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Subjective
Uncanny Valley
alt title(s): Nightmare Valley

If you see something that... looks human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and you feel for your hatchet.
- Mr. Beaver, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970 once stated the more human a robot acted or looked, the more endearing it would be to a human being. For example, most lovable Robot Buddies look humanoid, but keep quirky and artistically mechanical affectations.

However, at some point, the likeness would seem too strong, and it would just come across as a very strange human being. At this point, the acceptance drops suddenly, changing to a powerful negative reaction.

When shown as a graph (see above), the acceptance on the Y axis and increasing X approaching human normal, there is a slow rise, then a sudden drop, then a sudden peak as "human normal" is reached. Masahiro Mori referred to this as the "uncanny valley".

Thus, things that look somewhat human, but are clearly not - such as C-3PO (in Star Wars) or a Golem - produce an accepting reaction, while things that are very nearly human, but just a little strange - such as a child's doll, a ventriloquist's dummy, or a clown - produce a negative response. The very lowest point of the valley is the zombie, a living corpse.

The Uncanny Valley may be a deep, instinctual reaction; it steers humans, on an automatic level, away from humans who are dead, diseased, or deformed (which is often an indication of poor health). It may also alert "normal" people to the presence of mental problems which would render someone unfit for inclusion in a peer group. In that way, the theory goes, the Uncanny Valley is a protection against associating with sources of infection. Of course, it may also be a race memory of when Earth was invaded by department-store mannequins.

This might explain why we like Ridiculously Human Robots, even if they don't make a lot of intuitive sense; they are just far enough out of the Uncanny Valley not to bother us.

This idea has recently been applied to CG effects. While it's become very easy for programs to simulate textures and skin tones, convincing movement and facial expressions aren't always as simple. This can produce an effect where the character comes off as a zombie, if a production company is going for a purely realistic human look.

Similarly, many cartoons nowadays prefer a simultaneously stylized yet simplified character design, versus the "realistic" look amongst some older cartoons. In the latter, it’s more obvious the budget just didn’t allow characters to move much.

Heavily rotoscoped characters often seem less "real" than more stylized animated characters, especially when they're in the same production - see the Fleischer Studios version of Gulliver's Travels for an example.

Compare Reality Is Unrealistic, where the poor impression comes less from being 'creepy' as from breaking existing conventions which audiences had come to expect. See also Off Model, Bishonen Line, and Ugly Cute. And while you're at it, see What Measure Is A Non Cute as the scientific study of that trope gave birth to this one.

You'll notice that most the examples below have to do with inadvertently entering the Valley. This trope can also be used to purposefully make something creepy, where creepiness is called for. One such example are the masks worn by Malevolent Masked Men.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Commercials
  • Those new Comcast: Dream Big commercials, in which a normal-looking person starts singing about Comcast in a Creepy Monotone.
  • That new Pocket Plate commercial, has a ridiculously human talking peice of pizza. At least those carrots are cute...
  • The Burger King. The mask is a reference to their campaign from the 70's, where a guy would dress up in "kingly" regalia and shill for burgers, in a predictably trippy fashion.An example.
    • They actually just remade that one. Sort of.
    • It only gets creepier in a new commercial where the Burger King brings in some similarly-designed Klingon friends (Klingons are uncannily scary enough on their own), and they even seem to acknowledge that they're creepy by freezing the dog who barks at them.
  • Evil Dead Orville. (Orville Redenbacher popcorn.) Someone had the bright idea to use a real actor for his body, and to computer generate his head, since the original was dead and they didn't want to use his Identical Grandson.
    • The "someone" was ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, who are also responsible for BK's advertising.
  • Mr. Six, the dancing man in the Six Flags commercials, a disturbing looking character with an equally disturbing mask for a face. Mr. Six's true identity is Danny Teeson of Queer Eye for the Straight Girl.
  • Nadine Baggott, Celebrity Beauty Editor.
  • In the UK, Lynx deodorant ran an advertising campaign in which a grinning man made entirely of chocolate broke off pieces of himself. The advert was eventually banned for being too disturbing.See it here. They're using the same ad for the American version, called Axe. It's still damn creepy.
  • This X-Box commercial.
  • The recent M&Ms ad campaign where several different celebrities are caricatured as odd and unsettling M&M characters. A review of the ads in Entertainment Weekly nailed it: "Who wants to eat candy with hair?"
  • Every single commercial in the PS 3 ad campaign, but in particular the baby commercial, seen here in all its horrifying, squeal-inducing glory.
  • The plastic Duracell family, the Puttermans.
  • Discovery Channel's Shark Week featured a cheery young man giving the camera a broad grin. He actually would be kinda cute were his mouth not filled with SHARK TEETH. Yeesh.
  • The sentient cookie in the Chips Ahoy. If you're trying to sell food, don't make it sentient first.
  • A recent "holiday" phone ad has the anthropomorphic representations of the company (Altel maybe), and its competitors all in claymation. The ads were annoying before but this is where they got really creepy.
    • Interestingly enough, when the Mac and PC ads attempted the same thing, their cartoony appearances kept the ad out of the valley.
  • Those "Feed the Pig" commercials from the Ad Council with that grotesque Pig-Man hybrid.
  • Chockadoobie.
  • The old "Mental Wealth" commercial for the Playstation 1... directed by Chris Cunningham, natch.
  • The denizens of Comcast Town.
  • This internet advert for Apple Jacks cereal.◊
  • The trailer for Alan Carr's new chat show is wrong. Wrongwrongwrongwrong. FUUUUCGETITAWAY!

Film
  • Averted in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, being perhaps the first time a film has completely leaped the valley. Benjamin's face is 100% CGI for almost a third of the film; Brad Pitt doesn't actually take over the role until Benjamin's teenage years aboard the tugboat. Most people seeing the film never noticed it was anything but real.
    • The bleeding-edge techniques the effects team used are detailed here.
  • When living humans are animated via stop-motion, the result is often creepy and unnatural. Doubly so if they are filmed moving deliberately slowly but with the camera running at high speed, so that they move at normal speed on playback but look all twitchy and deranged. See the remake of House on Haunted Hill for this in action.
    • This effect was used deliberately in 1999's Stir Of Echoes to emphasize the murdered girl's status as a ghost.
    • Which is also used to rather spooky effect in both The Ring and The Grudge.
  • The failure of the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was partially blamed on its characters being right in the Uncanny Valley. The rest of the blame could be chalked up to boredom. Somehow, the female lead was put in a Maxim Magazine "hottest women" list. Nice body aside, her skin looked like porcelain. Creepy. Especially given that "skin like porcelain" is supposed to be a compliment.
  • Square's next attempt, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children wisely dodged around this by giving its characters a subtly more stylised, animesque look. The use of motion-capture for more natural movement was probably a major plus, too.
  • The Polar Express, although more successful, skirted this trope. Many reviewers commented on the zombie-like appearance of the adult cast. Especially the ones voiced by Tom Hanks. The Cartoon Brew blog nailed it: "This holiday season, give your family Nightmares!"
  • In The Dark Crystal, the two Gelflings are the most human-looking characters - and the least convincing. Since they qualify as Petting Zoo People, however, they aren't quite as creepy as some of the other examples.
  • In the film adaptation of Bicentennial Man, when the protagonist gets a new, completely realistic android face, every blink is regular and accompanied by a little whirr. Creepiest thing ever.
  • A classic example from Disney: In the original Disney Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs from 1937, Snow White is rotoscoped, while other characters are not. The character is the only one in the movie who looks "unnatural". Ironically, she is the only detail of this ground-breaking film that looks "old-fashioned" even though rotoscoping was considered cutting edge technology at the time. The Seven Dwarfs are recognizable instantly, but Snow White fades into the background when she isn't singing or dancing.
  • The producers of Shrek intentionally dialed down the realism of Fiona's skin due to the animators reportedly feeling a bit like they were animating a corpse.
  • Used for effect in Evil Dead 2 multiple times, notably during Ash's freak out when he and everything in the room starts laughing at his predicament.
  • Also used for effect in the draft examination sequence of Across the Universe. The strange, plastic, square-jawed and Ken-doll-haired beings that looked like the unholy offspring of the Burger King for the creepiness involved. That's Julie Taymore for you.
  • In Schwarzenegger's movie The 6th Day, Arnie buys his daughter an animatronic... doll... thing. The movie gave the impression that the doll was very popular in the future, but it looks creepy. It comes to its demise when it's destroyed and slowly says "I have a boo-boo". This video was probably inspired by that doll The doll itself here.
  • Another inadvertent in a Schwarzenegger movie: Total Recall, with Johnny Cab. He's even creepier when he's melting.
  • Disney's Enchanted features, of all things, the dragon version of the Uncanny Valley, with a villainess whose face is just a little strangely... well, animated.
  • Darla Dimple from Cats Don't Dance looks normal (if disgustingly cute) as animated◊, but as a physical maquette◊, not so much.
  • The Spielberg movie A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) turned the Uncanny Valley on its head by having actual actors play the human-looking androids. However, it was used for effect in some scenes with CGI-animated partially damaged androids being hunted down and put on a bonfire and a sequence with many identical boy and girl androids hanging in the factory. The part where David "breaks" after ingesting human food (he shudders to a stop and the left side of his face sags alarmingly) was particularly effective. Alas, a scene after that, where David is lying down on a operating table, still looking human, but with the "skin" on his chest peeled away, especially with them "testing" him; they flick something in him and his hand rises up slowly in a dead manner.
  • The Dark Seekers of I Am Legend were impressively done in terms of integrating film footage with their movements, but whenever you got a clean look at them, they were just enough Conspicuous CG to throw off the belief.
    • Don't forget about the scene in which the mannequin that Dr. Neville has named Fred may or may not actually move his head.
  • The Hulk 2003 movie had special effects with a great level of detail for the title character, but oddly enough the most complaints came from an extended sequence where the Hulk wore purple pants that did not mesh well against the real environment and the green skin. The other problem with it was the unlayered look on the Hulk's skin. Human skin has levels of transparency (one of the reasons it's so hard to emulate) giving it diverse textures and colors. The Hulk did not have this, making him look like he was molded from clay. This was fixed in the 2008 Continuity Reboot where the Hulk's skin has a much more realistic sheen and depth.
  • The Emcee from Cabaret.
  • Intentionally applied to The passengers◊ on the Soul Train from Spirited Away.
  • Pixar has this for the human characters in its early films. The humans in the early movie Toy Story look rather odd, and a major reason for some strange settings was to feature characters who would look less odd as CG characters. The human cast of The Incredibles and Ratatouille are probably the most realistic, but they avoided the Valley by having cartoonish proportions. In Wall-E, they try to avoid it, but there are some people who found the live-action scenes deeply disturbing. The CG background and cheap props only make it worse, particularly in comparison to the CGI, such as Wall-E's treads.
  • The puppets in Team America: World Police were capable of incredibly subtle and detailed movements (in their faces, of course). The producers decided they were too realistic, and thus too creepy, and decided to purposefully scale them back a bit.
    • Most notably when they make fun of the fact that the puppets can't really walk.
  • Both Terminator and Terminator 2 (deliberately?) enter the Uncanny Valley; the former when the Terminator performs surgery on its face in the mirror, and the latter when T-1000 is talking on the phone in a woman's voice.
  • In the James Bond film Die Another Day, during the opening song there are women composed entirely of fire and embers. They look downright disturbing.
  • Intentionally used in Mirror Mask, from The Jim Henson Company but with a screenplay by Neil Gaiman and directed by visual artist Dave McKean. It featured a scene of intentionally Uncanny Valley-tacular robots singing "Close To You" while hypnotizing the protagonist. And then there are the Sphinxes. Don't let them see you're afraid.
  • Deus Ex Machina. Nuff said.
  • The characters in Corpse Bride aren't nearly as appealing for the most part as the more cartoony ones in Nightmare Before Christmas because of this trope. The more subtle expressions (as opposed to the more convincing stylized ones) end up looking especially creepy sometimes.
  • Mr. Universe's "wife" in Serenity.
  • The remake of Alice in Wonderland by (who else?) that will be coming out seems to be a haven for this (at least to me) and I haven't even seen any pictures. Live-action and stop-motion probably shouldn't mix. The most nightmare-riffic thing seems to be Helena Bonham Carter (most likely best known for playing Mrs. Lovett) is playing the Queen of Hearts. And her head will be ''three times'' the size of normal. And may I add that she isn't stop-motion?
    • This troper has seen the pictures and let me tell you, your fears are well grounded.
  • The Garbage Pail Kids movie had incredibly creepy rubber masks worn by midgets that were supposed to be the titular characters. As their mouths weren't even capable of closing all the way, let alone natural movement, the effect is far more unsettling than any of the grotesque imagery the tradings cards the movie was based on could produce.
  • The title character of Son Of The Mask is a baby with extraordinary cartoon-like powers. Every time he uses them, you can spot the exact moment he stops being a real baby onscreen and becomes his CGI replacement, and the effect is creepy as hell. Especially when he whispers "I must be losing my mind" over and over again into his dad's ear. Ugh.
  • The human characters from Dreamworks' Monsters Vs Aliens, due to the extreme detail rendered into their skin. *shudder*
  • In Let The Right One In the eyes of the vampire character reflect in the dark for just a second. Then the light comes on, and for half of another second you see cat-like slit pupils before they return to normal.
  • Coraline deliberately sweeps the valley to induce fear. The human characters avoid it quite swimmingly, considering that they aren't very realistic, but they are realistic enough to make the ragdoll versions of themselves fall squarely 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.
    • The mice were put dead-center at the bottom of the valley. That had to have been difficult.
  • The difference between the Turtles in the first live action TMNT movie and the third was...disturbing. In the first they were stiff and rather monster-like. In the third they were much more fluid and probably looked like what "real" six-foot tall teenaged human-turtle hybrids would look like, and looked scary.
  • Mostly averted in the 2007 film adaptation of Beowulf since Everything is Motion-captured in real-time. Most of the extras however (who they didn't bother to do Mo-Cap with their faces) tend to fit square in the middle of the valley.
    • This trope is played straight with the posters for the upcoming Disney adaptation of A Christmas Carol featuring Jim Carrey as the voice of Scrooge and the three ghosts.
  • Dr Strangelove, despite being 100% real, is disturbingly inhuman. He was a member of the most brutal regime the world has ever seen, has a prosthetic arm that either tries to salute said regime or kill the organic parts of him, speaks like a broken record, never shows his eyes, ants completely indifferent toward everything up to and including the Earth blowing up and is always sporting a Slasher Smile. Yiiii.
  • While Amelie Poulain looks pretty normal in her eponymous film, the cover/poster rendition of her is a bit... disturbing◊. Those eyes...
  • This troper's not quite sure what it is, but something about the faces of Santa Clause and Merlin in the infamous Santa Claus movie (as seen on MST 3 K) isn't quite right . . .
  • This troper finds the unnaturally toothy smile of one of the titular characters in ''Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D'' (guess which one) surprisingly disturbing. Of course, this "uncanniness" is largely subverted as we discover that, despite his unnerving appearance and personality he is in fact a good guy.

Literature
  • Lampshaded in So Yesterday by Scott Westerfeld. A special effects whiz explains that the human face is the hardest thing to animate convincingly because humans spend almost all of their time reading faces. If it's even a tiny bit off, we won't accept it.
  • The villainous Gray Agents of Sean Cullen's Hamish X series of novels are described as being deep down in the Valley.
  • Lewis took his readers again to the Uncanny Valley in writing Perelandra, the second volume of his Space Trilogy: describing as follows how the alien-evil-spirit-possessed Weston appeared to the novel's hero, Dr. Ransom:
    [Weston's] body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man ... [although i]t was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human. Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with — the man-aged corpse, the bogey, the Un-man.
  • Lampshaded in World War Z: Zombies don't blink. Not only is this creepy, it also means the surface of their eyes is never lubricated, leading to the eyes becoming scratched and opaque. hence the traditional white eyes.
  • Lampshaded in the Mercy Thompson novels. Mercy describes the vampire Marsilia as being in the Uncanny Valley.
  • The human-animal things in The Island of Dr. Moreau by HG Wells. Just reading about those things is disturbing.

Live Action TV
  • 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 revealed that Lister is a robot lampshades this trope, with Kryten explaining that some robots were produced that were too close to humans in appearance, which was creepy for some and so they were recalled.
  • Every single one of those child actors from Disney Channel. Even The Onion had to comment on this.
  • Doctor Who: "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.
    • Autons. After they were first shown, some children would refuse to walk past a clothes shop.
      • The clockwork robots from "The Girl in the Fireplace". *shudder*
  • Parodied brilliantly on the live action show 30 Rock as the reason why it is impossible to do a porn video game:
    Tracy: Tell it to me in Star Wars.
    Frank: Alright. 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!
    • ... and then the game he made went on to make $300 million. He apparently figured out a way to avoid the valley after all.
  • The miniseries adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyles' The Lost World (the one starring Bob Hoskins) subtly uses this one to make the Australopithacines distinctly creepy.
  • LazyTown. Specifically some of the human characters and their prosthetics. Not to mention that Robbie Rotten looks just a little too close to Bruce Campbell.
  • Though not alive (or meant to be alive), Buster from Mythbusters fame falls squarely into this category, considering all of the things Adam and Jamie have done to him to get a more "human" response out of him during tests, including giving him a "spine", "brain", and even breakable "bones" for testing injury. Special mention goes out to the "death balls" used for the Plywood Builder myth, which shatter upon a lethal impact, releasing stage blood. All used for effect, of course.
  • The three creepiest characters on Buffy The Vampire Slayer are generally considered to be the Gnarl, The Gentlemen, and Sid. The first two by virtue of exaggerated and odd movement, and the last due to being a self-animating ventriloquist's dummy.
    • The "lead" Gentleman played by Doug Jones, famous for the equally creepy performance as "The Pale Man" (also known as 'the creepy guy with eyes on his hands') in Pan's Labrynth as well as the faun. Also the creepy "Angel of Death" (also known as 'the creepy guy with eyes on his wings'. is there a pattern here?) and much less creepy Abe Sapien from the Hellboy movies. As a trained mime and body artist he clearly excels at placing himself smack in the middle of the Uncanny Valley.
  • Max Headroom: The voice! The face! The eyes! The arrogance! (example)
  • The special 200th episode of Stargate SG 1 featured the SG-1 team as marionettes and as this link◊ shows, it certainly qualifies as Uncanny Valley.
  • A very good example is FRAN, the replicator created by Rodney McKay in Stargate Atlantis. 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.
  • Mr. Data, the android in Star Trek: The Next Generation, 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 had this effect, though for the opposite reason (the character we were expected to believe was a machine looked disturbingly human when he was deactivated - and effectively, dead.)
      "Pinnochio is broken. Its strings have been cut."
    • Which may be a big reason why the Amargosa scene in Generations willied out a lot of people. Especially when his emotion chip overloaded and he couldn't stop laughing.
  • Similar to Data, Cameron of The Sarah Connor Chronicles sometimes slips into the Uncanny Valley, such as one scene where she perfectly repeats a deceased classmates' 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 crowning moment of uncanniness comes in the episode "Allison from Palmdale," where Cameron acts exactly like a normal, ordinary teenage girl. Except that the viewer knows just what Cameron really is, and that makes Cameron all the more disturbing.
  • Zaphod Beeblebrox's second head in the miniseries of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy. Sometimes it talks, but mostly it just sits there on his shoulder, motionless and eerily realistic.
  • Peppermint Park, an obscure kids' show, used some very creepy-looking human puppets, as seen here, here and here.
  • A program on the Military Channel about the Gettysburg Address features a mix of live-action actors, with a mostly-to-completely CGI Lincoln. The CGI Lincoln squarely falls into the uncanny valley...
  • For Tony's stag party on Coronation Street, they all wore "Tony" masks - flat unmoving faces with little cutout eyes peering out. This Troper shuddered every time they came on (not helped by the fact that Liam was killed wearing one ...)
  • The Generic Man sim used to illustrate animal traits on The Most Extreme avoids this by being just slightly cartoonish, especially the goofy surprised looks whenever he gets overrun by something.
  • Kids' educational show Between the Lions has a sort of game show host character named Arty Smartypants. Arty is a marionette with off kilter, differently-sized facial features, cartoonishly exaggerated body and movement and absolutely creeps the heck out of me whenever my kids are watching the show. Go get freaked out for yourself.
  • The Monty Pythons Flying Circus sketch "It's a Tree" features pieces of wood and plastic talking through their lips.

Music
  • Speaking of Max Headroom, some viewers apparently found the mid-1980s video for "Paranoimia" by The Art of Noise (with Max Headroom) sufficiently creepy to leave them in vague fear of it for decades.
  • The scary puppet in the video for Interpol's song "Evil" is a weird example. It's very, very puppety. It almost looks like a muppet, and it moves its hands like they're on strings. But there's no visible strings and the thing's got a very expressive face, enough that you still get this effect. That last shot where the lights flicker and they swap the puppet for a real boy doesn't make anything any less creepy, either.
  • RoboLou Reed in "No Money Down". Pulling off the flesh almost reduces the effect but introduces potential Nightmare Fuel.
  • Some of the puppets in Genesis' Land of confusion, especially Reagan emerging from the water in slow motion.
  • That... thing from Daft Punk's "Technologic".
  • The music video for Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" stars a bunch of adorable monkeys... with the band member's faces.
  • These puppets. Granted, that's the point—they're enacting "The Conqueror Worm", a poem by Poe, and are supposed to be mockeries of humans, but still...
  • 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. Given the song's lyrics and this being a Serj Tankian song, they may well be right.
  • The video for Herbie Hancock's "Rockit", of all things, is improbably terrifying. Those half-human robot abominations (robominations) wandering around that creepy deserted house?
  • Intentionally used in the music video for "Black Hole Sun" by Sound Garden, which features an eerie "off" suburb populated by clearly insane grinning people. It's actually a relief when they all get sucked into the sky. One magazine actually called it the best horror movie of the year!
  • The puppets in the music video for Wyona's Big Brown Beaver by Primus.
  • This [1] Puffy Ami Yumi music video. We get close ups of lips and backs of heads, but The Reveal comes in at 1:10 and scares you half to death.
  • Just about any vocaloid song that doesn't have to do with happiness and ice cream involves a mix of this trope with either Mind Screw and/or Nightmare Fuel. (See Wide Knowledge of Late, Madness, Alice Human Sacrifice, and Dark Woods Circus for more details.)
  • The faces and almost anything on Aphex Twin's music videos. Just watch for yourself.
  • The masks in this Sound Horizon video. At least the witch is supposed to be scary; Lafrenze (the girl) is supposed to be beautiful, though, not incredibly fucking creepy.
  • Rather than use backup singers, the band of Montreal will often just dub lead singer Kevin Barnes' voice over itself about half a dozen times. This tends to send any attempts at harmonization down the slope into Uncanny Valley. And then there are their music videos, which the term 'Uncanny Valley' may not completely cover.
  • Face Dances part 2, by Pete Townshend. Good song, weird video. Almost as weird as the singer's nose.
  • And who could forget Kraftwerk? They were defined by this trope!
  • 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 vocoder counts as an aural version of this trope. Even if you don't find "Believe" by Cher an awful song, there is something just plain weird and unnerving about her vocoder altered voice in the bridges. Especially as it is about the last original part of her left.
  • Human voices played backwards. See Electric Light Orchestra's "Fire On High". It's a recognisably human voice, but no human could possibly produce those sounds. Shudder.  *

Tabletop Games
  • The roleplaying game 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.
  • A similar effect happens to Vampire 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.

Toys
  • These Reborn Baby dolls from MacPherson crafts. The photos alone are fine, because they just look like photos of babies. Having such a doll around would be like having a real baby that never moves at all, which is just horrific.
    • The toys aren't the horrifying part. What these women use them for are. Ax Crazy minus the ax, anyone? (Unless you're the unlucky sap who happens to fall onto one of these by accident. Judging by the article, the ax will soon follow.)
    • Just the Fridge Logic of their name, "Reborn Baby", is enough to give you pause.
      • 'Reborn" refers to the fact that these dolls are not custom sculpted, but that the creators take pretty standard baby dolls and through the use of very impressive artistry make them very realistic.
      • To be fair, many of the women who use Reborn Babies as substitute children do so because they have lost a child of their own. It's tragic, not creepy, in those cases, when you think of these poor women so desperate for a child that they transfer the affection onto a doll. Losing a child is one of the most painful experiences a woman (or a man) can go through, so it's really not fair to judge these women for that.
  • Baby Born◊ dolls are deep in the Valley, with their empty staring eyes and their faces forever frozen in an unnatural pout... brrr.
  • Resusci Annie. Don't even get us started on the baby versions of that doll. It helps that the mold for her face was based on L'Inconnue de la Seine, the death mask of an unidentified young woman who drowned in the Seine River around the late 1880s. And don't even get close to the neonate one. Augh!
  • Baby Alive.
    • Well, at least Baby Alive sells a lot better than the Grandpa Barely Alive doll.
  • Furreal Friends manage to apply this to animals. The horror!◊
  • Almost any realistic doll based on a baby, really. This is likely because babies are such twitchy expressive energy pods that seeing one of these inactive homonculi triggers some deep instinct to save the life of a baby that suddenly ceased moving. Or maybe they just really are that creepy. (The fact they're often the first things demons possess in literature certainly doesn't help.)
  • China dolls. Oh god, china dolls... *shudders*
  • Any doll that has eyes weighted so they open and close.
  • Has anyone heard of the My Twinn dolls? Parents send pictures of their children with hair samples to get a doll that is designed to look like them.
    • What's creepier is that this is a practice that's been alive for quite some time, and was especially popular in the Victorian era.
  • Many toys based on characters who were never meant to be three-dimensional suffer from this
  • Asian ball joint dolls. Ye gods, they can be spooky looking— especially if you weren't expecting one. In particular, the Johnny Depp minimee— which resembles Johnny Depp, yes, but in a disturbingly static way. Just slightly out of proportion— and did we mention it's on about one third the scale?
    • For those who've never seen one before this site is one of the biggest suppliers. And if you think that's creepy then you haven't seen Pullip dolls, which are like regular BJ Ds, but Super Deformed. (They can also be made to look like Anime characters.)
  • Mc Farlane toys tend to do this with their action figures and so do Neca.

Video Games
  • Oblivion and Fallout 3 both fall into this trap, as Bethesda's attempts at creating realism and a more immersive world end up having exactly the opposite effect, to the point where a game with 2002 graphics and text boxes for dialogue (Morrowind) actually manages to be more immersive despite the latter two games' more technically advanced graphics.
    • This is specially true for the ghouls in Fallout 3.
    • Bethesda is pretty notorious among game fans for making really good games with scary bad humanoid models and animations.
  • In Guitar Hero III, the graphics are notably improved from previous installments. Not all of the characters look different from previous versions, but the male singer in particular stands out. While he now mouths the words more realistically, his jaw is enormous. He nearly looks muppetesque, or what the Mouth of Sauron from the extended edition of Return of the King might look like during a period of youthful rebellion against the Dark Lord, man, and his cramping the Mouth's style. Especially strange given that he looks perfectly normal in the animated cinematics. Let's not forget the drummer, who acts like he's part of the animatronic band at a Chuck E. Cheese style restaurant.
  • The Grotesqueries from Drakengard, partly due to Anime Anatomy, although the Uncanny Valley is what the game's makers were going for.
  • The Death Jr. Series naturally has more to cause fear than this, but its offering toward the Uncanny Valley is Pandora Boxley. A sweet and well-meaning goth girl (which, in the grander scheme of the game's cast, makes her relatively normal), she is very cute despite having empty eye-sockets—IN THE OFFICIAL ART! The version of her in the in-game graphics resembles a chillingly soulless zombie far more frightening in appearance than the title hero—and he's a skeleton!
  • Western-made "adult" PC games (read: Porn) tend to not sell very well, even on the direct download market. Publishers are baffled by this. This editor would point them all to their misguided attempts at "realism" and the intensely creepy female... things, that result. A particular example is Active Dolls (NSFW), where the mannequin-like Creepazons are designed to lock their eyes onto the camera at all times and angles when not engaged in... other activities. Given the "models'" unchanging expressions and dead eyes, one wonders how the programmers considered this anything other than the wrong end of Uncanny Valley?
  • Japanese-made porn games usually manage to avoid the valley by giving the girls anime eyes and faces and making the male character faces (if not his whole body) invisible or impossible to see directly. 3D 'love simulator' maker Illusion has gained large notoriety and a wide fanbase for their Biko, Sexy Beach and Artificial Girl series.
    • School Mate goes a step further with real-time cel-shading and thick figure outlines that resemble hand-inked illustration. Many fans deride other Illusion games for looking 'unrealistic', but never have this complaint about their cherished Schoolmate.
  • Final Fantasy X dips in and out of this trope, particularly with the character Tidus. Depending on the angle and lighting, he can either be real-looking enough to, well, look real, or look like his face is a mask. Partially due to the fact that the animators used the default in-game model, present in gameplay, in most scenes, but used a much higher quality version with a fully expressive face whenever a character was the centerpiece of a cutscene. Sounds great in practice, but their habits of forgetting to use the high-quality model, or even worse have a HQ-model and a gameplay model in the same cutscene at the same time made this quite jarring and unimmersive. There is a particularly jarring scene in Final Fantasy X-2 where Yuna and Rikku are trying to puzzle something out ("Key-Mon?" "Monkey!"), and there's a close up shot of Rikku's low-quality face as she says something. It is, by far, the most disturbing thing: passionate speech, dead face.
    • The infamous "Pixel Mouth" in both Kingdom Hearts game falls into the same category. It's particularly noticeable in one of KH 1's crowning moments, where Riku takes the keyblade from Sora and later Sora takes it back. Some of the best lines in the game can be found here, but the because the characters are using in-game models, their mouths only shift from open to closed and back (as opposed to the cutscene models, which are properly lip-synched).
  • Fandom is divided on the Forsaken from World Of Warcraft; some consider the female Forsaken to be Cute Monster Girls, other consider both sexes to reside deep in the Uncanny Valley. Both sides are right, to at least some degree, owing to variations in personal tastes and the range of appearance options for Forsaken faces, from "cute green skinned girl" to "where's your jaw, and who stitched the leather X over your eyes?" Then again, they are zombies (i.e. the lowest point on the graph), just in varying states of decay.
  • Hilde on the Xbox 360 boxart of Soulcalibur IV. It's her eyes... her soulless eyes.
  • Princess Elise from Sonic The Hedgehog 2006: Princess of Uncanny Valley. Being alongside characters that are modeled after Felix the Cat punctuated it even further. The other humans in the game don't help it, with their random arm flailings in grotesque parody of actual body language. Sonic Team seems to have understood this, and made the humans in Sonic Unleashed look like they came straight out of Ratatouille.
  • Deliberately invoked in Metal Gear Solid 4, where a not-quite-human all-female unit was modelled by scanning in the physiques and faces of four real-life actresses, whose slightly too detailed faces jarred horribly against the more stylised look of the entirely digitally made 'human' characters. Even more deliberate when you consider that, according to their back-stories, those girls have all suffered from really heavy mind rape. Thus the impression that they're dead on the inside.
  • Pretty deliberately invoked with GLaDOS in Portal. Her vocoded, modulated voice seems quite endearing when she's just a Ninja Butterfly, but when she progresses to Big Bad the emotion seeping into her voice makes her seem very creepy. At one point, she informs the protagonist that 'some day, we'll look back on this and laugh. and laugh. and laugh...o-o-oh boy'. Each instance of the phrase 'and laugh' is said with exactly the same pitch and intonation. This is also true, albeit to a lesser extent, in the Turrets. Most of their lines are cute and even funny, but some, like "Are you still there?", "Hey! It's me!", and the cries and laughter all sound like what it really is—an eerie attempt at sentient speech from a non-sentient creature. They also suffer from misplaced or low-toned emotion in select places, confusing the player's perception of them. Of course, the fact that they're actively machine-gunning you as they charm you, spraying blood in bright red fans over the walls, also makes for an unsettling dichotomy.
  • The game Bioshock 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 in Bioshock 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.
  • When unmasked◊, Samus Aran certainly invoked this in the original Metroid Prime. In subsequent 3D appearances, she was toned down in this regard. Although in Prime 2: Echoes◊, it's hard to define if it's "more cartoonish" or "further down the valley".
  • Largely averted in Half Life 2, with realistic lip-synching and largely realistic character movements, but deliberately invoked in the G-Man, who acts as though he has read about human speech and mannerisms without really understanding them. Of course, it's implied that he isn't entirely human.
  • This is probably why the Pirates Of The Caribbean level looks so out of place in Kingdom Hearts II
  • Sony's first-party PS 3 sports games (MLB the Show and NBA 0x) have technically excellent 1080p graphics. Except every arena looks to be made entirely of plastic, and every player looks like a wax doll.
  • Avoided in Heavenly Sword where the game designers had real life actors give real performances with motion capture sensors in order to have their real facial expressions tell the animated characters how to look. The result was lively animation that dodged the valley entirely and was praised for its stunning cutscenes.
  • Mass Effect largely avoids this, in-game - the facial models are of excellent quality and generally look very real. However, the facial customisation section during character creation can be disturbing - the facial image is animated, moving and breathing naturally even as you alter it, and the sight of it mutating as you alter the parameters is somewhat disturbing. It's also possible to end up with rather odd-looking results if you set multiple features to the extremes of the available scales.
  • "Adult" video game Strip Fighter 2 almost averted this by making all the detailed pictures of women be scans of actual pictures of women. Then someone got the bright idea to make the pictures wink. Without moving any other part of the face.
  • The intro to Silent Hill 4: The Room was quite a bit more terrifying than the game proper. Never Trust A Trailer.
  • Then there's this little number◊.
  • If you fail at the Boss Rush in Sexy Parodius, you're treated to a rather frightening image of the final boss laughing at your misfortune.
  • Roughly half the cast (the energetic ones) of the Dynasty Warriors series avoid this trope (they instead sometimes border on being too cartoony, especially really big guffawing guys like Meng Huo), but the 'serene' or 'contemplative' characters like Da Qiao, Zhuge Liang, Xu Huang, and Yue Ying more than make up for them. Yue herself is a bit of a shift as the emotion in her lines show she was meant to have Action Girl expressions. She just comes off as very very strange when speaking, almost like a period automaton from an old German sci-fi movie. Compare with the Rikku example up above. Strangely, Lu Bu also falls into the second catagory depending on the game involved, as sometimes his voice is bizarrely low-pitched in comparison with his roaring angryface. Methinks Koei had different modelers working on different sets of people which resulted in the discrepancies between believable and non. Does not seem to happen as often in the Samurai Warriors universe.
  • In case 3 of Apollo Justice Ace Attorney, there's a cutscene involving a concert performance. While the entire game series is in 2-D point-and-click, the concert is in moving 3-D and not that well detailed. It's very unnerving.
  • Organization XIII's members are supposed to be deliberately made examples of this trope, but good luck telling that to the fanfic writers.
  • Much like the Basement Jaxx example, Halo 3 has an easter egg of a family of either monkeys or cavement with human looking faces that sill creeps me out to think about.
  • Early 3D games like The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Mega Man Legends tend to suffer from this trope. The player character and the most important NP Cs usually look great — but the other NP Cs are often horrific. The worst are like dolls made by someone who's only seen actual humans through a kaleidoscope. Those carpenters in Ocarina... *shudder*
    • The carpenters were more due to the wierd way they moved. They've move faster than they their legs moved, hammer stuff wierdly and generally freak you out. Infact many old 3D games suffered from this issue. Conker's Bad Fur Day averted it so well (especially with the leg movements relative to the character's movement speed) that it was one of the things this troper most remembers about it.
  • The entire cast for Strong Bad's Cool Game 4 Attractive People. While some characters transition well into 3D, some, espescially Homestar, look damn creepy.
  • Alma is made of this.
    • As are the Replica soldiers, especially with their masks off.
  • New International Track And Field contains some hideous Super Deformed characters as contestants. All look pretty dreadful, but the worst ones are the characters from other Konami games with a more serious feel. Simon Belmont looks passable, but scary. Solid Snake, with a head drawn as if for a semi-realistic anime and a tiny body, looks very scary. But the absolute nadir of terror has to be Little Pyramid Head, who is actually scarier than the real thing. What were they thinking.
  • Tales Of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World invoked this for many people, simply by giving the anime-style character designs realistic motion-captured movements in the cutscenes.
  • This quality is given to Mitsuo Kubo of Persona 4, whose natural Black Eyes Of Evil are portrayed as rather dead, which is shown to be fitting as his shadow portrays that he's practically dead inside as well as making him look like creepily Gonkish.
  • Wario Land games are usually too cartoony in art style to fit this usually, but I swear some of the clown based bosses would probably head far enough into the valley to give Coulrophobics nightmares. There's Clown-a-Round in Wario World, which looks just human and somewhat CGI like to creep someone out before they even realise it has multiple detachments heads and his real one is on his stomach: picture for reference and possibly Chortlebot from Shake It, which is at least somewhat disturbing in the least (it freaking laughs when using a flamethrower type attack for goodness sake, and the music getting faster and faster can't help much).
  • This trope is among one of the many many problems with Limbo Of The Lost. The normal people end up looking far scarier than the ghoulish ones due to creepy Poser models and jerky animation.
  • Moviebob applies this to environments in his "Reality Sucks" segment. The central thesis is that a realistic environment tends to harshly de-immerse the gamer when unrealistic elements show themselves. The example he uses is a "wooden" door that may as well be adamantium for all you can do to it. The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything would be the counter to this problem.

Web Comics

Web Original
  • Referenced in a recent Homestar Runner cartoon, where Japanese Culture Greg is going to the prom with Chizuko, his robot date.
    Science Fiction Greg: You'd think I'd be interested in life-size, realistic robots, but that thing makes me wanna barf up my earlier energy drink into the one I'm currently drinking.
    • Followed by Japanese Culture Greg getting NCANNY VALLEY'D!

Western Animation
  • Transformers: Beast Wars avoided this by having no human main characters; Transformers are humanoid, and in this series gain the ability to mimic organic parts but not designed to look specifically human. Those cavemen, and poor, poor Transmute, on the other hand...
    • In another Transformers example, though 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.
  • Deliberately avoided in Mainframe Entertainment productions featuring human or at least somewhat human-like characters (ReBoot and Action Man). They would exaggerate proportions just slightly to give them a warm animated appearance instead of attempting photo-realistic.
  • The rotoscope-based animated version of The Lord Of The Rings by the usually brilliant Ralph Bakshi fell right down into the Uncanny Valley with a thud.
  • Skyland, a motion-captured 3D-modeled cartoon, attempts to make things look more stylish by cel-shading it afterward. This backfires, though, making the characters look inhumanly polished and sending the entire thing plummeting into the Uncanny Valley.
  • Math Girl: A series of semi-animated CGI shorts with writing that seems aimed at children, subject matter (calculus) aimed at high school and college students, and extremely frenetic, jerky pacing that makes actually learning anything unlikely. The characters are right in Uncanny Valley, helped by the creepy Exorcist-style theme music. The temptation to shut it off or vocally make fun of it is nearly unbearable, but unfortunately, this is rather hard to do in a classroom setting.
  • Star Wars The Clone Wars: I know it's deliberately designed to be cartoon-like, but the characters are sufficiently realistic in general that some of the detailing is just jarring enough that it makes my teeth itch. Especially the hair. Especially Obi-Wan's beard. Padme's pipe-stick arms deserve a mention too (I can't use the "well, she's not human" excuse I can use to ignore the same thing on Ahsoka). She makes Olive Oyl look big-boned.
  • Courage The Cowardly Dog was a very frightening cartoon for many, often skipping the "comedy" part of its "horror-comedy". By far, the most frightening episode was the series finale: "Perfect". Courage had a series of nightmares where he was declared "not perfect" by what appears to be a superdeformed CGI Fetus with a freaky adult's face◊.
    • Don't forget the Kitty&Bunny episode. Kitty before removing the mask qualifies, and the atmosphere and music certainly doesn't help. Doc Gerbil's World is equally mindrending.
  • Intentionally invoked in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack with this image◊ of the titular Flapjack.
    • The Candy Wife, also deliberately in the valley.
  • Also 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) on those who watch it.
  • Also invoked for many of the villains in The Real Ghostbusters. One of the most traumatic characters for anybody growing up in the eighties might have been their Boogey Man.
  • If you're still not clear on what the Uncanny Valley looks like, watch "Sid the Science Kid".
    • That show is unique, in that Henson Studios uses a technique that combines CGI Motion-Capture with actual puppetry. The actors are "filmed" in real-time as the CGI characters. As little post-production as possible is used.
  • The promo images for the upcoming Olivia TV show manage to do this for what was once an adorably drawn pig.
  • The Simpsons: Homer briefly imagines his children as "mutants" with pinkish skin, five fingered hands and eyes with pupils. The camera briefly cuts to a more realistic rendering of Bart, Lisa and Maggie. Homer, like the rest of us, screams and runs far, far away.
  • In the 1960's there were action animated shows (often based on Marvel comics) actually were not animated at all. Yes apparently they reached a new low in how to be cheap on Animation. But how did they handle the characters talking? Simple when a character spoke that character would be a still drawing with a human mouth on the face speaking. It gave off what is arguably the first and one of the creepier examples of Uncanny Valley in North American animation. Say what you will about the 70's being a Dark Age for American TV Animation but by that time that practice was no longer the least bit common. (Nowadays its only very rarely used for comedic effect.)

Other
  • Statues of children are just... so... creepy.
  • The animatronic Elvis bust falls squarely into this category.
  • The "little girl giant" mega-marionette that's made appearances at parades and festivals all over Europe has a limited head and facial animation that still manages to be creepily human in execution.
    • Then her face splits at the middle and she releases a four-foot long, slightly-too-large tongue and goes from Uncanny Valley to pure Body Horror.
  • The tech demo for Heavy Rain. You know, The Casting? This vid?
  • Any type of CG face that is made to show what someone (usually a historical figure) might have looked like. Then again, Tutankhamen supposedly looks like Boy George.
  • Most Disney mascot costumes are either animal suits (Mickey, Donald, etc.), extremely cartoony humans (Lilo, Pinocchio), or just regular people in costumes (Aladdin, the princesses), avoiding the valley. Captain Hook, on the other hand, is just disturbing; he bears an unsettling resemblance to V. Or rather, V looks like him.
  • Postmortem photography, the Victorian custom of taking pictures of corpses posed as if they were alive. They sit in chairs, they hold each others' hands... but they're horribly, obviously dead. The modern versions of such photography are worse. Color photography plus the discoloration skin undergoes due to decomposition equals Very Very Wrong.
    • By the same token, bodies that have been prepared for open-casket funerals and visitations.
  • Nintendo, in an effort to promote their WiiSpeak microphone, has a demo set up in their Nintendo World store in New York City, where kids can gather around and talk to a virtual representation of Mario, Wario, and others who will respond back. Whoever is speaking as the Italians (maybe Charles Martinet, maybe just a really good impersonator) does a fine job providing the voices of these characters, but the characters themselves are like some horrible cross between old cartoony graphics and videogame graphics, resulting in Mario and Wario looking creepier than they ever have in history. This isn't helped by the fact that they can apparently play with their faces ala the interactive face in Super Mario 64.
  • This Picture◊
  • The 8,000 terracotta warriors in Mausouleum of the Chinese Emperor Qin.
  • Several artists on Deviant ART do digital pictures of cartoon characters, only gives them photorealistic details regarding the skin, hair, eyes, texture, etc, while KEEPING the cartoon proportions and the size and shape of the features. Anyone who's seen those pictures knows what I'm talking about.
    • "Untooned"
      • This troper came across that image while innocently googling for references for her Figure Drawing class. (Her searchwords weren't REMOTELY similar to anything that could have brought up that image.) She promptly had a heart attack, scrolled upwards, clicked the "Back" button, AND exited the internet. And then she sat in her chair rocking forwards and backwards a few minutes...*whimper*
  • Anything made with iClone. Anything. There, witness some of the absolute worst here. You'll never look at Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck in the same way again.
  • This◊ is an artist's mannequin. Artists use them to help them envision a pose before drawing it, and they also help to get the proportions right as one draws. They're very handy - just don't leave them out on your desk at night.
  • The art style of CLAMP can edge into this, most notably in xxxHolic with the zombiesque portrayal of the main characters. Smaller issues include the gangliness of the characters which can make them look spiderlike.
  • Some of the exhibtions in the York Dungeons fall smack into this trope. Anamatronic robots with flat faces, then a real human face projected onto them. Except of course, the human flace is only 3D like it would be on the television. TERRIFYING.
  • This picture.◊ Michael Jackson skirts this trope already, but with the aging effects, it's Uncanny Valley City, Population MJ.
  • There is a dedicated market for innumerable models and fashion designs for the software program Poser that people use, mainly, to make CGI softcore porn. Or So I Heard. The results unanimously fall deeply into Uncanny Valley territory. Here (NSFW) is a prime example of the deepest part of the valley.
    • Entirely your own opinion. There is far far worse out there in Uncanny Valley, and believe it or not, but "Poser porn" is actually very very common among 3D porn sites. Your Mileage May Vary
  • Two words: Dancing Baby

Real Life
  • Personal experiences are available in Troper Tales: Uncanny Valley
  • The Japanese tradition/hobby/fetish of kigurumi - cosplaying human and humanoid anime characters using masks and body stockings - seems to back into the Uncanny Valley from the human side, due to the mad creepy effect the results sometimes have. Doubly so in light of the fact that a significant percentage of cosplayers are males who nevertheless portray female characters. Look and be mentally scarred. Yes, it looks cute at first, but it will start to get to you after a little while.
    • You can see an in-fiction example in Megatokyo, with appropriate reaction from Largo.
    • Cosplay where the subject actually does literally resemble the character id from the Valley, because of how heavily stylized the characters in comparison...well, an example. This◊ is Osaka. Say "howdy". This◊ is a girl cosplaying her. This is even creepier.
      • Creepier? I think you mean funnier.
  • Botox (or any plastic surgery disasters for that matter) tends to send a real flesh and blood person sliding into the Uncanny Valley. Examples: Dolly Parton, Joan Rivers, Dr. Frederick Brandt (who is a client to his own products).
    • Collagen injections make some vict... er, patients have faces bloated like someone with a shellfish allergy at an all-you-can-eat shrimp bar.
  • Real life example: Stephen Harper◊, Prime Minister of Canada. Spoofed by Air Farce, a Canadian comedy show, by having the actor who plays Harper act like a robot. (A really diabolical robot.)
    • On the subject of politicians, Dmitry◊ Medvedev◊, President of Russia. The eyes, the staring eyes... Now, that gives the phrase "Medvedev is just Putin's puppet" a whole different meaning.
    • Elba Esther Gordillo, the scariest thing in Mexican politics, by far. Just google around for pictures of her, you won't like it.
  • Over the course of many plastic surgeries, Michael Jackson has steadily edged deeper and deeper into the Uncanny Valley.
  • Manbabies.com - 'Nuff said.
  • Real people doing robotic dancing or miming, especially if wearing make-up to look metallic or just shiny. A creepy example: This video for Radio Number One by Air. Made worse by the fact that the vocals are done using a vocoder.
    • Like the three performance artists from the Blue Man Group.
  • Non-human example: BigDog. It looks JUST enough like something...alive to be almost cute, but that buzzing, and that weird, jerky walk...*shudder*
  • The retouched photos on this site fall into Uncanny Valley from the human side.
  • Visible Body.com
    • An inversion - though perhaps even more freaky - is the Body Worlds exhibits. The pieces look like plastic Biology class models... Until you realize that they're real human bodies, organ systems, and extremities "plastinated" with resin.
  • Robotic imitations of the human voice can also have this effect. For instance, there's this program which emulates a child learning to speak, developing from random babbling to complete sentences, but with enough mechanical-sounding stammering to keep it creepy. And this recording of a coded message sent through a secret radio station, complete with an Ironic Nursery Tune accompanying the Creepy Child speech.
    • The speech is someone reciting numbers in German (eins, zehn, eins, vier, fünf...etc) but the creepyness is really only enhanced by this knowledge. One wonders why this child is reading these numbers off in the first place.This article will give a little insight.
  • Models made using Pixologic's Zbrush, although the artists must have incredible skill. Creepiest is when they model real people, and I think the Joker ones take the cake.
  • Isabelle Dinoire◊, the French woman who received a partial face graft following a massive disfiguring dog attack. One the one hand, the sheer awesomeness of medical science is laudable, but on the other... the press conference where she spoke with her entire face stiff as a mask sends chills down the spine.
  • Clowns. Parts of their facial expressions are fixed, painted on, and the parts of their expressions which move are deliberately exagerrated. Clown puppets are even worse.
    • Mimes. Don't forget mimes.
    • Cirque du Soleil characters frequently fall into this category as well. Take the Double Faces◊ in Mystere; those are masks, but they're worn on the back of the performer's head for the two-faced look, and that makes a difference in terms of how movement looks when the performers usually show the masked side to the audience.
  • The Jabberwokeez, a dance crew who wear expressionless white masks while robotically dancing. It's even worse when Shaq joined them onstage, since he appears to be double their body mass and the mask doesn't quite fit his head.
  • AAAAAAAARGH! Real Life master class of Fan Disservice.
  • This is a CAKE. This Troper isn't usually bothered by the Uncanny Valley but this crossed a line.
    • This woman's entire portfolio embodies this trope more often than not. Somehow, her Gollum cake is even creepier than the movie version.
    • While we're on the subject of cakes...AAAAHHHHHH!◊
  • In the March 2009 Birds and Blooms Extra magazine, there was a picture of a birdhouse in the shape of a pileated woodpecker. For this troper, it was very jarring.
  • How would a typical woman look with Barbie's figure? (BBC News Magazine)
  • Lo and behold, it's HRP-4C. Say hi to her. Preferably with a rocket launcher.
    • From the linked article: "...which is optimistically described as being 'just like a fashion model.'" Yeah, right after the drug-induced stroke that drove her back into rehab.
  • Julia Roberts' teeth. This may be a regional thing — the disturbing perfection of her smile is often commented on by British reviewers, but really who are we to comment on dentistry?
  • Victoria Beckham. Seriously.◊
  • Primates such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans are known to provoque this ocassionally.
  • One can't◊ forget the◊ Japanese woman◊ who had◊ plastic surgery◊, giving her the◊ appearance of a◊ Real Life anime girl◊. Oh so cute◊ and oh so creepy...
    • Every time this troper sees those photos on her desktop, she thinks, "damn, somebody needs to lay off the Photoshop!" And then she realises... it's real. Now imagine that cute young lady as a 60-year-old.
    • The problem is that she has the perfect face - for a 5-year-old, but everything else about her is not.
  • Stephenie Meyer. I mean, just look at her! [2]◊ That does not look like an ordinary human!
    • She looks like Anne Hathaway◊.
      • With a ridiculously oversized photoshop lips, maybe.
    • I think it's because she has the same facial expression in every picture. I mean, god damn! No wonder why her characters show no emotion! I would say she was part vulcan, but vulcans are logical. But I digress, she is rather creepy, but so is Robert Patterson on Twilight movie posters. I mean, with the bright red lips and ridiculously pale skin (Which really looks like make-up to me), and a facial expression limited to the human version of >:C I can't stand looking at posters of him.
  • Denis◊ Leary◊. There's just something about that guy...
    • As if that weren't bad enough, in the recent Hulu ads, he plays a brain sucking-alien.
      • "Cuz' we're aliens—and you're not soup yet." Shudder.
  • William. Randolph. FUCKING. HEARST. Completely unremarkable middle-aged guy's face... except for the eyes. Oh dear sweet Christ, those dead, staring, eyes◊
  • ...And from the advertising link right on this very page, we get this: [3]. Now, most of the lifelike dolls the company offers are adorable. But that... there is just something off about the likeness. It's not a newborn human baby—it's the spawn of the Uncanny Valley.
  • Willem Dafoe. Willem Fucking◊ Dafoe.◊
  • Kendra Wilkinson. Watch her on The Girls Next Door or her new solo show on E! When she laughs, her face doesn't move. AT ALL.

Three Shorts
« Animated Trope »
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Thank The Maker
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Van Helsing Hate Crimes
Took The Bad Film Seriously
« Subjective Tropes »
Unfortunate Implications
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