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8) Silence – Though Bennett and Royle describe this as an “interesting” one, to me it comes as no surprise. The absence of sound, and thereby the absence of action, has an eerie quality to it perhaps because it is something akin to death. Or maybe it is because we know that the silence must end somehow, and not knowing what will end it, or how it will end is what makes us so unnerved.
9) Telepathy – Have you ever been in a situation where you’re hoping that the person you’re speaking to, daydreaming about, or bubbling with frustration because of, doesn’t have the ability to read your mind? It’s uncomfortable to think about. Maybe it’s because we like to keep some thoughts hidden, some things or conversations that we only want locked up. Like other examples of the uncanny, it is the lack of control, the lack of autonomy and agency, that creeps us out and makes us feel a little bit on edge.
10) Death – Well, isn’t the idea of eternal blackness rendered by non-existence rather unsettling? Well, what might be interesting is a study into whether there is a disparity between the religious and non-religious as to whether they find death as something uncanny or not. One would imagine that the former of the two groups might find a less disconcerting experience. However, there is still much left to be unknown in a hell or a heaven, and so the uncanny feeling may still be experienced.
11) Death drive – this might seem rather unnerving to think it even exists. The death drive is a theory of Freud’s that states that we all have an innate urge to return to the void of non-existence. It may not be omnipresent (you might feel a little confused at reading this), but it may come sporadically such as when you hang your feet over the edge of a cliff edge.
12) Ghosts – This seems like quite an obvious one. That that should be gone forever suddenly appearing in an apparitional would disconcert anyone. It is also an element of the uncanny that is interlinked with another element: where reality and imagination merge, or the boundary between the two is blurred. It also extends into the uncanny effect of repetition, “it is a revenant, it comes back”.
13) Language – A rather tenuous one from Bennett and Royle, but seeing as it’s coming from a book about literature and criticism it might be obvious to see why they included it. The very word ‘uncanny’, they say, is in itself rather uncanny. Our use of the word shows a yearning for the understanding of an inherently unknowable force.
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