always at some form of attention. He doesn't chatter or joke around, he only speaks when spoken to and only replies with short, direct responses. Lise is a downplayed version; it's noted several times that there's something too perfect, too flawless about her beauty, that she's inhumanly beautiful, but it doesn't put anyone off.
- Anyone: Michael of the League of Villains. This trope is namedropped as he's described as someone who "feels wrong, in ways that are hard to perceive", and that there are thousands of little ways in which his proportions seem wrong but not immediately obvious to the average person.
- Barefoot: Harry Potter is creeped out by conjured items because of his ability to read the history of anything he touches. Conjured items only have a history of minutes or hours and it weirds him out, especially since he can often tell the history of something from before it was made (such as how old a tree was when its wood was used to make a wand).
- Bird: Charnel, a woman who has been radically altered by a wetware Tinker into some kind of bio-mechanical doll-person. She is also stated by the author to be an expy of the Plain Doll, so this makes a lot of sense. Charnel herself is fairly pleasant and benign, though unsettling at first.
- Brony Steve Makes Out With Fluttershy. As part of a deconstruction of the typical Wish Fulfillment Self-Insert Fic, the protagonist realizes that the cartoonish ponies look rather grotesque with their half-horse, half-human features. The author has also dedicated a blog post to this issue.
- Children of an Elder God: In spite of being heroes, the main characters creep most of people out because they can tell what those teenagers may look human but they're something different and very dangerous.
- The Compendium of Forgotten Secrets: One of the Warrior-Saint associated traits is "Your face is eerily symmetrical.", suggesting an appearance that is just off enough from normal, imperfect people to be uncanny.
- Deserted Distractions: After confronting the shadow demon, Yami Bakura's hold on his "human form" slips, and Tea has this reaction to him.
This being was still human-shaped, still had the pale skin, brown eyes, and dead-white hair of the boy standing next to her [...] but he looked almost... stretched. Too tall and not wide enough, like a badly enlarged photo. His fingers were too long and too much like claws. His skin didn't seem to be quite opaque. If she looked hard, Tea could see the guttering shadows through the outline of his form.
- A Devil Amongst Worms: Several people on Earth-Bet have this reaction to Makima. Notably, Alexandria describes her as lacking the sorts of micro-expressions and subtle facial tells that regular people have, describing her changes in expression as being akin to different frames in a film.
- The Dimensional Drifter: Other than Judai, people are generally creeped out by the Identical Strangers running around because they basically look like clones that act completely differently to what they expect.
- EVA Sessions: You Can (Never) Trust: The child soldiers bio-engineered by the Project Devereaux are unsettling to everybody because everyone can tell they are looking at someone who is intended to look like a natural human but it doesn't look or act like one. Samson Creed is a slimey, creepy psychopath, looks like a muscular adult in a fourteen-year-old body (Gendo Ikari himself remarks that his muscles are too perfect to be natural), often speaks out weird gibberish, tends to stand still, zone out and hum nursery rhymes at any place and time. Rita is even more unsettling because she is able to express and possibly feel emotions, but she is perpetually smiling and agreeing to everything, and she never reacts or fights against insults or hits. A member of the shadowy Group who funded their creation even calls them "too much uncanny valley".
- Don't Forget The Importance of Body Language: In an effort to be as welcoming and inoffensive as possible, the Jedi order all learn a specific form of body language and manner of speaking that doesn't cause offense to anyone, having learned centuries ago that a gesture that's perfectly acceptable to one species can be extremely offensive to another. They also make sure to project light into the Force wherever they go as a habit to protect the children of the temple from the Dark Side. However, because their speech patterns and body language don't match any species, they're frequently off-putting to other races. As a former slave, where nonverbal communication was actually considerably more important than what's being spoken, Anakin is both frustrated and disturbed by how everyone feels like "puppets being controlled by a creature that doesn't understand how they should move." Races like Twi'leks are especially disturbing as their lekku never move, which is something only found in slaves trying to stay as still as possible to avoid punishment.
Anakin: No one acts normally! No one! Aayla's lekku hardly ever move. And you're a Kiffar, but you don't smile like a Kiffar, you keep moving your head like a human and your arm movements are almost Kel Dor, except when they're Tholothian. Everyone here moves the same.
- Everqueen: Isha, when not concealing herself behind a glamour, is described as disturbingly, impossibly beautiful, looking more like a statue that moves than a real, living person.
- Getting Back on Your Hooves: Checker Monarch. According to Word of God, the fact that she's a Sociopath in a society where compassion and love are basically hardwired into everypony's genes makes her Lack of Empathy this for anyone who she lets see it.
- The Gloaming, a The Twilight Saga rewrite: Vampires' status as an Inhumanly Beautiful Race falls into this — upon meeting Alice, Bella thinks that she looks more like a porcelain doll than a normal person.
- Guardians, Wizards, and Kung-Fu Fighters:
- Upon first seeing Phobos, Jade notes that at first glance he seems the most normal of his court. Then she looks into his eyes, and sees an emptiness in them that proves there's something off about him.
- Even before they see him, Alborn and Miriael note that something about the sound of Drago's voice is just wrong.
- How the Light Gets In: Following Laurel's death a funeral home prepares her body for viewing by family. Dean and Thea were both deeply unsettled by her appearance, likening it to a wax figurine. As Thea puts it "all the makeup in the world can't make a corpse look like anything but a corpse." She then has to desperately try to forget how Laurel looked in the morgue and funeral home, finding both appearances too disturbing.
- The Infinite Loops: Loopers will sometimes muse on how non-looping individuals and even nonawake versions of looping individuals are disturbingly static and predictable. On the flip side, young loopers or particularly competent nonloopers will sometimes view Loopers as strange eldritch forces inhabiting the bodies of their friends.
- Kimi No Na Iowa: Summoned/Manifested shipgirls, especially those that have only returned recently, can be creepy. They blink and breathe too regularly or not at all. They lack the unconscious tics, twitches and microexpressions normal humans exhibit. They turn and move too sharply and jerkily. Also inverted, though, in that Summoned/Manifested find Natural Borns too humanlike as to be discomforting.
- The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World: Paul's eyes turn golden after he's hit by lightning, which weirds Ringo out “because he looked so goddamned inhuman.”
- Manehattan's Lone Guardian: Leviathan has this effect on the city's residents, to them being a living mass of metal that looks and acts as if it were alive but clearly isn't. Between this uncanniness and her standard white undersuit making her look like a living doll, the pediophobic Ebony Evening in particular has a difficult time dealing with her.
- Memory and Desire, Stirring: In-Universe. Vegeta's appearance is considered unsettling, due to him looking less realistically human than the other Saiyans. His bulky physique, despite his short height, makes him look disproportionate, especially compared to Goku. His and Goku's eyes also creep people out due to looking soulless and predatory.
- A Mighty Demon Slayer Grooms Some Ponies: G1 My Little Pony "twinkle-eyed ponies" get this treatment. As their eyes are just unmoving gemstones, their faces seem creepily emotionless no matter what their mood is.
- The MLP Loops: This is what makes the Slavequestria iteration of Celestia so uniquely horrifying compared to the countless other "evil opposites" that surface throughout the Loops. Her personality and mannerisms are flawlessly Celestia... but she still rules over a society that is built on the worst sort of slavery.
- Morphic: This comes into effect in Chapter 13 after Jean accidentally "evolves," causing her face and limbs to get out of proportion. The trope title is even stated word for word.
- Mutatis Mutandis: Northstar is basically described as vampirically beautiful. Rogue notices when she stares at Northstar's face for more than a few minutes, remarking he looks so eerily perfect that he seems creepy and surreal.
- New Dawn: Nebiros is already an outlandish looking demonic clown, barely even human looking. However, he talks as a whole like a young teenager, has no sense of personal space, views reality as a game and is oh so enthusiastic in a very child-like way about what he does. And, suffice to say, he does not see anything wrong with being a serial killer: "Because its so fun, watching em flail about like a fishy!"
- The Conversion Bureau: Although a lot of it is heavily dependent on the individual writer due to the general nature of these works, many Deconstruction Fics depict the Newfoals (humans turned into ponies through a magical potion) as giving off this vibe to humans and natural born ponies.
- The Conversion Bureau: Not Alone and its sequel The Conversion Bureau: Conquer the Stars: The newfoals are able to get sad, scared and even annoyed and frustrated, but they can't get angry or assert themselves. The natural born ponies are revealed to be unsettled by this, while the humans are just put off by how the newfoals possess their former human selves' memories and none of their original personality.
- The Conversion Bureau: The Other Side of the Spectrum: Aside from being perpetually smiling, glassy-eyed Extreme Doormats with no free will or individuality (to the point where many characters liken them to zombies), TCB!Trixie also points out that every single Newfoal, no matter how long it's been since they were ponified, is a blank flank, and she treats it as the unsettling icing on top of the creepiness cake. It's basically Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul taken up to eleven and then some. To a lesser extent, Comet Tail in the Asia Side Story finds regular earth horses to be rather unsettling and strange looking, though she notes they are still just somewhat better than the Newfoals. Another character named Sergei references this trope by name.
- The Negotiations-verse:
- Twilight Sparkle inwardly admits that even when she still had complete faith in Celestia and wholeheartedly supported the conversion of humanity, the newfoals always rubbed her the wrong way with how they always seemed to be "too nice" and constantly happy. Pinkie Pie even noted how fake their smiles looked before the war kicked off (though unlike Fluttershy, who defected to aid humanity, Pinkie didn't act on her own doubts about the conversion). And Halberd Wings, the protagonist of the prequel story Warfare, admits to being creeped out by how they're complete Extreme Doormats.
- In the Distant Finale story Future, Luna's corpse is described as having some of this going on. Since she was killed in battle getting mulched with More Dakka, the expensive funeral preppers Celestia hired were tasked with trying to turn what was described as resembling a slab of ground meat with bits of blue fur and feathers sticking out of it back into something that looked like Luna when she was still alive to look presentable for her state funeral. It's not too bad from far away, but upon closer examination, it's clear they had their work cut out for them - the horn is crooked, her muzzle is a bit longer, and the body looks lopsided and asymmetrical in several areas.
- The Nightmare House: Enforced. The dancers in Lucy's nightmare have blue (later red), pupilless blue eyes.
- Passion and Justice: Invoked by Vision, having perfected the ability to speak in a way that's just off kilter enough to sound calm but faintly terrifying, which he uses when interrogating someone.
- A Quiet Valley, a The Owl House fanfic, has Luz's witch friends hit this for Camilla (Luz's mother), who finds their near humanness creepy when she notices inhuman things about them, like their eye color, fangs, and pointed ears and is a lot more relaxed around Vee's basilisk form which is far from human. Camilla herself isn't too thrilled that she's reacting like this, as said friends are also all lost and injured following The season 2 finale and the last thing they need is them realizing their very nature unsettles her instinctively.
- Remnant's Blonde Bard: Downplayed. The Game immediately outs Penny as a robot thanks to its interface, and Jaune notes that Penny's introduction is not something a human would say and that her voice is subtly different from that of any human because she doesn't breathe in order to produce it. However, without his Semblance's heads up, Jaune would have likely passed her greeting off as unusual and failed to notice the voice.
- A Speeding Bullet: Night and Fog are so boring and repetitive — even having the same conversation every morning — that they give Taylor the creeps.
- Thousand Shinji: Asuka's secondary form is frightening because she looks like a demon... and her skin and hair's colors don't look natural on a human.
My red skin. As in brilliant crimson, the colour of arterial blood flowing from a fresh wound, before clotting has kicked in. It was the sort of colour more associated with paints than with the spectrum of human flesh tones. It was unnatural and terrifying with its ultimate wrongness for it had not the same quality as painted skin either.
The same went for my hair. While copper was an accepted hair colour, mine was bronze. Again, it wasn’t so much the colour in of itself that was wrong, it was the fact that it was on a human, because it didn’t look like some strange admixture of blonde and red that might arise in nature, but it looked like it was made out of actual strands of metal. It just subtly did not look right. - Through a Diamond Sky: Jordan takes the doppelganger issue mostly in stride... but is never entirely sure what to make of her husband's double, Clu.
- The Uncanny Danny is a Danny Phantom fanfic written with this trope as its core element.
- A few Mass Effect stories, such as the NSFW An Unusual Companionship invert this. To humans, asari are Blue Skinned Space Babes. But to some asari, human women are too similar to them while being different enough to creep them out.
- Realistic Pokémon: Some of RJ's Pokemon look really disturbing when brought into reality, but Mewtwo stands out the most here, as its origin story makes it very likely that RJ went for this effect intentionally with it.
- This Bites!: The Self-Insert Cross experiences the world of One Piece through a realistic perspective rather than the manga style of the original series. This is especially the case when he encounters his first Fishman in Mock Town, where he sees fish scales in place of skin and warped physiology that pushes them more to fish than human. He has to remind himself that they are a race with their own society to break free of his uncomfortable feeling.
- To You, My Love, Forever Ago: Several times Asuka disturbs or unsettles people by behaving less like the fourteen-year-old girl she pretends to be and more like the ageless humanoid abomination she really is. In chapter 1, she draws everybody's attention when she talks by pitching her voice in a certain way which makes humans frightened like an animal of prey. As she puts it, "tigers do it with their roar, but it is far more terrifying when it is coming from a 'human'."
- In Tron: Invasion (a very loose adaptation of TRON 2.0), Jet and Mercury appear as this to each other. Jet observes that Mercury's face is a little too angular and her movements a little too precise to be human, while Mercury is vaguely put off by Jet's hair color, the lack of circuitry under his gridsuit, and the "strangely flat" quality to his voice.
- Under the Northern Lights: In-universe, Spike perceives the nidhoggs as this — they're superficially very similar to dragons like himself, but with a too-flat face, too-small eyes, no limbs, and a pebbled skin that looks like scales but isn't, resulting a very unsettling feeling of subverted familiarity.
- What if the Yeerks Were the Good Guys?: The Quantum Kindred is described as looking like a mannequin with a face projected onto it, which freaks the humans out.
- What About Witch Queen?: Most people are put off by snow horses. Inverted with Kai, though, who can't ride and finds his new Automaton Horse great.
Kristoff: They're absolutely creepy.
Kai: No, they're not.
Kristoff: You're saying that only because you're a hopeless horseman and these are some automatons.
Kai: Maybe. But I do like that they'll never kick me, or throw me off, or trample me, or generally act like jerks towards me... - Where We Don't Belong: Noah finds the Face Mechon Xord disturbing not for being a giant Killer Robot who self-admittedly eats people, but because his human-like actions and wording - comparing them to the elderly denizens of The City - is just so off when paired with that giant mech body. Of course, at this stage, he along with the rest of the non-Machina XC1 cast don't fully realize what Face Mechon really are.
- With Strings Attached: Brox looks and acts like a normal little child — until he/she starts acting his/her real age. Her/his whole mien shifts, which creeps out the four considerably.
- The Worm That Dorks: Izuku looks just a little off to anyone who meets him. Tokoyami describes it as his skin color being slightly off and that his body seems like it wasn't proportioned quite right. Also, Izuku has several lines on his face that look more like seams than scars.
- Xenophilia: Rainbow Dash and most other ponies find regular non-sapient horses creepier than humans, mainly because of facial expressions.
Films — Animation
- Coraline deliberately sweeps the valley to induce fear.
- The human characters mostly avoid it, considering that they aren't very realistic, but they are realistic enough to make the ragdoll versions of themselves fall into this trope. In general, taking emotion and soul out of a face is a keen way to achieve the Uncanny Valley, so in this case taking out one of the most expressive parts of the face, the eyes, was a good strategy.
- Furthermore, the real humans in the film have asymmetrical faces. Coraline's mother has a somewhat hook-shaped nose that points left, a trait she shares with Coraline herself, and a slightly crooked mouth, while Coraline's father has one ear lower than the other and one eye larger than the other. Even Wybie has one much larger eye than the other and a crooked "hunch" to his posture. The "other" versions of them however have perfectly symmetrical faces, which gives them a very subtle but unnervingly unnatural look: human faces are never symmetrical in real life, so the imperfect real parents look natural while the perfect other parents look fake.
- The stop-motion in the Other World is slightly off, doing things like having single frames where background objects suddenly jump around, just enough to be unnerving.
- Mr. Bobinsky has blue skin, freakish long legs and a big gut, and he's supposed to be a normal human. There's some justification, as the background information states he was part of the Chernobyl clean up crew, which may explain his appearance.
- As the Other Mother's illusions start wearing off, the Other Father begins looking increasingly melty (for lack of a better word). And that's without mentioning the Other Mother's true form.
- Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence:
- The Geisha-gynoids are chalk-white, life-sized Creepy Dolls modeled after Hans Bellmar's doll-sculptures and every bit as creepy. Their staggering mechanical movements and speech have just the slightest trace of humanity to put them in the Valley.
- Batou and Togusa discuss the nature of the Uncanny Valley with a forensics scientist named Haraway, who ponders why humans are obsessed with recreating themselves. Haraway seems like a highly cynical but overall laid-back older woman — until Batou and Togusa leave, upon which she takes her face off and plugs cables into her eyes. If you look carefully, you can deduce her cyborg status by her wearing short sleeves in extreme cold and her breath not being visible, even though Togusa's is.
- Kim had his brain put into a cybernetic body which is shaped and moved like a wooden puppet on strings. To Kim, the deepest point of the Uncanny Valley is the closest any being can come to perfection. As a result, his whole Big Fancy House is full of human-sized dolls, puppets, and robots.
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney): The reason such a film is able to exist at all is seemingly due to an inverted use of this trope. The central point of the story is that the protagonist, Quasimodo, is so heavily deformed from birth that he can't go out in public because people would be frightened and disgusted by the sight of him. Yet, he can't be depicted in a way that would frighten the children in the audience. The art style of the movie is quite realistic, and Quasimodo is indeed objectively heavily deformed — but he only looks Ugly Cute to the audience. Presumably this is because his animated appearance lands so far on the "unrealistic" side of the valley that most people's brains don't react to it as if it even should meet realistic human standards. So, the inversion: instead of looking creepy because he looks a little off, he doesn't look creepy because he looks way off.
- Penguins of Madagascar: Dave, when posing as Dr. Octavius Brine, makes some movements that are impossible even for a cartoony human, like walking on the ceiling, leaning forward almost to the ground, and stretching his arms to extreme length. These all indicate his true identity, but the humans are still fooled by his appearance.
- Shrek the Third: When Shrek seemingly wakes up from a nightmare about ogre babies, Puss and Donkey have ogre baby heads, with the baby-headed Donkey calling "Da-da" in a deep, unsettling voice as the camera closes in on him. It cuts back to Shrek actually waking up.
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse:
- The Uncanny Valley is invoked with the three non-standard Spider-People. Spider-Ham is a Toon who uses Toon Physics in a realistic world, Peni Parker is an Anime schoolgirl who has deliberately Limited Animation, and Spider-Man Noir is a permanently black-and-white character who's always given heavy shading even in broad daylight. All of these characters are individually appealing, but put them alongside more traditionally CG characters and the result is pretty damn uncanny◊—intentionally so, to enforce the idea that they don't belong in this universe.
- Kingpin's ridiculously bulky body is juxtaposed to his tiny head, which takes turns being played for laughs and for terror. Compared to other characters (or Real Life people), he's a freak of nature.
- The Uncanny Valley is invoked with the three non-standard Spider-People. Spider-Ham is a Toon who uses Toon Physics in a realistic world, Peni Parker is an Anime schoolgirl who has deliberately Limited Animation, and Spider-Man Noir is a permanently black-and-white character who's always given heavy shading even in broad daylight. All of these characters are individually appealing, but put them alongside more traditionally CG characters and the result is pretty damn uncanny
- Studio Ghibli:
- The Great Forest Spirit from Princess Mononoke has a face that's way too human-like◊ for comfort. In profile, it eerily resembles a headless deer◊. The intentional part comes from how it seems intended to emphasize how otherworldly the creature is. Still, its Eldritch Abomination transformation manages to be less scary than its deer form.
- Spirited Away invokes it with passengers on the Afterlife Express. No-face deserves special mention. Just looking at that blank expressionless face on the pale, ghostly body is enough to give you the willies. Observe◊, or maybe even worse when he becomes monstrous and gains a mouth full of teeth and bulbous body... but his mask-like face stays the same. Hell, Spirited Away invokes this everywhere, from the anthropomorphic animals to the "regular" humans who look completely alien◊ compared to Chihiro, the justification being that most of them are spirits.
- The Great Forest Spirit from Princess Mononoke has a face that's way too human-like
- Wreck-It Ralph: Turbo, the lead character in Turbo Time, is a game character that's human, but due to the graphic limitations of his 8-bit game, he has grey skin, an oversized head, bright yellow teeth (which are all exactly the same size and shape, and perfectly straight so that they all seem to be one piece), glowing, sunken yellow eyes ringed with dark circles, a pudgy body, and skinny limbs, giving him the appearance of a zombie. No wonder his game lost popularity when RoadBlasters arrived.
Live-Action TV
- Parodied brilliantly in 30 Rock as the reason why it is impossible to do a porn video game... and then the game Tracy made went on to make $300 million. He apparently figured out a way to avoid the valley after all. Of course, this explanation in a way even Tracy Jordan can understand:
Tracy: Tell it to me in Star Wars.
Frank: All right. We like R2-D2 and C-3PO.
Tracy: They’re nice.
Frank: And up here, we have a real person like Han Solo.
Tracy: He acts like he doesn’t care, but he does!
Frank: But down here we have a CGI Storm Trooper or Tom Hanks in The Polar Express.
Tracy: I'm scared! Get me out of there. - Explicitly invoked in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as the reason why Radcliffe used a real person's appearance when building Aida; starting from scratch always resulted in this trope. Personality-wise, she still dances on the edge of this trope, though not enough for people who aren't robotics experts to figure out why.
- Atlanta has Darius visit the home of Teddy Perkins, the eccentric brother of reclusive former Motown artist Benny Hope, to pick up an advertised free piano. Every single thing about Teddy is disturbing from the moment he appears on-screen — he doesn't seem able to fully relate to Darius like a human being, he speaks in a low falsetto whisper, he eats owl egg yolk for supper, and his mannerisms and clothing evoke the most bizarre kind of elderly rich shut-in. But above all, it's his appearance that's so immediately startling: Teddy, ostensibly an elderly African-American man like his brother, has perfectly smooth alabaster skin, straight black hair, and sculpted, almost equine Ken-doll features◊. It's not clear whether it's surgery, cosmetics, a shared genetic disorder with his brother, or something else, and his death in a murder-suicide deliberately leaves all questions unanswered.
- In the Black Mirror story "Be Right Back", a woman buys an artificial meat effigy of her dead husband coded with a facsimile of his personality based on his social media posts. It starts to have this effect on her after a while, when she begins to pick up on things like the fact that he doesn't breathe, and that instead of sleeping he lies next to her with his eyes open, and how the pores and creases on his skin are completely two-dimensional and 'bump-mapped'.
- Buffyverse:
- The three creepiest characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer are generally considered to be Gnarl, the Gentlemen,note and Sid. The first two by virtue of exaggerated and odd movement, and the last due to being a self-animating ventriloquist's dummy.
- April the Robot from "I Was Made To Love You". She's an in-universe example, as the main characters all slowly realize there is something wrong with the super-cheery way she talks, the way she walks, and eventually her huge amounts of strength.
- Played with regarding Warren's second creation, the Buffybot. Though it has the same problems as April, her friends fail to realize they're talking to a robot, merely thinking that their friend that they've known for years is behaving oddly for some reason, until Buffy herself shows up.
- Even the regular old Vampire make-up or "Game Face" while created to make people feel less sorry for the rampant murder of normal looking people is still creepy thanks to the dated computer effect to make the vampire face appear seamlessly without cutting away like in the early series.
- The make up is slightly different depending how the actor's facial structure, this especially noticeable for the female vampire faces◊ since actresses usually have differently shaped faces to the male actors so the make-up is affected which is effectively disconcerting and uncanny.
- David Boreanaz and James Marsters wear the Vampire make-up very well, James Marsters as Spike can contort his face into a massive snarl◊ which is more jarring than the heavy make-up of most Demons.
- The mascot from Community falls under this trope. Having been designed to have no ethnically distinguishing features, it ended up being an androgynous White Mask of Doom.
- One episode of the season 5 of Criminal Minds has the title "The Uncanny Valley". Young women are abducted and paralyzed before being transformed into living dolls, giving them a surreal look. The creepiest part is that the eyes are often shown, being the only thing that they can still move. Here's a picture.◊
- Doctor Who:
- Invoked with Susan's dancing to Pop music in "An Unearthly Child". It doesn't resemble any dance anyone would ever do to that kind of music and looks pretty, but freaky.
- "Kerblam!" has the titular MegaCorp's omnipresent robots, which have faces reminiscent of ventriloquists' dummies, and which companions Ryan, Graham and Yaz find unsettling. The Doctor tells them off for being "robophobic".
- "The Robots of Death" references the Uncanny Valley effect in the form of "Grimwade's Syndrome", (named after Peter Grimwade, a production assistant who always complained about having to do robot-themed episodes) a mental disorder whose sufferers subconsciously equate highly humanoid robots with animated corpses; the robots in that particular story looked just slightly less human than the animatronic dummies on a Disneyland ride, but the idea of being surrounded by human-sized creatures with emotionless and immobile features is unpleasant enough that the audience could easily accept it.
- Jack Harkness evokes this for the Doctor as a living fixed point in time, "a fact", which his Time Lord instincts balk at.
- The Family of Blood from "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood". Perfectly normal-looking people turned to pure terror through a combination of Verbal Tics, Creepy Monotone, unsettling facial expressions and body movements.
- Weeping Angels, played by actors, in special makeup, while using unusual, robotic movements to make them appear extremely creepy.
- While not actually eerie-looking (since he's played by a real actor), the robotic sheriff from Eureka has this effect on the townspeople, who are unnerved by him and especially by his creepily fixed smile.
- Extant: John says that the uncanny valley issue is not with his robots' appearance (which he's solved, as they cannot be outwardly distinguished from humans). Rather it's their behavior, which is still inhuman.
- Laurence Fox manages this when he plays a British Nazi in Foyle's War. No makeup, no sci-fi elements, yet his performance is still inhumanly creepy thanks to his hostile and unblinking stare, dissonant smiling, and the oddness of his body language. He even manages to creep out other Nazis.
- An aural rather than visual example from season 2 of Game of Thrones. Daenerys' baby dragons sound just enough like human infants to make their cries of fear extremely disconcerting.
- Halo (2022) has the Artificial Intelligence Cortana, with human-like hair and skin tone and a clearly defined bodysuit that makes her much more unsettling to look at than the blue and slightly stylized woman from◊ the games. Rather predictably, the other characters have an unnerved response to this not quite human's presence.
- In an episode of House, the patient, a painter, is doing a portrait of a man's wife. When the painting is done, her husband goes to look at it, and it is horribly distorted. The same patient later sees extremely disturbing doppelgangers of Taub and Thirteen as a result of the same vision distortion, invoking an almost-but-not-quite freakiness.
- Humans:
- The series is built on this trope. All the Synths look almost exactly like normal people, but there are all sorts of little details that uncomfortably remind you that they're not — unnatural eye colors, overly smooth and shiny glossy skin, et cetera.
- Advertisements for a company named Persona Synthetics, which provides realistic-looking synthetic servants to look after your family, appeared in British newspapers and aired on Channel 4 in mid-May 2015, which drew a lot of comments on Twitter from people freaked out by it. It turned out to be a viral marketing ploy for Humans, and the synthetics in the ad were just actors.
- Kamen Rider: This happens every so often given the number of monsters that have/create a human form without attempting to be human on the inside too. Humans who become monsters are usually even worse. Prominent examples include:
- Worms in Kamen Rider Kabuto can go into this despite being able to mimic humans so perfectly even they themselves forgot who they actually are.
- The Roidmudes in Kamen Rider Drive are supposed to evoke this trope, although all are played by regular actors. Chase, with his expressionless face and unnaturally wide purple eyes, is the most prominent example. His Kamen Rider Saga even lampshades this several times.
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid:
- Kuroto Dan pulls a zigzagged version of this. He is human (well, used to be), but get more disturbing as time passed, such as moving with Marionette Motion and speaking in a variety of very much inhuman tones.
- This is not made any better by Kuroto's partner in crime, Bugster higher-up Parado, an eerily cheerful Psychopathic Manchild with truly eldritch Blue-and-Orange Morality. His smiles go from mostly normal and even somewhat heartwarming on few rare occasions to the teeth barred, corners of mouth upturned version of Technically a Smile three inches from your face.
- One episode of The Librarians (2014) has the team chasing down a shapeshifter called Hoklonote, which impersonates other people, but has a tendency to break out into an inhumanly wide grin.
- Lost: Though he doesn't play an alien, robot, or supernatural creature, Michael Emerson's performance of Ben Linus has a hint of Uncanny Valley, as one of his techniques he uses to achieve his magnetically compelling creepiness. He sometimes goes for a long time without blinking, then blinks very slowly at a carefully chosen moment.
- In Not Going Out, Dolly, the top-of-the-range sex doll recovered from the tip by Lee. She is imbued with Artificial Intelligence but is almost, but not quite, human - which disconcerts both Lee and Lucy and certainly prompted her previous owner to track Lee down and deliver an awful warning.
- Power Rangers:
- The majority of villains are far enough away from human that this rarely applies, but any time they veer toward human-like, they hit this full-force. Take, for example, Madame Woe or Lipsyncher.◊
- Heckyl from Power Rangers Dino Charge is similar to the Kamen Rider villains mentioned on this page. He is (seemingly) twenty something man in Awesome Anachronistic Apparel (suit, waistcoat, pocket watch), whose expressions give off such a vibe that he only grasped the theory behind them. Also, he can go from Affably Evil to foaming at the mouth angry and back at drop of the hat.
- The majority of villains are far enough away from human that this rarely applies, but any time they veer toward human-like, they hit this full-force. Take, for example, Madame Woe
- Red Dwarf:
- Holly is generally acceptable because he/she acts just like a normal human, with a lighthearted, "chummy" way of speaking. But on the instances where he/she malfunctions and reverts to Robo-Speak it can be damned creepy. "The phrase 'cargo bay doors' does not appear to be in my lexicon," for example. An episode in which it is briefly thought that Lister is from a previous class of robots to Kryten lampshades this trope, with Kryten explaining that these robots were too close to humans in appearance, which was creepy for some and so they were recalled, hence why despite being a later model he looks more reassuringly non-human.
- Done deliberately with the Data Doctor from "Back in the Red", apparently inspired by Max Headroom.
- The first novelization Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers notes that Holograms all have the big chrome "H" on their forehead to make it more acceptable and less creepy for your dead friend to be walking around and talking to you, as it makes it more explicit that the person you're talking to is not actually the real person.
- Kryten mentions that his predecessor series was a notorious commercial failure because it looked so human that it made humans uncomfortable, while Kryten's "novelty eraser shaped head" (as Rimmer puts it) is sufficiently far enough from human appearance to avoid the valley effect.
- Invoked in "Blue" where, in The Rimmer Experience, the appearances of Cat and Lister are slightly off, with extreme make-up and overly white teeth. A DVD extra shows a deleted scene from the episode, for good reasons: a rejected version of the Rimmer Experience ride entrance featuring a terrifying static CGI head of Chris Barrie.
- Played for Laughs in the recurring Saturday Night Live sketch "The Merryville Brothers", which features a trio of animatronic musicians (played by cast members) that engage in increasingly creepy activities towards couples trapped on their rides, usually culminating in trying to kill or harass the riders in an over-the-top manner.
- Space: Above and Beyond features the Silicates, robots who, based on outward appearance, are nearly indistinguishable from humans, except for three things:
- They have not been properly maintained since they Turned Against Their Masters, so bits of their "skin" have flaked off.
- All Silicates (even the Sexbot models) have crosshairs for eyes.
- The odd physical tics and the occasional st-st-stuttering of speech.
- Stargate-verse:
- Stargate SG-1:
- "200" features the SG-1 team as marionettes, and as this link◊ shows, it certainly qualifies as Uncanny Valley.
- Human-form replicators definitely qualify. They look perfectly human, and even come off as human for the first thirty seconds they appear in the series. But soon it becomes pretty clear that there's something off. Fifth comes off as much more human and is (originally at least) a sympathetic character as a result.
- "200" features the SG-1 team as marionettes, and as this link
- Stargate Atlantis:
- The first few appearances of the Wraith. In an attempt to avert Rubber-Forehead Aliens, their eyes and mouths were noticeably slightly too big (apparently with CGI), leading powerfully to this effect. It was apparently too creepy, or else just too expensive, and they abandoned it later on.
- FRAN, the replicator created by Rodney McKay. She acts perfectly human, friendly, yet is willing to completely obey orders (meaning suicide) and is even slightly enthusiastic about it. It is very much the Uncanny Valley. The notable thing is that she is actually unsettling to the other characters (such as McKay himself) because of this, too.
- Stargate SG-1:
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Next Generation,
- Data sometimes slips a little ways down the right side of the Valley — though, as he's played by a person, he never gets very far down. Though the grimace-lockjaw-rictus-smile he had during the dancing scene in "Data's Day" greased the slope quite effectively. This trope was cited in all but name when it was revealed to Data that he was designed to not perfectly mimic humans as it tended to creep people out.
- Switching him off also has this effect, though for the opposite reason (the character we are expected to believe is a machine looks disturbingly human when he is deactivated and effectively dead). As Riker says in "The Measure of a Man", after demonstrating this during a trial of Data's personhood:
- Which may be a big reason why the Amargosa scene in Star Trek: Generations wigged out a lot of people. Especially when his emotion chip overloaded and he couldn't stop laughing.
- In the episode "Clues", everyone on the ship but Data is knocked unconscious after going through a wormhole. He tells them they were out for only a few seconds, but strange hints that he may be lying begin to appear. Picard gets increasingly frustrated as he — and the audience — realize just how hard it is to figure out what's going on inside Data's head, and how unsettling that can be.
- Data's relationship with the uncanny valley is nicely illustrated when contrasted with his brother/prototype Lore. Lore had more human qualities than Data, including emotions and the ability to express them.... but this only made him unpredictable and dangerous to be around. As a result, Lore comes off as too human, with his emotions not matching up at all with what's happening around him, and it creeps out the audience. In response, Dr. Soong constructed Data to replace Lore and consciously dialed back the human qualities so he's be approachable and polite, keeping Data out of the valley.
- "Brothers" is another episode where Data's inhumanity was brought into sharp focus. For reasons that only become clear later, he suddenly seizes control of the ship and pilots it by himself to an unknown star system. The frightening ease with which he accomplishes this — the entire rest of the crew are essentially powerless to stop him — and his blank expression throughout (even as a child's life is threatened by his actions) can be very disturbing.
- Deanna Troi is a Half-Human Hybrid with completely black irises. It can be offputting to observers who recognize there's something different about her but can't quite figure out what it is. To those who recognize that she's half Betazoids, or at least able to recognize what's "missing", Troi instead crosses over into big and static pupil space babe. Full Betazoids have larger black eyes that make them more obviously non human, skipping the valley altogether.
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
- Odo's face slips into uncanny valley. As a Changeling shapeshifter, Odo normally takes the form of a humanoid man, but he has difficulty mimicking humanoid facial details. The result is that his face has very blunted features with unrealistically smooth skin. Fortunately, he does not seem to trigger an uncanny valley response in the other characters, presumably because he looks like just another Rubber Forehead Alien in a setting full of them.
- The Vorta◊ can have this aura. Their violet-color eyes and manikin-like smooth faces feel off, and their extreme politeness can also feel more creepy than comforting. Justified because they are genetically engineered by the Founders to be ideal non-combat officials of the Dominion.
- In "The Darkness and the Light", an altered voice says, "That's one", "That's two" after each murder victim is killed. The voice sounds broken, artificial, deep, and not at all humanlike.
- In Star Trek: Voyager, one could infer this is the reason why the Emergency Medical Hologram ended up being an utter failure. It seems that Starfleet crews found it difficult to trust medical care in someone "not real" and would often forget they were a sentient, self-aware hologram, leading them to treat them as though they were not even there. They also seem to have been designed a little too lifelike for people's tastes; the EMH Mk1 was too pompous, while its replacement, the EMH Mk2 was scathingly sarcastic, etc. As of "Life Line", the Doctor's creator reveals that they were up to a Mk4 and still running into this problem. Granted, this is less because of the uncanny valley effect and more that every version of the EMH has their physical appearance and demeanor based on an actual human.... and the creator keeps modeling them after smug, condescending assholes (starting with himself).
- Star Trek: Enterprise: Normally, Dr. Phlox's features are just alien enough to register as "non-human", but then he smiles... from ear to ear.
- Star Trek: Discovery:
- When Georgiou has one of her Temporal Sickness episodes, her whole body warps at one point.
- Twice, characters have gotten whited-out eyes: Adira on the Trill planet and Stamets during a spore drive malfunction.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation,
- Similar to Data, Cameron of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles sometimes slips into the Uncanny Valley, such as one scene where she perfectly repeats a deceased classmate's last words, word-for-word and inflection-for-inflection. In another, equally disturbing example, while she is being crushed between two trucks, her face is covered in cuts and burns, and her head is being sliced open, she starts talking to John in a completely normal tone of voice that shifts into frantic pleading and crying just like a normal person.
- The Terror: The Tuunbaaq resembles a polar bear with a weirdly long neck and a human face, making it extremely eerie.
- Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! uses this trope for comedic effect.
- Whenever pictures of children are displayed on the show, there's always something terribly wrong with their face. The funny thing is, it's possible for kids to actually look like that.
- The careful use of slow-motion, freeze frame and camera zoom makes pretty much every human actor fall deep into the valley at one point or another.
- David Lynch filmed several scenes in Twin Peaks within the Black Lodge. All the apparitions in the lodge were characters who did their scenes, all speech and movement backwards. Then the filmed result was played in reverse, giving all the action an unsettling tone.
- The Umbrella Academy (2019) has Grace, a robot who perfectly resembles a human... except she is almost constantly smiling, moves with an eerie grace, appears to be perfectly flawless, and never reacts to situations normally. Plus, there's the time she spooked Baby Vanya by standing up after being flung into a glass case and twisting her head back into the correct position. You don't quite realize she's a robot, either, she's just unsettling — until the end of the first episode, when she sits down and a futuristic charger plugs itself into her ears, setting off blue glows under her skin.
- Westworld (2016): Deliberately used in the scene where Ford is talking to one of the first hosts created, who has become very old. He looks human, but his movements are very robotic and jittery.
- One of the wives featured in one episode of Wife Swap is a New Jersey woman who owns a huge and ever-growing collection of reborn baby dolls. She is shown carrying out a daily routine of brushing their hair, changing their diapers, and carrying them around with her constantly. She even brings one of them with her to her swap family's home, and the wife of the other family is understandably freaked out when she encounters the dolls.
Music
- In terms of sound any music that uses the Tritone is going to have a more aery and unnatural sound to the melody and is the reason why it was described as the devil in music daring the middle ages. Because of this songs that use it the most tend to be more haunting and scary.
- Daft Punk's videos invoke this trope a lot, mostly in the Human After All and Homework eras. Of particular note is the weird robot baby thing from the Technologic video. It's the teeth behind those wireframe lips...
- David Bowie: Purposely invoked via makeup and image manipulation with the photos of the various characters in the liner notes for 1. Outside, as well as on the album itself with their spoken-word "segues" between songs, which are digitally tweaked to vary the voices further. It doesn't take long to realize Bowie is playing all of them, including the women; the low point of the valley here is Baby Grace Blue, the 14-year-old girl whose murder kicks off the story.
- The cover of South African rap duo Die Antwoord 's Ten$ion album features Yolandi Visser done up like some black-eyed, cannibalistic angel◊ with pure black eyes.
- The Caretaker:
- The heavily sample-based music is designed to evoke this, quietly distorting the originals in ways meant to be atmospheric ambience, yet always subtly off by way of low quality, vinyl scratching sounds, and inappropriate looping and inconsistent track-by-track flow. His more conceptual albums like An Empty Bliss Beyond This World and Everywhere at the End of Time are meant to be musical illustrations of the headspace of those suffering from mental disorders like Alzheimer's disease and dementia, and become even more unsettlingly warped and disturbing over time in a way that evokes losing your mind.
- In a more visual sense of this, the accompanying album cover illustrations by Ivan Seal also count. While his paintings never depict human subjects, the inanimate sculptures he does depict are nevertheless very ambiguous, unidentifiable, and quietly impossible, behaving in ways that wouldn't make sense in real life. There's something "real" in them, but garbled under twisted abstraction.
- The man on the cover of "Raro" by Uruguayan rock band El Cuarteto de Nos was made by compositing the facial features of the band members into one face, making it look just the slightest bit disproportionate. For a more uncanny effect, the liner notes have more images of the figure, all with the exact same facial expression.
- In the video for "Two Weeks" by Grizzly Bear, the band members' facial features and movements are digitally altered just enough to give them the deliberate appearance of singing automatons. Their unnaturally shiny skin, large eyes, and un-synchronized blinking are unnerving enough, but eventually light starts pouring out of their mouths and sparks fly out of the backs of their heads.
- The video for HEART by group_inou features animated characters with lovingly rendered detail but (purposely) terrible anatomy.
- The genre of hyperpop feeds off of this trope. All of the over-repetitiveness of some phrases, bright poppy colors and a background whine in some songs make you feel just a little off. Not to mention the vocals being pitched just a little higher than usual and the utter vapidity of some songs. A proper example of this trope and a big part of the genre, GFOTY really lives up to this, or Lipgloss Twins who just don't feel right in this song are true to this trope.
- SOPHIE, one of the genre's popularizers (if not originator) was a master at this, taking a step further by designing all her sounds from scratch, designing bizarre synths comparable to rubber/plastic/elastic using waveforms and chaotically integrating them in her tracks. The end results resemble songs inspired by hyper-polished 2000s-era bubblegum pop, but as if entirely created by "hyperkinetic" aliens.
- Hannah Diamond, also of PC Music, is this, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. Her photography is sleek and hyperreal, and her vocal delivery and lyricism are so sincere and girly she starts to seem almost like an A.I. version of a pop singer.
- The remixed version of Mike Posner's "I Took a Pill in Ibiza". At the beginning of the video, Posner takes the titular pill, and the ensuing trip causes his head to appear as a giant, dead-eyed, papier-mache head, which is fitting as the song itself is about how Posner is desperately trying to appear cool, but whatever fame he has/had is just making him feel empty inside.
- Mindless Self Indulgence's Shut Me Up video. Everything in the video is just a bit off, and the guy's movements are so exaggerated and such that it's like watching a cartoon with realistic people.
- The fully Intentional look for the music video of "Carnival of Rust" by Poets of the Fall, revolving around a Circus of Fear carnival and its surreal, menacing denizens.
- The first verse of Radiohead’s "Like Spinning Plates" consists of Thom Yorke singing backwards played backwards so that it sounds like normal singing but oddly distorted.
- The music video for Serj Tankian's "Empty Walls" features the lead singer parading around a Circus of Fear with a bizarre, sociopathic look on his face, while various small children play happily... or, as some people have interpreted it, re-enact the War on Terror.
- The music video for Sofi Tukker's "Swing" features Sophie and Tucker both developing large anime-style eyes in an otherwise live-action video.
- Steam Powered Giraffe is a band consisting of three human performers portraying robots. They invoke this trope rather effectively through their movements, which are choreographed to look as convincingly robotic as possible. Or rather, choreographed to look like robots who are trying their hardest to look as convincingly human as possible, but are not quite managing it. This, coupled with their glitching and occasional outright breakdowns, can make them very jarring to watch if you aren't used to them.
- Stromae:
- His song Papaoutai (a phonetic rendering of "Papa, où t'es?" or "Daddy, where are you?" in French) is based on his real-life experience of having lost his father in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, although it is obscured by a catchy EDM beat. In the video, a young boy representing Stromae runs around his neighborhood looking for his father, but all he finds is a Stepford Smiler Demonic Dummy. That's creepy enough, but it becomes even creepier when one realizes that the "dummy" is actually Stromae himself wearing makeup that makes him look eerily like an Auton. Hard to tell whether this is more Nightmare Fuel or Tear Jerker. Taken further in this live performance.
- His music video for "Quand c'est?" has him dancing in a very creepy, almost inhuman manner, and seen only in silhouette. There are even a few very brief and easy-to-miss moments when he has an extra arm or leg, which only makes it that much creepier.
- His song Papaoutai
- TOBACCO/Black Moth Super Rainbow uses a vocoder effect on his vocals at various different pitches, and combined with a directly analog approach to production (akin to music out of the 70s and 80s) on top of a "cursed image" aesthetic in sound and visuals, his music can be quite offputting to a normal music listener. And that's not even getting into the music videos, such as "Human Om."
- "Weird Al" Yankovic intentionally creates this effect for his "Perform This Way" video, a parody of Lady Gaga's "Born This Way". The video has a female dancer wearing a bunch of outlandish outfits, with Al's face digitally superimposed over hers. Not only is it obviously fake in and of itself, but it's also disturbingly out of sync in some places.
- FKA twigs does this a lot, especially on her album covers. LP1, EP2, and M3LL155X all count, but MAGDALENE stands out as especially unsettling, being a portrait of Twigs looking as if she was constructed out of clay and paint with shoulders that are too broad and eyes with no irises.
- The music video for Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" features people around a neighborhood with very distorted faces and smiles that are clearly supposed to be off-putting.
Mythology & Religion
- Many a mythical creature in human guise falls under this category, most notably changeling children and angels from The Bible. Though usually said to be beautiful, these disguised beings are also claimed to have something off about them that the human witnessing them can't quite pin down until they learn their true identity.
- In Celtic Mythology, Blodeuwedd is a beautiful woman fashioned originally from flowers who has no conception of what it is to actually be human. She is later transformed into an owl — a night bird considered to be a non-worldly thing of the Otherworld — for her failings whilst trying to be human.
Radio
- The New Zealand sci-fi series "Claybourne" from the late 1990s featured an AI named Delilah that imitated the voice of the character of Edith in a telephone call as a plot point in the series. The person that took the call later said that the voice sounded "slightly off."
- The NPR series On the Media did a segment on the Uncanny Valley phenomenon.
Tabletop Games
- BattleTech:
- This is effectively what gives away upgraded Manei Domini agents. They are cyborgs who have been given a variety of implants, most of which are subdermal in nature. In theory any one high-quality implant is largely hidden, as is the case for standard characters who may need them. Too many, however, and they become subtly inhuman—agents with subdermal armor or strength enhancers have bodies that look more like a Rob Liefeld drawing than anything human, while agents with secret bio-weapon upgrades have odd patterns of head movement and speech because the location of the implants in their throats and mouths makes them sound 'off.' The tabletop roleplaying game Mechwarrior reflects this by forcing such affected characters to take unavoidable flaws that reduce their Charisma rating and make it harder to interact with others. This is helped by the fact that Manei Domini tend not to be the sanest of individuals to begin with, and all the cybernetic implants they receive frequently cause further Sanity Slippage.
- The game's lore has a rare mechanical spin on this trope in the form of the Black Marauder, a Marauder mech that was found sitting by itself on a lone asteroid after a misjump. It has no insignia, manufacturer's mark or serial number, was discovered without any damage from exposure, and looks unnaturally smooth and out of proportion. And that's just how it looks. It was abandoned after its crew began to suffer mysterious accidents, suicides and psychological trauma but was later discovered by an infamous MechWarrior who saw it as a kindred spirit. Legends describe the "Dark One" as it came to be known as capable of mechanically impossible movements and even operating on its own accord. A mechwarrior who was piloting a mech with an Interface Cockpit (which plugs directly into the pilot's brain and, among other things, ties their senses directly into their mech's sensors, said that trying to look at the Dark One was like staring at a hole in reality.
- And speaking of Interface Cockpits, mechwarriors who've confronted a mech with an Interface Cockpit regularly describe its movements as "off" or "slightly wrong" because of the subtle differences in how the mech works. Among other things, it no longer needs a gyro because it uses its pilot's sense of balance directly, and it has slightly faster and more responsive reactions to their commands.
- Chronicles of Darkness:
- Like all Beasts from Beast: The Primordial, the Ingamu draw from a strain of fears, and their fear is of "the other". As such, there's a sense that they just aren't right... which is driven home by their Horrors, which often appear human but have something distinctly ''off' about them.
- In the Mage: The Awakening book Night Horrors: The Unbidden, there's a genetic ailment called the Ractain Strain, actually the result of a semi-successful incursion by an Abyssal entity called the Ractain. Those possessing the Strain have leonine features, lobeless, flat ears, and a general sense of something being off. This imposes a penalty to Social rolls, as people find them very offputting. (Taking the Striking Looks merit can help negate the penalty, as it makes the unusual features of being a Strain bearer look more exotic than creepy.) They especially bother werewolves, as their scent is completely wrong; as such, werewolves absolutely refuse to associate with Ractain Strain bearers, and thus they can't be wolf-blooded.
- Promethean: The Created puts a different spin on the Uncanny Valley. The player characters are artificial humans, ranging from reanimated corpses to magically animated statues, who appear human through the thinnest of supernatural veneers. Muggles can tell the difference on some deep, fundamental level, meaning that spending too much time around them is enough cause to haul out the Torches and Pitchforks.
- Saturnine Night gives us a more "routine" example with Dr. Robot Hughes, a scientist whose lifelong goal is the creation of successful sex robots. His previous attempts were all terrible failures due to the Uncanny Valley. Only when a Qashmal guided him to an unconscious Galateid did he manage to create one that actually worked - and that was because he'd unwittingly created a clone.
- A similar effect happens to vampires in Vampire: The Requiem. As they get older and lose touch with their Humanity, it gets harder for them to interact nicely with mortals. They forget to do things like blink, breathe, vary their vocal inflections or send off the other signals that humans unconsciously do without thinking. Even if they do make an effort to do all these things, vampires that have lost enough Humanity will appear like walking, talking corpses:
A Kindred with low Humanity can put great effort into acting like a living person. He can force himself to breathe and remind himself to blink now and then... but he can't fake that subtle, unconscious dance of nonverbal interaction. Mortals soon pick up on this. They cannot consciously spot the problem, but their instincts tell them that something is very wrong and they should get away.
- The Nosferatu clan gets this all the time, no matter how high their Humanity. Some of them look just plain ugly, but others might look perfectly normal... but when they interact with other people, they may carry about them the sterile scent of a hospital ward, or a gaze like they want to see what the other person's guts look like. They always carry the idea that there's something wrong directly centered on them. There's even an entire bloodline devoted to inverting the curse by bathing in blood to improve their appearance... and even then, it doesn't work, because they become too beautiful to be anything human.
- Crappy Birthday: Several card pictures are chosen due to showing rather unpleasant variations of the human face:
- The Bedroom Decor card shows a part of said decor being a rather unpleasant head sculpture with blank eyes and a lower half that looks oddly stretched and droopy.
- The Home Cyborg looks like it would be a near-human replica, if it wasn't for its face being visibly only partially attached, giving it an unnervingly blank expression.
- The Whateleys from Deadlands are an entire family of uncanny valley residents, thanks to a combination of demonic influence to gain magical powers and a family tree that's really more of a family stunted shrub. Player character Whateleys in Reloaded take a noticeable Charisma penalty to represent that they freak everyone around them out. (Unless they're female, in which case they can choose to instead be "exotic" and get a Charisma bonus.)
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The elan "race" is actually made up of psionic humanoids who have undergone a Super-Empowering ritual to become ageless beings who don't need to eat or drink if they can spare a bit of psionic power to sustain themselves. While they look identical to normal humans, they're classified as Aberrations rather than Humanoids, and other people can tell there is something fundamentally odd about elans, resulting in a -2 racial penalty to Charisma.
- Implied with the zenythri, a "planetouched" race with a Lawful outsider for an ancestor. They're noted for their flawless features and hair that naturally falls into place, but zenythri don't get any Charisma bonus from it, and in fact their basic statline has them with lower-than-average Charisma, implying that other creatures find them too perfect-looking.
- Keepers, debuting in the Planescape setting, are a race of extraplanar humanoids who are all identical, bald, and have to hide their Eyeless Faces with smoked goggles. They're obsessed with hoarding secrets, which combined with their abrupt manner and odd appearance makes them unnerving to other beings. Keepers are also really bad at blending in with other races - an example has a keeper walking into a bar, seeing everyone taking drinks, and trying to imitate the patrons by chugging a bottle of lamp oil.
- Unholy scions are mortals or beasts who were possessed by a fiend in their mother's womb, completely replacing the burgeoning soul, to the extent that an exorcism is impossible. While they're irredeemably evil and have a number of dark powers, unholy scions are physically identical to their mother's species, yet somehow disturb onlookers - "Their features might be ever so slightly off, their eyes possessed of an evil gleam, or they might simply make everyone around them nervous for no obvious cause."
- The Alienist Prestige Class from 3.5 Edition involves studying and using powers based on Eldritch Abominations from a place beyond the Planes called the Far Realms. Taking levels in the class causes the character to suffer increasingly high penalties to charisma-based skills as the secrets they study begin damaging their sanity and eventually warp them into a Humanoid Abomination.
- "Uncanny Valley" is the name of a trait in Eclipse Phase that can be taken in exchange for Customization Points. It means that your character's body (or "morph," in the game's lingo) is designed to look human (and not like a spider robot or an evolved monkey or something) and doesn't quite make the grade. It has the effect of giving a -10 penalty on all social interactions with humans.
- Magic: The Gathering:
- The Phyrexian race goes toward this, being undead cyborgs, but especially jarring is Phyrexian Unlife, which shows someone finding out that she(?)'s become a Phyrexian.
- According to the fluff, the Machine Orthodoxy invokes this. When a captured prisoner is compleated their face is often left just intact enough that their former comrades can recognize them.
- The card Fleshmad Steed's flavor text sums up this trope pretty well: "More disturbing than the unknown is a distortion of the familiar."
- The Phyrexian race goes toward this, being undead cyborgs, but especially jarring is Phyrexian Unlife
- Mortasheen: Lester the Manbogey is a bio-construct designed to spy on and study colonies of humans by blending in as a human itself. However, it's noted to have a 100% failure rate; even human newborns can immediately tell that Lester is an imposter. Lester's creators are baffled how, since other races can't tell it apart from a real human.
- Changelings in Pathfinder (the Half-Human Hybrid offspring of hags), at least in the lore. They're Always Female and conventionally attractive, but their otherworldly demeanor and minor deformities (like heterochromia) make them disconcerting to be around.
- Vampire: The Masquerade:
- A vampire has to spend blood in order to mimic a human, and the cost rises quickly with a falling humanity. Additionally, skin tones and monstrous features become more and more pronounced as a vampire forsakes humanity, and alternate moral paths which abandon humanity make vampires unable to spend blood to mimic human functions.
- Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition: The supplement Children of the Blood introduces Belinde Buch, a Nosferatu who had a notably unusual Embrace. Rather than the Looks Like Orlok appearance that most Nosferatu have, Belinde instead had her features become smoothened, her mouth always a fraction open, and her eyes never blinking, making her look like a mannequin.
- Warhammer 40,000:
- Blanks, people who are born without a soul. While they look and act like completely regular people, other people are subconsciously aware of their lack of a soul, and the sheer unnaturalness of it causes them to instinctively hate and fear Blanks. Even if being a Blank makes you immune to the Warp, it won't do much good when you get lynched by an angry mob.
- Cullexus Assassins, recruited exclusively from the aforementioned Blanks, literally weaponize this by amplifying their Uncanny-ness into a tangible and very harmful blast. They also literally suck out the warp energy of nearby psykers and a single punch from one of them can utterly destroy the victim's soul.
- The Eldar, Depending on the Writer.
- Both official artwork and fan depictions have shown them looking suitably◊ creepy◊, and some as the typical hauntingly◊ beautiful◊ Tolkienesque elf. The way they move has specifically been singled out in the fiction; it's so smooth and elegant that it wraps back to boneless and creepy.
- According to the lore, humans equally fall into the uncanny valley for the eldar: they look very much like each other, but because eldar are so focused on perfecting all aspects of themselves, the comparative imprecision in simple movement makes them think humans are somehow broken.
- Both official artwork and fan depictions have shown them looking suitably
Video Games
- A.I.L.A uses this as a plot point: A.I.L.A, upon being activated, assumes the form of a young girl whose face looks weirdly rigid, and her mouth moves in a wooden, mannequin-like manner as she speaks. And then there's how she remains stationary most of the time and whenever she walks, her movements are suspiciously jerky like a puppet made of flesh. She is, after all, an artificial self made by an AI who's not quite sane and can function as a torture device for extraction of memory.
- The Working Joes from Alien: Isolation provide an in-universe example. It's implied that Seegson, the company that makes them, is far behind Weyland-Yutani technologically and can't produce the like-humans-but-not-quite-there synthetic androids the setting is known for, so they produce robots that look like bad crash test dummies cheaply for the mass market and use their less-than-perfect appearance as a marketing spin. Of course, they're still terrifying as they shrug off your firepower and give you False Reassurance while doing the The Slow Walk towards you and intending to strangle you. Not even setting them on fire slows them down.
"With the Working Joes, you always know exactly what you're dealing with!"
- Bad Day on the Midway: The characters are somewhat crude, stiff 3D models with the eyes and mouths of real actors animated on their faces, the dissonance between the cartoony yet robotic models and the more realistic faces creating an uncomfortable look. Word of God from the main animator Jim Ludtke from the strategy guide is that the creepy faces were meant to be a Shout-Out to Clutch Cargo.
- Bendy and the Ink Machine: Bendy is drawn in a simple rounded 1930s art style, but has an uncomfortably forced grin that clashes with the style just enough to look... wrong.
- BioShock:
- The first game seems to make intentional use of this phenomenon - the grotesque, ex-human Splicers are even more unnerving for how human they still look. The first ghost you encounter subtly lampshades this: "I'm too spliced up! I'm too spliced up! Now nobody's gonna want me...." The Little Sisters are also examples of the trope.
- BioShock 2 has redesigned the Little Sisters to make them cuter and more cartoony because the player character's viewpoint is a Big Daddy, who cares for them more than anything else; he doesn't find them creepy, neither should the player. Splicers, on the other hand, are still in the valley, because the PC sees them as threats to his Little Sisters. BioShock 2 brings up the valley when a journal of Andrew Ryan describes an animatronic replica of him built for a theme park as a "lurching, waxen nightmare" and wonders how children are supposed to respond to that. Indeed, the first time one of the animatronics is encountered can be startling because it appears to be a slightly less than normal human sitting completely still. Then you attack it and it breaks apart completely.
- It's brought up again in BioShock Infinite as intentional on the developers' part for the Motorized Patriot, who was in fact based on a nightmare of Ken Levine's about the porcelain dolls his grandparents had when he was a child.
- Invoked with the Orphan of Kos in Bloodborne. Throughout the game, you fight increasingly inhuman monstrosities, ranging from werewolves to all manner of Eldritch Abomination. The Orphan, however, looks almost human. Almost human. It's impossibly thin, shriveled, and utterly hairless, but it's far more human-looking than any other boss. This sheer wrongness makes it absolutely horrifying, worse when you consider it most likely looks that way because Kos wanted her child to avenge her murder while wearing her murderer's shapes.
- City of Heroes: Invoked in game. Nemesis' Automatons look almost exactly like real humans, "until you get close." It's also kinda creepy when the innocent-looking office workers pull gigantic guns from Hammerspace and blast you, all the while engaging in water-cooler conversation.
- Clive Barker's Undying: Bethany's Handmaidens, who were her own creation. If you look up close they have porcelain masks like victorian dolls. Behind it there is a grotesque mockery of a face. They were her demented version of servants. Must have missed all the hired help around the mansion.
- Deadlock (2024): The Doorman looks perfectly formal and perfectly normal — excessively so. His face is perfectly symmetrical and unremarkable aside from the Creepy Blue Eyes, his cordial and servile posture is impeccable even as he goes around shooting people with one hand firmly behind his back, his uniform remains utterly spotless even as he runs around Manhattan as it becomes an eldritch battlefield... It stands out most whenever he needs to do something his cover job wouldn't allow, like hanging from ziplines and banishing people with his ult, as he suddenly starts moving like a stiff, lanky and overly lively clockwork toy.
- Detroit: Become Human discusses this in an in-game magazine article. It mentions that the very first androids were designed to be ideal beings who were perfect in the way they looked and acted, so much so that people were uncomfortable around them. To rectify this, android manufacturer CyberLife gave their androids a wide array of redundant but humanizing behaviors, like realistic blinking and breathing, and modeled them after various ethnicities in order to push them past the uncanny valley and make them practically identical to humans.
- Dragon Age:
- Played for Laughs with the tiny, harmless little rodents known as nugs. They are absolutely unable to hurt anything, totally docile, and most typically just kind of walk around in circles aimlessly looking for food until they hit a wall. Yet there are still several characters and codex entries that find them creepy because instead of rodentlike limbs, their limbs end in weirdly humanlike hands. Hands.
- Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening:
- Justice falls right into the Uncanny Valley... because he's an animated corpse possessed by a spirit from the Fade. Of course he'll look like a corpse!
- The Architect is much more human-looking then other darkspawn, which just makes it creepier when you notice that his hat is actually part of his head, and that when he takes his mask off you can see that his eyes are misaligned.
- In Dragon Age II, the redesigned elves were given a number of small but subtle changes to distinguish them from humans. For example, they have thin nose bridges that extend out from their faces (most clearly visible in profile) and unusually-large irises in their eyes. the effect is simultaneously attractive yet eerie, and does a good job making it clear that as humanlike as elves are, they are distinctly not human.
- In Dragon Age: Inquisition, this is done deliberately with the companion Cole — a Spirit of Compassion who has taken the appearance of a mage he previously met and comforted as the man was dying. Spirit Cole looks malnourished and has bags under his eyes because Mage Cole was dying from starvation after being locked in a jail cell by an abusive Templar guard. The issue is more pronounced because of his strange mannerisms as a spirit while still looking human, which only Solas can understand, or the fact he doesn't need to eat, drink or even sleep. Also, due to his spirit nature he can read a person's mind and can immediately know their deepest secrets, or know how past events in their life could have gone had they chosen differently, which they naturally find uncomfortable. If you side with Varric on his personal quest, he becomes more human... and starts complaining about how much he dislikes having to eat.
- Fallout:
- Fallout 1 created what were known as "talking heads" for important characters by digitally scanning clay sculptures, which have aged well enough that they generally avoid invoking this unintentionally. However, at least one character was certainly intended to look creepy, and that's the Master. As a misshapen amalgamation of both technology and the flesh of various humans and creatures, the figure once known as Richard Grey only has the vaguest suggestion of human features left on his face, with his eyes, nose, and mouth being difficult to discern.
- Fallout 4 plays with this. To the people of the New England Commonwealth, the Institute's 1st- and 2nd-generation Synths, which look like SkeleBots and Murderous Mannequins respectively, are pure Nightmare Fuel because of their uncanniness. 3rd-generation Synths, which can pass for human, are pure Paranoia Fuel. But potential companion Nick Valentine averts Uncanny Valley, since he's a discarded prototype with obviously fake "skin" and enough wear and tear to have his robot parts showing. As a result, he looks (and acts) human enough to be reassuring, but still obviously a robot instead of an infiltrator, and so is tolerated in Diamond City and even able to work as a private investigator.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy VII:
- Sephiroth's in-game portrait makes him look like a lifeless corpse compared to everyone else's portrait except maybe Vincent Valentine. If you look closely, you can see that he has slit pupils like a cat. Once again intentionally done with him in its remake, who, unlike the heroes is a Perpetual Smiler in Remake as even while getting slashed at by Cloud or having the environment burn around him, Sephiroth’s face barely changes. This combined with his shadowed dead-eyed slit-pupil stare makes him quite unsettling◊.
- Hojo is another intentional example, being designed in Remake to look uniquely repulsive and dirty while still being as realistic as other human characters and as a result he looks like a goblin with five o’clock shadow compared to the rest of the cast. Perfectly fitting given he is a Hate Sink Mad Scientist.
- Sephiroth's in-game portrait
- The Simulant in Final Fantasy XIV shares the face and voice of both the living and the Endless Sphene. But there are clear gaps in her logic and she constantly uses a cheerful, sing-song voice that's eerily dissonant to the gravity of of her words. She sweetly asks the Warrior of Light to return the interdimensional key after she and Calyx tried to assassinate them with a massive lightning bolt. Should you point his out to her, she continues to smile while noting that yes, she probably should have done things the other way around. This makes the Simulant deeply unhinged in its actions and personality, but manages to hide it from the rest of Alexandria thanks to the Endless Sphene's Universally Beloved Leader status. Even then, the joy she demonstrates in almost all her actions betrays her inhumanity and Lack of Empathy for a purposefully unsettling effect.
- Final Fantasy VII:
- Fire Emblem: The Elibe duology invokes this as part of its Artificial Humans theme. A few things that both war dragons and morphs have in common are that they're both described as hardly feeling sentient, being produced in masses by the games' respective final bosses, and a majority of them lacking any proper intelligence, which results in them looking very "off" compared to the two species (Manaketes and Humans respectively) they're modeled after. They also tend to lack emotions, though in the case of Blazing Blade, Kishuna is capable of displaying them.
- Used liberally in Five Nights at Freddy's to make the animatronics more disturbing. Nothing more charming than pulling up a camera and seeing a robot that wasn't there before and now looking back at you to make you feel all nice and cozy at night. Of note is the history behind the characters: Scott Cawthon originally developed kid-friendly games, but one such game, Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., was criticized for having characters that look like creepy animatronics. After a Creator Breakdown, Scott decided to turn this flaw into an advantage by creating a horror game about creepy animatronics. Special mention goes to Toy Chica from Five Nights at Freddy's 2, who is the very incarnation of Fanservice gone horribly wrong. A yellow chicken-girl robot wearing attire that leaves very little to the imagination is slightly unsettling in and of its own, but when she starts roaming, she takes it above and beyond because her eyes and beak somehow disappear, leaving her with a very freaky Game Face.
- Gadget: Past as Future: Every character but one is locked into a single, vacant facial expression with limited body motions, never moving their legs, with what little movement they can convey being stiff. Special mention goes to a character only known as "the boy", who is able to float in the air while standing completely still in a straight line. Past as Future was a remake of Gadget: Invention, Travel, and Adventure, so the character models are somewhat more detailed and have a little more capability to move, but not by much. According to Word of God, this was brought about by the technological limitations of the time but became a creative choice that was leaned into in order to show that the characters in this setting, a bleak dictatorship in a world possibly on the brink of destruction, deliberately keep themselves stoic so as to avoid judgement from the government and hide their true motives. It's interesting to note that one of these characters, Theodore Slowslop, would go on to inspire the G-Man mentioned below. The one character to avert their intentional Dull Surprise is Paulo Orlovsky, the dictator of the series who is creepy in his own way because he's a Perpetual Smiler.
- Canister users in Geneforge are described like this in-game. It's particularly prominent at the higher levels of power when they start to glow and get a near-constant Psychotic Smirk, and particularly particularly prominent when they take a bad canister and their skin starts flaking off.
- In the .hack games, Aura's◊ artwork◊ ended up looking creepy. Maybe it's her striking eyes or her apparent lack of a body. Given that she's an AI, it's justified.
- Half-Life 2, which largely averts Unintentional Uncanny Valley with realistic lip-synching and largely realistic character movements based on character actors, deliberately evokes this with the G-Man, who is implied to be not entirely human. His speech is littered with awkward pauses and emphases, his way of standing and walking are oddly rigid, and his "humanizing" gestures — like brushing dust from his suit or straightening his tie — are unconvincingly stiff. He behaves as though he's had to learn 'human' behavior out of books and films. The effect is further compounded by his facial features, which are not only misaligned but also seem to lack any kind of expression at all. G-Man's mannerisms begin to look realistic only in the Episodes — the point at which he's caught off-guard for the first time in the series. His sole scene in Episode One has him look genuinely confused, then genuinely angry. When he appears again in Episode Two, a touch of actual nervousness and urgency seems to be creeping into his formerly effectless voice, and his movements become much more realistic. By Half-Life: Alyx, he's more or less entirely realistic in motions and expression to the point of showing some very pronounced emotions... but still has some bizarre mannerisms, eyes that look a little too piercing and a massive disconnect between voice and face that keep him firmly entrenched in the Valley.
- Daniella from Haunting Ground, while all the stalkers in the game are terrifying, she in particular stands out. Firstly there's her Creepy Monotone, her unnaturally pale skin tone, her mechanical movements and her No Sense of Personal Space while talking to Fiona. There's also the bit where she doesn't react to Riccardo smacking her in the face twelve times besides a little blood coming out of the corner of her mouth, and then she turns to smile at Fiona who is seeing this through a keyhole (freaking her out). It gets worse when Daniella has Sanity Slippage out of jealously and hatred towards Fiona and she starts laughing insanely and twitching her head way too fast in pure Nightmare Fuel fashion. Perhaps even creepier is that she actually stops chasing Fiona at certain points to do cleaning, the jarring mundanity is very unsettling.
- The final boss of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Fecto Forgo, looks a lot like a human embryo and has uncannily photorealistic and detailed eyes, which is especially apparent when they dramatically open their eyes and deliver their threat to consume everything. Their true form, Fecto Elfilis, has a similar effect — while they have a humanoid, angelic design, they also have disproportionately large hands, Creepy Long Fingers, and digitigrade legs, which adds to their appearance as an Angelic Abomination. Even further, as Chaos Elfilis, their eyes are sunken inward to give the effect of staring at the player. The overall effect is that they look otherworldly and just plain wrong, since they are an invader not native to this world, and plan on subsuming the entire planet for their own purposes.
- Orianna in League of Legends is considered this in-universe, a clockwork parody of a teenage girl with a clearly artificial happy attitude. When reliving her original self's death, her reaction is "It was fun. I like memories." She's been described as looking far more human but far less alive than chunky yellow robot Blitzcrank. Who largely manages to avoid the valley, admittedly by standing on the other side to most of the human champions and waving.
- In one of the endings of Massmouth 2, the protagonist notes that he's creeped out by the way the Big Bad's face never seems to be facing away from him (due to the way the in-game sprites are drawn.)
- OFF has the Secretaries, who are portrayed with a little too much detail for a game like this, and thus look human in the worst possible way. Also, the Elsen's wheezing gasps, particularly when they're about to attack you.
- Portal:
- The original game has GLaDOS' Robo-Speak and its sudden human shift after the destruction of the Morality Core.
GLaDOS: [creepy, distorted laughter] Good news: I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was the morality core they installed after I flooded the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin, to make me stop flooding the enrichment center with a deadly neurotoxin.
- A jarring contrast to GLaDOS' more organic-sounding voice in Portal 2 is the almost melodious scream she lets out as her head is removed. Whether it's deeply unsettling or just plain Narm is a toss-up.
- The original game has GLaDOS' Robo-Speak and its sudden human shift after the destruction of the Morality Core.
- Self-Checkout Unlimited: The giant bunny doll in the Birthday store has...oddly human-looking teeth. When you examine it, the game notes that it looks like it's watching you.
- This is invoked with the Manikins in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. In-universe, it is discussed that they are not human, and even though they do look a lot like them, the characters just think there's something... off. In the game, their tendencies to do random spasms, their mostly expressionless faces and pale skin (pale even by Megaten standards) are unsettling at best. They are usually friendly, however.
- Siren 1. Characters had animated images of actors as their face textures, with their expressions made through frames instead of actual polygon animation. It made it all seem slightly real, but also unnatural, and added to the dreamy feeling the game had.
- Alex Ahad said that when designing characters for Skullgirls he liked to have them mostly normal, but with something disturbing and off-putting about them. The ones that invoke this trope most effectively are Peacock, who looks like a cartoon character until you realise that those aren't Black Bead Eyes but eye sockets, and Filia, who looks like a normal, troubled schoolgirl - until you see the mouth, sharp teeth and eyes sticking out of her hair and realise she has a head parasite instead.
- A few of the Easter Egg screens in Sonic the Hedgehog CD play with Sonic's design to make him more humanoid, deliberately invoking the uncanny valley for humor. One is a parody of Batman's appearance in Batman (1989) — clashing the cartoony hedgehog's design with the build of muscular Michael Keaton — and the other is the infamous "Fun is Infinite with Sega Enterprises" screen, which features a strange portrait of Sonic with a realistic middle-aged man's face, all while the boss music plays. While this weird Sonic is intentionally uncanny, it was probably meant to be comical, especially with the original Japanese soundtrack's groovy boss theme; the lack of context given for it in the US version, combined with that version's creepier boss theme, just makes it even more unsettling. The official Sonic Twitter account has acknowledged the design's creepiness with a piece of Halloween artwork that shows Sonic dressing up like it to frighten Tails.
- Stellaris has the "Uncanny" Machine Unit trait. The usual dynamic can also be inverted with Synthetic Ascension, as Machine Empires will find the former organics to be uncanny.
- Invoked with the Weird Mushroom in Super Mario Maker, which transforms Mario into Weird Mario. Weird Mario's body has near realistic body proportions by trimming down his belly while lengthening his arms and legs and giving Mario's jump physics more height and floatiness like Luigi's jumps. The concept came about during development where a glitch with the Super Mushroom sometimes made Small Mario twice as tall (but not wide, making him look stretched) rather than turning into Super Mario. They liked it so much, they made it a feature but changed it to give him more realistic proportions so it would be even weirder.
- The Replicas in Tales of the Abyss. Despite that they are quite stylized and thankfully don't try for realism (Which would definitely create the Uncanny Valley), they don't appear this way to the player. But to the characters in the world? They look exactly like someone they know, only they speak in a Creepy Monotone thanks to not having any memories of emotion (Like Luke and Ion did), and don't even remember you. Just about anyone would be freaked if their friend died...and a clone of them showed up at their funeral, or your long-dead grandfather walks into your house, doesn't recognize anyone and doesn't even know how to act socially.
- Team Fortress 2: The "Meet The Pyro" video. The scene alternates between footage of the burning carnage of the outside world and the Sugar Bowl within the Pyro's mind. Not only are the images of various character's faces pasted onto tiny egg-shaped cherubs unsettling enough as it is, the juxtaposition between the two realities makes the normally comic violence within the game seem much less comical when the outside world footage is shown. But even though this short was meant to be terrifying, several people ended up finding it hilarious in a Black Comedy kind of way.
- Thief: Deadly Shadows gives us the fabulously creepy Shalebridge Cradle, an orphanage turned asylum though for a time, it was both. Inside, Garrett encounters the puppets, reanimated corpses of the worst inmates in the Cradle. Their rasping breathing is creepy by itself, but the true horror lies in their jerky, Jacob's Ladder-esque movements. It's just wrong. Years earlier, Thief II: The Metal Age gave us Father Karras' twisted creations the Servants, with creepy, unblinking, expressionless golden masks adorning their faces.
- The Witcher 3 has Gaunter O'Dimm, who is just as well-rendered and stunningly-animated as everyone else in the game, but just looks disconcertingly (and appropriately)... off. And in such a way that it's exceedingly difficult to describe WHY.
- XCOM: Enemy Unknown invokes this with the Thin Men enemies, who are described as alien saboteurs who adopt a humanoid appearance in order to infiltrate society. Even discounting their strangely tall and slender builds, they have unnatural physical flexibility, green patches on their skin, slitted eyes that they conceal behind opaque sunglasses, and poison within their body that they can spit out after unhinging their jaws. XCOM 2 reveals that their true form is precisely as reptilian as these traits would suggest: a species of Snake People. The only Thin Man that remains in their disguised form at this point is the ADVENT Speaker, whose proportions now appear more natural, but still has green patches of skin and strange eyes that betray his inhumanity.
- In XCOM 2, set 20 years later, the Speaker for the ADVENT Administration would appear to be a more advanced Thin Man, who can move much more naturally (and has a full head of hair rather than a comb-over), but he still has discolored flesh around his neck and never takes off his sunglasses. The ADVENT peacekeepers, on the other hand, have to wear visored helmets at all times to hide their grotesquely-oversized eyes, flattened noses, and misshapen foreheads, the result of aliens tampering with their DNA.
- Yandere Simulator has a vocal variant. According to the game's backstory, Ayano was an Emotionless Girl, up until she met her Senpai. At which point, she started experiencing love and rage. As a result, her voice is most of the time a flat Creepy Monotone that can be slightly off. It's most obvious when she has conversations with more lively characters.
Visual Novels
- Ace Attorney:
- The Blue Badger. He's only a battery-powered wooden panel of a mascot, but his vacant eyes, perma-smile, and jerky movements make him creepy to many characters. Phoenix mentions that if a child saw it, they'd probably have nightmares. It's a 3D model in a mostly 2D game. And Edgeworth... well, he sums it up pretty nicely.
"What the HELL is that wriggling piece of plywood?!"
- Calisto Yew from Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth falls into the trope because of how she behaves in the courtroom. She frequently bursts into laughter, even while talking about serious subjects like murder and her own past, and does it when she takes a hostage during the case she shows up in. Edgeworth himself finds her to be creepy.
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies's Video Game 3D Leap gives it, of course, the chance to play this intentionally. Two examples come to mind: Aristotle Means and that goddamn smile, and the phantom and his loose mask.
- Speaking of the phantom from the final case, their entire character seems to have been an intentional example of this. For context, the phantom is a Master of Disguise who does not feel anything, yet can convey facial expressions as if he does. When Phoenix and company start to corner him, his facial expressions start to mismatch his statements, such as smiling when he's trying to sound angry. When Athena runs her Mood Matrix on him, she finds that there is zero emotion in his voice whatsoever, despite the way he's gesturing with each line; in a subsequent testimony, his emotions start fluctuating all over the place in an attempt to keep in control of himself. It's a very disturbing effect that makes the player wonder if he's even human anymore.
- The Blue Badger. He's only a battery-powered wooden panel of a mascot, but his vacant eyes, perma-smile, and jerky movements make him creepy to many characters. Phoenix mentions that if a child saw it, they'd probably have nightmares. It's a 3D model in a mostly 2D game. And Edgeworth... well, he sums it up pretty nicely.
- Yaku: Yūjō Dangi's character designs are intentionally offputting, featuring grimy textures, extremely wide and sometimes bloodshot eyes, dead expressions and strange facial placements. The janky animations and surreal atmosphere further contribute to the game’s overall sense of discomfort.
Web Animation
- Extra Credits has mentioned the Uncanny Valley several times. First in an episode specifically about it, then revisited in a Halloween episode and again in an episode about Kinect's controls.
- going to the store and its sequels invoke this with featureless, unemotive CGI mannequins, their absurd bodily movements, and the remarkably high attention to detail in inserting them into real-world settings.
- If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device mentions in episode 20 that the Salamanders invoke this reaction in the common citizens of the Imperium, as they have jet-black, coal-like skin and glowing red eyes.
- Murder Drones: The Drones themselves avert the trope, being visually and anatomically different enough from humans that there's no unsettling overlap... which gets thrown right out the window when we see Cyn, or rather, Cyn wearing Tessa's human skin. It's very clearly something inhuman putting up the barest pretenses of human form and movement.
- Squimpus McGrimpus's interpretation of Purple Guy from Five Nights at Freddy's — the empty eye sockets, the strangely shaped head, the unhinged jaw — gives a startling similarity to Gaster from Undertale.
- Referenced in a Teen Girl Squad cartoon where Japanese Culture Greg is going to the prom with Chizuko, his robot date.
Science Fiction Greg: You think I'd be into life-size realistic robots, but that thing makes me want to barf up my earlier energy drink into the one I'm currently drinking.
- The Walten Files: The cartoonish, low-quality art-style the series uses at times can make certain moments much creepier than usual.
Webcomics
- The Alpha Droids of Commander Kitty are more cute than anything, though their inexpressive, jewel-like eyes can be a little creepy. But it's when they shut down that they plunge right into the valley, with their blank-eyed, corpse-like expression. Even worse is former Big Bad Zenith's breakdown, having been the most "human" of the bunch. She's later booted back up, completely devoid of any personality, with a blank, red-eyed stare to match.
- Some of the staff of the titular Dark Carnival have vacant expressions and don't seem totally aware of what's going on around them. The notably exceptions are the actual entertainers and a stage hand, who all seem more normal but are clearly hiding something.
- In Dresden Codak, Kimiko Ross tends to cover her cyborg arm with a long sleeve because "it always creeped people out".
- Freefall: Doctor Bowman neurally programmed his sapient wolves to find the human form appealing so they would integrate with human society. As a side effect, they find other Bowman's Wolves, their own species, "funny-looking". (Spoilers ho!)
- Mr. Ishiguro experiences an odd form of this. One morning he decides he should have his driverless car take him to the police station so he can have a chat with the Chief. As soon as he arrives, a cop is ready with a cup of tea for him and a message that the Chief is coming. Ishiguro is pleased… except he didn’t tell anyone he where he was going, and asks the obvious question. The cop comments Mr. Ishiguro’s car worked out where he was going and the motive for the visit, and called ahead to make sure the Chief would be available. Mr. Ishiguro, who didn’t know the sheer extent of sentience the local robots have, thinks on how smooth, efficient, and slightly creepy the exchange was.
- Gunnerkrigg Court: When Jones reveals to Annie that she's not human and can't feel emotions, we (or at least Annie) also find out why she never seems to smile (or rather why she doesn't bother trying to mimic emotions). This bonus strip is fittingly named "Uncanny Jonsey".
- This is used to describe android girl 42 on the cast page of Kiwi Blitz. Her permanent smile, Dissonant Serenity and ability to appear without a sound can unnerve characters. It's also mentioned that she only blinks once every 10 seconds on the dot, and she just opens her mouth to talk due to the speaker in it.
- Homestuck:
- Lil' Cal is described as being in "the Uncanny Laurentian Abyss". Most notably, his eyes are always at a much higher resolution than anything else in the otherwise blocky Pixel Art Comic. Really, though, if Mr. Hussie wishes to use this, you will know: for instance, a Diagram; a self-portrait intended to disturb; the Duttle... the list could go on and on.
- Trickster Mode turns previously non-creepy characters into manically cheerful, technicolor versions of themselves so Sickeningly Sweet it's disturbing. And it spreads.
- Lil' Cal is described as being in "the Uncanny Laurentian Abyss". Most notably, his eyes are always at a much higher resolution than anything else in the otherwise blocky Pixel Art Comic. Really, though, if Mr. Hussie wishes to use this, you will know: for instance, a Diagram
- Manly Guys Doing Manly Things explains the valley here from cartoon to creepy and back again.
- In Our Little Adventure, elves have extra-large Tareme Eyes and proportions that are just far enough off from the human baseline to make some people uneasy:
Lenny: You look like a Disney princess tweaked out on PCP.
- Questionable Content:
- Winslow the AI tries out a prototype android chassis from Hannelore's roboticist father, but his human friends explain that it's creepy for him to look "not quite human enough" (they even specifically mention the valley)... so he pulls his face off to put them at ease.
- According to Marigold, an android chassis modeled after Jude Law with Exotic Equipment falls solidly in the valley:
"Only thing creepier than the Uncanny Valley is the Uncanny Valley with a writhing erection."
- Winslow the AI tries out
- In Starslip, the attempts of the ameboid Dahk to look human are... less than appealing, to say the least.
- According to Lucias, the Seraphim from Two Keys are this. Probably isn't helped by the fact that they have extremely pale skin with pitch black eyes.
- Unshelved presents: vegan food. Almost like real stuff... almost.
- No Face from YU+ME: dream is an easily accomplished attempt at making something human, but disgustingly monstrous. He also eats hearts, just to add to the (puneriffic) images of terror.
Web Originals
- A.I. Brainrot Animals: As part of the meme's surreal nature, many characters have very realistic, often disproportionate, human features. This is most noticeable with Indonesian Brainrots, such as Udin Din Din Dun, Garamararamararamanmararaman dan Madudungdung tak tuntung perkuntung, Brr Es Teh Patipum, Rang Ring Reng Bus Ireng, Apipipipi, Dug Dug Dug Bedug Dug, Frutta Ceryta, Anpali Babel, Kel Kel Mokel or Dud Udud Gendut, with their realistic faces and limbs.
- American High Digital: Used for laughs in "Typical Picture Day 'Packages", which ends with a picture of Hyde with eyes from a different photo pasted on that is as freaky looking as it is hilarious.
- Atop the Fourth Wall has a surprising example with the Entity. It's usually the complete opposite, until you see it take the form of 90s Kid. Never mind the fact that it's acting and talking utterly different from what we normally associate with him, but the fact that his eyes are screens of static. Not to mention that the rest of the body keeps jerking to different positions without even moving.
- Asenath of Binder of Shame is a very pretty woman with a deformed arm, which according to the narrator isn't what creeps him out; what creeps him out is the fact that her clothes are "part schoolgirl outfit, part leatherwear", "she never seemed to blink", and "she was pretty much making out with the GM the whole time we played".
- Cracked TV is hosted by Michael Swaim, a self-stated android who does absolutely nothing android-like, and therefore lands on the upward slope after Uncanny Valley, comfortably close to full-fledged human. His normal self is visible at the beginning of episode 15. Then, after the forty-five second mark, he slowly becomes more and more creepy (the first change was an innocuous pink bowtie). By the end, he's reached complete and utter terror incarnate.
- Creepypasta Cookoff: In a Humans Through Alien Eyes sense. An alien in "Captain's Log" says that while the planet's inhabitants look similar to the spaceship's crew, they have eyes that look "ghostly white with dark retina and pupil in the center like some small, haemovorous invertebrate floating in a drinking glass." The alien also complains about how "disgusting" the human's five fingers are.
- Hamster's Paradise:
- A more tragic example happened with the Always Chaotic Evil harmsters and the peaceful but comparatively primitive splinsters. Both of them are furry bipeds with forward-facing eyes and long tufted tails, and both use spears as their primary weapons. However, the splinsters also have long necks and vaguely elephantine faces that the harmsters found disturbing to look at, which led to the naturally sadistic species wiping them out.
- The harmsters had a similar reaction to the ripperoo, the predatory animals that the harmsters originally evolved from. They're large, savage and animalistic but still have an unnerving resemblance to the harmsters, which led to one culture of Matriarch Harmster to view them as monsters to be eradicated while another would go on to see them as death gods and try to placate them with offerings.
- The white-eyes are a species of southhound that developed white sclerae to better nonverbally communicate with each other during hunts. This strange appearance combined with their general silence has led to other dark-eyed southhounds finding them disturbing and preferring to avoid them.
- The bat-like desert falcyons have a very canine-like head thanks to convergent evolution, which makes them deeply unnerving to the dog-like drysander northhounds, especially since they will sometimes prey on drysander pups. This earned them a reputation in drysander folklore as flying monsters with the faces of people that swoop down on children.
- "I Feel Fantastic" (also known as "Fantastic Hey Hey Hey"). It's a video of an animatronic woman singing an off-putting song, made all the more creepy by the low quality camera and how jerky and inhuman her movements and voice are. Just in case you're feeling extra brave, you can watch the entire 16 minute video it was sourced from.
- The Magnus Archives: The very first episode has what seems to be a man standing in an alley asking for a cigarette, but which is in fact only a lure for something Jon calls the Angler Fish. Later episodes introduce a group of creatures posing as anatomy students so they can "learn to get the insides right," animated taxidermy humans, and "philosophical zombies" that outwardly fake humanity but have no inner mind. All of these are under the domain of the Stranger, an entity of the fear of the unknown and the creeping sense that things aren't right, most commonly in the form of things that ape the human form.
- This crops up in Midwest Angelica Landfall with the giant face created for unknown reasons. "Luckily" it doesn't move on-screen but at the same time the way it doesn't really react to the cameraman gives it a heavily uncanny feeling. Like something between a statue and a living thing.
- The cancelled Analog Horror series Man's Natural Predator would have cited that the origin for the Uncanny Valley effect in humans is that of an instinctive defensive measure against a Mesolithic predatory Mimic Species called Man's Mockery, a species of avian dinosaur that sports a off-putting false human face as part of its aggressive mimicry towards targeting hominids.
- The strange creatures in Obelisk heavily evoke this, only loosely resembling humans. The situations the tapes are recordings of are usually often very uncanny and off-putting, some going as far as taking place in an Eldritch Location with a pretty weird idea of what human buildings look like.
- Pantheon SMP: The night skies of the realm of Mount Olympus are described to be "uncanny". According to Nobody, all the constellations are either brighter or dimmer than they are in the mortal realm, or just not in the right places.
- In the eyes of the Protectors of the Plot Continuum, Mary Sues fit this trope because they're too perfectly pretty to be human.
- SCP Foundation:
- SCP-096, with its gaunt, distorted face with blank, empty eyes, huge, gaping mouth and impossibly long, spindly limbs. What doesn't help is its incredibly human sounding, yet also very distorted sobs of anguish... and screams of pure, unbridled rage as it slaughters those unfortunate enough to look at it. The head of the squadron that initially found it refused to see an art piece done in its likeness due to being haunted enough by just the sound of it, not wanting to put a face to that awful, uncanny noise.
- SCP-106 is already bad enough, what with looking like the rotting carcass of an old man... but, somehow, when he was young, despite being much less putrid, and a lot more human-looking, he was much, much worse.
- The titular subject of the creepypasta "Teddy" is well known for its uncanny appearence which, accordingly, can cause discomfort if you look to it for enough time.
- The ever-loved, the original SCP-173. It... it's kinda vaguely humanoid... but that face. Staring at it is so hard, so awkward. You want to look away. You can't. You mustn't. You did—*SNAP!*
- SCP-2852, a hollow shell and some cicada matter patched together to look like a human... and succeeding. It's just horrifying, especially the eyes which apparently have no function, not to mention the adult baby talk that they apparently spew.
- The DeviantArtist charcoalman has made many SCPs fall into the Uncanny Valley, but his depiction of SCP-4666 is his most well-known by far.
- SCP-096
- Someone had the idea to feed the "Screaming Frog" video into Google's Deep Dream neural net software. The results? After what seems like what would take countless iterations, this. The frog's eyes pop up and disappear all over its body, it's sprouting some sort of tentacle-toe things all over the lower half of its body, and the video itself occasionally morphs into different things for an instant, such as a car or a dog. Now, keep in mind that Deep Dream is meant to look like a human dream — and not after our sleeping brains distill it into a form we can understand, for these are the pure memories of this neural net. If that turned a relatively harmless frog video into Frog-Sothoth, then the real forms of our own dreams would be truly maddening.
- Serina:
- Woodcrafters, a sapient species of antlears, greatly dislike their non-sapient bestial relatives due to finding it deeply unsettling to interact with creatures that so strongly resemble them but which only have the minds of animals.
- The nop is described as fitting into the luddy's uncanny valley due to how different they are despite having a shared ancestor.
- Woolly wumpos, a sapient and primarily herbivorous trunko species whose religion views predators as demonic entities, are implied to find carnackles and other carnivorous trunko species creepy because they can can see their physical similarities despite their profound differences in diet.
- The savage gravediggers or wildwalkers, the nonsapient descendants of the tundra gravedigger, are considered unnerving by the thalassic gravediggers due to their physical similarity but inability to speak and lack of sapience or tool use.
- The Slender Man Mythos: The central Humanoid Abomination is an abnormally tall guy with no face or hair that wears a business suit. He apparently can't talk, and he walks in a very stiff manner, often with his arms out in front of him. He can also teleport anywhere he wants. Like inside your house. The tentacles are a bit off-kilter, as well.
- The Uncanny Brothers: The poster boys—and possible residents—of the Uncanny Valley itself.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time makes use of this trope a lot when creating a character who is supposed to be off-putting. For instance, Goliad has the voice of a little girl and the head of a baby, and uses People Puppets as a means of ruling the kingdom. These generic cute characteristics paired together with the body of a sphinx make her incredibly unsettling. It doesn't help that Goliad is also HUGE, and runs/leaps like a lion would. That eye that comes out of her forehead notably makes her face even more disturbing, to the point where Jake actually gets disgusted.
- Parodied in an episode of Chowder with a pink, badly CGI'd dancing pig-baby (probably a parody of the infamous CGI Dancing Baby), whose mere existence instills great horror (and grief) in those who watch it, especially Gumbo and Mung.
- Done intentionally in the Justice League: Gods and Monsters short "Twisted" with Harley Quinn. While she's normally a very cute Anti-Villain (bordering on Anti-Hero in some versions), This version is both far eviler, and very ugly. Even if you can get past her weird makeup and Scary Stitches, her facial features are misproportioned, and her eyes seem to not be focusing in the same direction.
- The Delightful Children from Down the Lane in Codename: Kids Next Door have Voice of the Legion, blank eyes, and sociopathic qualities, not to mention a slight Non-Standard Character Design. They're arguably the scariest aspect of the series. Lenny (the football helmet) averts this when he betrays them for the K.N.D. He's still a bit weird, but seems like a normal kid with a nasally lisp thanks to his headgear. Then he dives headfirst back into the creepy hole when he reveals himself as a triple agent. He slides back into his place in the group with a slurping sound.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- The avatar of the Tree of Harmony from "What Lies Beneath", which takes the form of Twilight Sparkle. Said avatar has unusually stiff, robotic movements, speaks with strange inflections on words, and has an off-putting gaze that is occasionally framed looking directly at the camera.
- The season 5 premiere does another in-universe example with the ponies who have supposedly found happiness in being fully equal. Pinkie Pie's first reaction is to say that there's something wrong about their smiles.
- The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In the episode "Knock It Off", the Big Bad creates an army of PPG imitations, but with shoddy workmanship. The scariest ones are those who are only slightly different from the originals.
- Purl: Purl’s semi-humanoid form she takes to fit with B.R.O. is rather unsettling. Given the theme of the short, this was probably intentional.
- Sealab 2021 intentionally looks jerky and bad to imitate old Hanna-Barbera cartoons (specifically Sealab 2020, the series it's based on), but it can still look unsettling to some.
- Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!: In-Universe, this is how the Funland operator◊ of "Foul Play in Funland" is seen by the rest of the gang, who, throughout the episode, make it verbally clear his eerie atmosphere and superhuman abilities are absolutely off-putting. Of course, the revelation that he's just a haywire animatronic certainly helps.
- The Simpsons:
- Homer briefly imagines his children as "mutants" with pinkish skin, five-fingered hands and eyes with irises. The camera briefly cuts to a more realistic rendering of Bart, Lisa and Maggie. Homer screams and runs away after seeing that.
- In the episode were Gabbo was introduced, Krusty tries to compete with his own ventriloquism number, using a shoddily-made puppet that looks rather creepy. And then the puppet loses its lower jaw. From this point on, things go downhill rather quickly.
- One episode has a gag in which Krusty says "We'll be filmed in HD TV! Here's how I'll look!" cue a cut to this◊ face - which makes the kids recoil in horror. This is how some people view HD TV today.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: This trope is alluded to, and parodied, in the episode "Frankendoodle". The drawings of the characters that come to life are described in-universe as being "kinda creepy when they move". And Patrick is obviously put off by DoodleBob because he resembles, but never entirely imitates, SpongeBob. In universe, DoodleBob is seen as disturbing, unsettling, and creepy.
- Steven Universe:
- White Pearl has INCREDIBLY robotic behavior, seems to be forever stuck in the same pose as her Diamond, with only her mouth moving, is perpetually smiling, overrules Blue and Yellow Diamond, glides instead of walking, even going through walls... and where her left eye should be, there's just a huge crack and a faint round outline. Unlike every other Pearl we've seen, she shares the voice of her Diamond, suggesting... something else.
- White Diamond acts in a way that's both overly cheering and intimidating at the same time, calls the intergalactic war Pink caused "a game", and asks questions and keeps talking without expecting an actual answer. She also has eyes but no pupils... Also, she is stuck in a sort-of T-Pose, with her arms outstretched, and the only part of her that has movement is her face (while literally the entire rest of her body is drawn in the same style and with the same methods as the scenery).
- Parodied in an episode of The Tick where a department store security guard complains that the store's animatronic Santa Claus is re-appearing in his nightmares. This gets aggravated when Santa's head gets torn off and thrown into his lap.
"I may never sleep again."
- Total Drama: In "Phobia Factor," Duncan confesses to an Absurd Phobia of the Céline Dion standees in music stores because they look too real. When he actually has to face one, the standee is caricatured and contoured in an unsettling manner.
- Xavier: Renegade Angel has a graphical style reminiscent of early 3D games, down to all the imperfections in the models and movement. This intentionally makes everything looks disturbingly alien.
- Transformers:
- Although it's not obvious to the viewer due to the animation style, this is implied to be why Transformers: Animated's Sari is despised by other children.
- In Beast Wars, the damaged, half-formed Transmutate has a very human-ish face that, when combined with her creepy voice and the show's graphical limitations, cause many to find her to be unsettling.◊
