Uncanny Valley - Television Tropes & Idioms

That woman in the Progressive Auto Insurance ads. Are we sure she's not an android?

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Ghost In The Shell: Innocence is a prime example of this trope and its whole plot revolves around it.
- The Geisha-gynoids could hardly be mistaken for humans and are clearly artificial. However, their staggering mechanical movements and speech have just the slightest trace of humanity, that makes them downright creepy. It doesn't help that they rip peoples heads off.
  - Interestingly, they are said to be very popular because they are so life-like. Possibly caused by Values Dissonance.
  - And as it turns out in the end, the whole series of events started with a robot manufacturer searching for ways to get their gynoids out of the Uncanny Valley.
- The scientist from the forensics lab.
- The chinese festival parade also touches the trope, though it doesn't cause real discomfort.
- And then there is of cause Kim himself, and his whole house as well. He had his brain put into a cybernetic body that was 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 with human-sized dolls, puppets, and robots, turning it into a Doll House of Doom.
- The probably cloned dog totaly averts this, however.
Played with in an interesting way in Saber Marionette J. For the most part the saber marionettes act as Ridiculously Human Robots, but on two seperate occassions 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.
In one episode of Ghost In The Shell Stand Alone Complex, the Tachikomas speculate that they were specifically given a non-humanoid design to avoid unsettling humans.
- In the first GitS movie, the Major looks completely human (aside from the jacks in her neck)...but then you notice that she never blinks.
  - But she does, just not very often. In the upcoming remaster of the movie the blinking is removed for this very effect.
In Neon Genesis Evangelion, Rei Ayanami was intended to provoke this in the viewer, but seems to have largely failed.
- Your Mileage May Vary: I found Rei really creepy.
Johann, the titular Monster.
The titular monsters in Parasyte 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 that give 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.
  - The protagonist also slowly starts slipping into this as time goes by.
Shinji (with a sheepish grin):"If you treat pigs and cows as equal beings... then we're eating their slaughtered corpses. So don't be so afraid when someone dies.''"
A few things in Ghost Hound fall squarely into this, like the thing fifteen seconds into this video.
After a certain point in the Art Evolution, the One Piece women started to fall into this trope sometimes due to looking too much more realistically than the men. Also part of how they can also fall into Informed Attractiveness; it can be hard to be turned on when you're busy wondering why certain drawings of them fill you with inexplicable terror.
Oh for goodness sakes, the Akuma Level 4 from D Gray Man. That thing was an attempt to look more human, but it seems to have fallen just one step away from the zombie. That is NOT normal at all!
Later episodes of Dragonball Z seemed to attempt to invoke this with androids 16, 17 and 18, by giving them steel-blue eyes, facial features very different from the series' norm, and (in the dub) unexpressive voices. If this was an attempt at the uncanny valley, it failed, as both 17 and 18 are almost universally considered adorable (and 16, while not exactly a looker, did not have the repulsive qualities that the uncanny valley is known for).
Invoked for Kazuo Kiriyama in Battle Royale. He was deliberately drawn with no reflection in his eyes, and while barely noticeable, it still manages to give his face a look beyond creepy.
Probably unintentional, but the Deer God/Forest God in Princess Mononoke seriously invokes this trope. A deer with vaguely mask-like human face instead of normal deer-head, and a veritable bush of horns growing on it. And from side he looks like a deer with front half of its head cut off.
The Astro Boy manga actually makes some precursor references to this idea. Dr. Tenma first becomes disgusted with Astro because he can't grow — acting as a painful reminder that he's not actually his son Toshio, or even human, but just a clever simulation. As well, when Dr. Tenma tries to sell him into slavery, the buyer is initially reluctant, stating that people don't like robots that look too human — although the rationale here is that it might prompt them to seek rights, rather than being considered property.

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The original Little Orphan Annie comics feature horrific, pure white eyes utterly empty of soul or emotion, on every character, for no apparent reason.
In 1970's Marvel Comics, this was Spider-Woman's shtick; her comic's tagline was "To Know Her Is To Fear Her!" She is, biologically, literally part spider, and was raised by Petting Zoo People and Beast Men to boot. When she finally enters the human world, nearly everyone is instantly, instinctively afraid of her—making it extremely hard for her to find work or shelter, and leaving her terribly alone. Still, through tremendous effort, she eventually overcomes this and makes a good life for herself, making for a very inspiring Character Arc. However, Executive Meddling later Put Her On A Bus for twenty years, and when she was finally brought back into the limelight, this whole aspect of her origin was pointlessly Ret Conned away.
Scott McCloud's Making Comics had a few pages of faces showing various basic facial expressions as a guide to how that kind of thing works. And they were creepy as hell.
The "Photorealistic" painted syle of Kingdom Come and Marvels falls into this somethimes, more so with the later.
Alfred E. Newman. Especially seeing his creepy grin pasted onto other popular culture icons....

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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.
You know the Clone Pilots in the Star Wars prequels? Take a closer look at their faces. Proves that George Lucas is definitely going too far.
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 Taymor 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.
- Donald Clarke, a film critic for the Irish Times, complained that the Hulk still looked ridiculous in the 2008 movie.
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.
- Even worse: in Toy Story 2, there is a dream sequence where Andy says "I don't want to play with you anymore" in a very Creepy Monotone. Brrr.
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. Some people have said that they found Terminator in the first movie creepy, look close and he doesn't look normal, and there's something funny about his eyes before he damages one.
- The reason his eyes look funny is because he's lost his eyebrows.
  - Also because Cammeron had Arnie's face sprayed with vaseline to deliberately invoke this trope and make it appear that something wasn't quite right about his skin, but that you wouldn't consciously know what. Done again in T3 with CGI used to erase any trace of the Terminators blinking when they get hit in the face or fire their weapons.
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.
Deus Ex Machina.
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. The mix of live action and CGI makes for some freaky Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dums and an uncannily misproportioned Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen.
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.
Mostly averted in the 2007 film adaptation of Beowulf since everything is Motion-captured in real-time, and the character design and graphics are similar to those from a modern videogame. 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.
While Amelie Poulain looks pretty normal in her eponymous film, the cover/poster rendition of her is a bit... disturbing◊. Those eyes...
Something about the faces of Santa Claus and Merlin in the infamous Santa Claus movie (as seen on MST 3 K) isn't quite right.
- Yet the animatronic Santa in the toyshop window of that movie was both less realistic and clearly much creepier. And then there were the reindeer. Oh, the reindeer...
The unnaturally toothy smile of one of the titular characters in ''Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D'' (guess which one) is 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.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine features a cameo of Professor Xavier, which uses CGI to de-age him. The problem is, it was less-than-spectacular CGI and it just succeeds in making him look really creepy.
- The same effect was used in X3 to de-age both Xavier and Magneto, but was much better-looking and a lot more convincing.
  - That and clothes pins.
Jacob's Ladder. Director Adrian Lyne uses a Body Horror technique in which an actor is recorded waving his head around at a low frame rate, resulting in horrific fast motion when played back.
The costume designers of of Killers From Space were probably aware of the Valley when designing the titular villains, but that film's instance of this trope has aliens looking stupid and hilarious rather than creepy. As Mike Nelson of The Film Crew commented, "He looks a little like Buzz Lightyear!"
The odd French (?) film Immortal has many eerie Conspicuous CGI side-characters who interact with the live actors. They're supposed to be mutants, gods, and people with strange body augmentations (mainly skin grafts), and seeing them next to live actors (even ones with ice-like blue hair and bluish-white skin) is jarring.
Deliberately invoked by the victims of the Serial Killer in The Cell: He drowns, then bleaches his female victims to resemble dolls, and when the therapist journeys into his mind they're captive but "alive". Naturally, one of them has a kigurumi mask.
In The Love Guru, there is a scene with a young Guru Pitka, which is just Mike Myers' head cgi-ed onto some kids body. In addition to being Conspicuous, it made his head look enormous.
The scene on the Extended Edition of Return of the King with the Mouth of Sauron: That unnaturally large mouth and grin...
Chucky of Child's Play in the first movie. As the movie progresses, Chucky starts gaining more and more human traits such as a receding hairline and skin imperfections.
For some people, the big-eyed doctor◊ in the new Star Trek movie can be quite unsettling.
- For some, being the operative word!
In the film adaptation of Frank Miller's Sin City, CGI is used to erase the actress's blink when Miko is sprayed with blood. Because it's practically impossible for any human to not blink when something hits them in the face, it serves to make her exceedingly creepy.

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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. Reading about how they're created even more so, Wells goes into just enough detail about the processes to be even more freaky.
In the novel Skinned by Robin Wasserman, when people get into fatal accidents, they are usually uploaded into the body of an android-like thing. These people are shunned because they look too perfect.
This trope is all but lampshaded with regards to the ~~eponymous~~ character of Frankenstein, who may be the Ur Example.
Eldar are described this way in the Warhammer 40000 Grey Knights novel Hammer of Daemons.

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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*
  - Not to mention "Empty Child". I never thought people with gas masks could be so scary.
Parodied brilliantly on the live action show 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.
- Torquemada Software's Video Strip Poker avoids this trope by using actual video clips of actresses.
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)
- Creepier is the Max Headroom WTTW pirating incident.
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.)
  "Pinocchio is broken. Its strings have been cut."
  - Of course, since Data spent so much time out of the Valley, the scene makes the audience sympathise with him and make Riker look like a jerkass. Turns out he felt like one too.
- 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.
- Phlox in Star Trek Enterprise was a Rubber Forehead Alien, and thus didn't fit into this most of the time, except when he smiled. There's a reason they didn't do that much.
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. It was originally intended to be more animated than it ultimately was, but the prop head only worked intermittently, leaving it looking more like a shoulder-mounted piñata.◊
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...
David Lynch filmed several scenes in Twin Peaks within the Red Lodge. All the apparations in the lodge were characters who did their scenes, all speech and movement backwards. Then the filmed result was displays in reverse, giving all the action an unsettling tone.
For Tony's stag party on Coronation Street, they all wore "Tony" masks - flat unmoving faces with little cutout eyes peering out. I 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.
In the Dollhouse episode "Briar Rose", the interrogation of Lawrence Dominic was chilling. Having been sent to the attic a few episodes past, the only way to extract the needed information was to apply his imprint to Victor. The actor playing Victor was disturbingly good at mimicking the mannerisms used by the actor who originally played Dominic, highlighting just how nightmarish the situation is. Especially once Dominic realizes his situation, even recognizing that he's in Victor's body and begins freaking out...
The Bionic Woman/Six Million Dollar Man featured several episodes with these lovely Fembots◊
Though he doesn't play an alien, robot, or supernatural creature, Michael Emerson's performance of Ben Linus in Lost 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.
"Floyd", the agent from "Department 44" in the Numb3rs episode "Dreamland". He looked perfectly human, but his affect was rather like an android with a better-than-average speech program. The bouts of "invisible cell phone" had me looking for the spinning blue ring, and the tendency toward Stealth Hi Bye (Amita called it "materializing"), just added to the wierd factor. You would think that an agent with such a secretive group would want to blend more.

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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.
- It's the teeth. Oh God, the teeth...
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".
- ...was the robot underneath Chucky. Be scared now.
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 Soundgarden, 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.
- Those aren't puppets. Those are actually the band members wearing huge, intentionally fake-looking cowboy costumes. They were so cumbersome that they had to mime the song at half its original speed to get the performance down correctly.
This 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.)
- As if that wasn't enough, they made Hatsune Miku, the most popular Vocaloid, into a real-life realistic robot that doesn't even look like her (it's on the web somewhere). This is just overkill.
  - But then again, it's Japan. They've already invented robot secretaries and teachers.
- Vocaloid songs in general, regardless of the content, are just robotic and twangy enough to fall into the Uncanny Valley. This Troper actually prefers the more robotic UTAU voices to the more human Vocaloid ones because of this. Your Mileage May Vary, of course, on both accounts.
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!
- Case in point: "We Are the Robots". German version here.
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.
- For the good side of vocoders, try Daft Punk. They make no big issue out of being "robots" (just don't watch the Technologic or Prime Time of Your Life videos).
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.^*
^{What's being said backwards is, "The music is reversible, but time is not. Turn back! Turn back! Turn back!" which actually kept me up for hours one night, but that's not this trope and harder to explain. Such a tortured-sounding voice who seems to have first-hand experiences with time not being reversible telling you you can't reverse time but then to turn back... what do you mean? Turn back how?!}
The video for the latest Flo Rida/Nelly Furtado cash in on that film G-Force. Even though the computer generated Furtado has obviously been animated using motion-capture, you can't help be creeped out by her movements. Plus the real-life Flo Rida himself has some kind of visual effect on him that makes his skin look plasticy and strange.
Any music video made by Tool would qualify as Uncanny Valley-esque, due to the weird CGI and puppets they use in their videos.
The Concept Video for Weezer's "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" features an entire small town made up of Weezer members. Mostly this just means the members of the band dressed up in different costumes, but there are four children with the heads of the band members pasted onto them. While the effect is more natural looking than the similar Aphex Twin and The Love Guru examples, they're still at least a little unnerving.

Close Music

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.
- 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.

Close Tabletop Games

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.)
- And on that note... BabyCakes!
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.)
  - That site even has 'Come see what's growing in the Valley' on it. /shudder
- BJ Ds are certainly an area where Your Mileage May Vary on how creepy you find them. While some find them creepy, others find them cute; and most seem to skirt the edges of the valley. Not so for the apparently defunct Paper Moon Dolls; whose sole business was creating life-sized BJ Ds. Again, creepiness factor varies for most of them; but they did a line of Japanese anime-style dolls which slide rapidly down into the valley. Something that looks cute and attractive in 2d seems to really ratchet up the creepy factor when expanded into the third dimension.
McFarlane Toys tend to do this with their action figures and so do Neca.
Face Bank. Truly, nothing is as terrifying as Face Bank. AHHHHHH!◊
Baby Laugh A-Lot. Just…Baby Laugh A-Lot. *shudder*
Though it arguably isn't a toy (it's a robotic TV remote), Phillips Electronics' I Cat (not to be confused with the robot of the same name made by Apple, which is actually cute) is often cited as such. The fact that the robot's intelligence is low and it often malfunctions probably helps it earn the honor. Currently, I Cat is just a prototype, not deemed successful enough for profit.

Close Toys

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.
  - Though the ghouls are supposed to be inhuman-looking.
- Bethesda is pretty notorious among game fans for making really good games with scary bad humanoid models and animations.
- There are mods to correct that.
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.
- Ashlotte in the game itself. A CGI animated model of a realistic human-like clockwork robot is just overkill. Thankfully, her movement and voice are very human, with nothing "off" or "mechanical" about them.
  - On the other hand, some human characters suffer from these problems. Like in Tira's story mode, when she says "Can I use him? Naw, he's useless!" in that exaggerated, strained voice of hers, combined with her face locked in an unnatural Creepy Smile with equally unnatural Mouth Flaps... *shudders*
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.
- This troper never really got that impression from the turrets. They struck me more as Obliviously Evil innocents, with consciousness but sufficiently extreme naïvete and lack of familiarity with the human psyche to be unaware that gunning people down is bad. As such, to me they're more tragic than creepy.
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 it's implied isn't entirely human. His speech is littered with awkward pauses and misemphases, 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.
- G-Man's mannerisms only begin to look realistic in the Episodes — the point at which he's caught off-guard for the first time in the series. His sole scene in Episode 1 has him look genuinely confused, then genuinely angry; when he appears again in Episode 2, a touch of actual nervousness and urgency seems to be creeping into his formerly affectless voice.
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.
- All the attention to detail however can be ruined during some of the conversations were a character's head will stop too suddenly during a head turn. The living breathing character suddenly becomes an animatronic robot. Occurs most often with Garrus but happens to most characters at least once when they are in the scene but aren’t the ones speaking.
"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.
- Speaking of Silent Hill, in Silent Hill 2 there was a scene in which James encounters Maria in a jail cell. After almost a minute of in-game graphics there is a sudden animation bump, combined with the shading, makes Maria look disturbingly realistic.
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.
- Particularly Xion, whose creepiness has sometimes been mistaken for outright technical glitches. As the game goes on, though, it becomes very clear that despite the cute face, the little things that aren't quite right were very intentional. And when they all come together, we find an alcove in the Valley home to both Nightmare Fuel and Fetish Fuel.
Much like the Basement Jaxx example, Halo 3 has an easter egg of a family of either monkeys or cavemen 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 weird way they moved. They'd move faster than their legs moved, hammer stuff weirdly and generally freak you out. In fact, many old 3D games suffered from this issue.
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).
- While we're on the topic of Wario World, there's Mean Emcee, who has an incredibly garbled voice, jerky movements, and just barely human features, falls squarely into this trope.
- Not to mention the Brawl Doll. Yes, it's a giant, almost sickening looking cupid type plush toy you fight as a boss. One look at those eyes will freak you out something weird, and it apparently fires laser beams.
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.
- If you like to know its more about how come you can't blast the door but inset need a key to unlock it, any gamer with tell you of course that they've stop doing that years ago.
Whoever designed Doc Louis' eyes in the new Nintendo Wii version of Punch Out! needs to honestly be charged with something. The game itself is silly enough and cartoony, but whenever a round ends and it shows Little Mac in his corner with Doc, his eyes are always disturbingly fixed upon you... not your in-game character, but staring at the screen at YOU. And the eyes appear to follow you... *shudder*.
- Speaking of Punch-Out, there's also the Super Punch-Out protagonist's appearance in Fight Night Round 2. Dear God◊.
The crowds in pretty much any 7th-gen sports title. In the past, crowds were nothing more than a flat, multi-coloured blur, maybe with a couple of frames of 'animation' and no-one ever questioned it. Now individual crowd members can be picked out, with their own animations and perhaps rendered in 3D. Sounds great, except that wide-shots show the same 50 or so crowd members copy-pasted to fill a 60,000-seater stadium, and it just looks weird.
Mario's floating head in Mario Teaches Typing 2. Everything, from the movement of the mouth to the shape of the eyes, is slightly off, resulting in Mario looking downright creepy. It doesn't help that Mario's missing his body and he seems aware of this.
- Speaking of Mario and the Uncanny Valley, hope to God that Nintendo never renders him realistically◊
Not sure about the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 versions, but the Wii, PSP and PS 2 versions of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed have some really awkward human models. As a reviewer put it, they have pretty much a single expression and don't show any emotion, which becomes very uncomfortable in some parts of the game with high emphasis on character development.
NED, the main antagonist of Albion, is a highly developed supercomputer, that communicates with the ship's crew through an android body, that pretty much falls into this. His permanent facial expression is a blank stare. Not to mention the one occasion where it malfunctions and starts walking around aimlessly. And near the end of the game, there's an entire army of these things. Pretty creepy.
After a certain point, the human character artwork for Shin Megami Tensei took a turn for the utterly creepy. Most of the character's skins are frighteningly pale white and their eyes are quite disturbing to look at. Even if the skin isn't off, the eyes are difficult to look at.
The Characters in Brave Story New Traveller look like love dolls. It's disconcerting, to say the least. In fact, everything about this children's RPG is Frightening.
Garry's Mod tends to inadvertantly invoke this trope as you manipulate and pose your favorite Half-Life 2 characters...as flopping, corpselike ragdolls. Bonus squick is easily achieved if you import the Left 4 Dead models.

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Lampshaded in this Questionable Content strip.
- Also invoked in this strip, but we never actually see it. This is a good thing.
Many webcomics that use CGI models turn out like this. House of the Muses is a prime example. Check out the last panel of this page if you dare...

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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 UNCANNY VALLEY'D!
There's a certain Youtube channel that warps photographs of poets to look like they're mouthing readings of their poems and creates these abominations.
This dog.
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 Nightmare Fuel.
The Nico Nico Douga "Home Haruka" meme is aaaall about this trope. (You'll need a Nico Nico account to see that video. If you don't have one... lucky you.)
- A lot of things made with the MikuMikuDance software straddles the line between awesome and awesomely disturbing. What's especially fun is that the software can be used to make a model of just about anything. Case in point: this. And if you're feeling especially brave, here's the same model, dancing to Black Rock Shooter. The creator even apologizes that she couldn't get the model's eyes to stop rolling back into its skull.
  - Besides the eyes, the only creepy thing is that he is singing with a girl's voice

Close Web Original

Jay-jay the Jet Plane is made of this trope.
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 Transmutate, on the other hand...
- And the hominid characters we do see are more apelike.
- 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 other 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.
- Don't forget to mention Chancellor Palpatine.
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 deformed 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 Lisa's First Word, Homer (in order to encourage the three-year-old Bart to give up his crib, so it can be used by Lisa) builds Bart a clown-themed bed; but it turns out to be frightening instead of comforting. (Bart's resulting phrase "Can't sleep, clown will eat me" has passed into popular culture.)
- The original show has nothing on the depths into the Uncanny Valley the fans will boldly go. Michael Swaim gives us The 7 Creepiest Simpson Fan Tributes. The title is most certainly accurate.
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.)
- The Incredibles DVD had a bonus episode from the unreleased 60s series with similarly cheap animation. Mr. Incredible and Frozone complain about every corner cut.
Ferret from Static Shock, in a milder case.
Intentionally invoked in Batman The Animated Series, part two of "Heart of Steel". The robotic replacements for Gotham's citizens look perfectly normal, but move in increasingly impossible ways - such as their heads spinning around to look at things, or crouching and leaping in a terrifyingly inhuman manner.
In the Powerpuff Girls episode Knock It Off, the Big Bad creates an army of PPG imitations, but with shoddy worksmanship. The scariest ones are those who are only slightly different from the originals.
- Arguably, the Powerpuffs themselves. As the characters are designed to look ridiculously cute, they have rather big eyes, and a lack of fingers, noses, and ears. A number of jokes in the show revolve around their appearance because of this, and there's even an episode that showed what would happen if the Freak Lab Accident never occurred and girls turn out to be the Run of the Mill Girls instead, without their unique cuteness features. Now try retaining these features in a hypothetical Live Action Adaptation. Still think they'd be cute?
  - This was actually touched upon in The Movie when people viewed them as little freaks when they were first created. Though this troper still says if Warner Brothers ever does a live action movie, Tim Burton is the man for the job.

Close Western Animation

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.
The animatronics at the Disney Theme Parks can have this effect at times, especially in rides that have a large number of human animatronics like It's A Small World.
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"
- "Patrick Star"
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.
- Giorgio de Chirico would paint them directly into desolate cityscapes, to unsettling effect.
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.
- Poser porn makes me sad because it is actually a fairly sophisticated 3d modeling program that i have had to take classes in as a graphic designer.
Modern face, body shapes, and skin textures available for human models for the program Poser are often very realistic, to the point of well-done renders being briefly confusable with photos. In competently-done stills, they're well out of the Uncanny Valley. However, rendering the vaguely anime/manga-esque Aiko 4 model with realistic human skin textures instantly achieves the "Untooned" effect described above.
- And then there's Alice and her Must Eat Your Face eyes, as depicted in many of the images linked on that page.
Two words: Dancing Baby
There must be something diabolical behind the fact that the animatronics at the Disney resorts haven't been mentioned yet. The ones at the "Hall of Presidents" are especially horrible because their resemblance to real, dead people makes them seem that much more like animated corpses.
This picture◊. If you're going to remove someone's face, at least, I dunno, smooth it out? And make it one color?
- It looks like someone... like someone pulled a stocking over her head. Or she had her features surgically altered because she's on the run from the law. For doing something unimaginably horrible to innocent families. Whimper.
This claymation video. And its a childrens show. What were they thinking?
- Well, that is supposed to be Satan....
This freaking web app. It is made of do not want.
How to make yourself look like Barbie. While some people may find a Barbie doll's face a bit unsettling, most people are fine with it. This clip demonstrates what happens when you try to put a face like that on a real person.
Whatever the hell this is.
- Those would be "corrected" photos of their precious babies/moneymakers that mothers who enter their daughters in pageants pay loads of money for. I think those are usually used with entry applications. Kid beauty pageants in general are really deep in the valley...
This was the modus operandi for Leave it to Cleaver at Halloween Horror Nights. Otherwise semi-cheerful disposition offset by unnerving smiles.

Close Other

Personal experiences are available in Troper Tales: Uncanny Valley
Those ridiculously thin supermodels. What they do (Starve themselves) is incredibly unhealthy, and they don't even look pretty.
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 know something's wrong when No-Face is present and yet is not the scariest thing present.
- 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.
- Keep in mind, though, that Botox is made from the botulinum toxin, the same stuff that causes botulism.
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.
- Politicians in general. Some of them just happen to be ugly. But considering that on the whole they are constantly accused of being outright fake, it’s clear that many of them do scare people. YMMV in most all cases.
Over the course of many plastic surgeries, Michael Jackson has steadily edged deeper and deeper into the Uncanny Valley.
Manbabies.com.
- Awkwardfamilyphotos.com contains plenty of Uncannyvalley gems. One in particular would do well on Manbabies:. Not to mention a couple other frightening numbers, such as this photo featuring an Uninvited Guest, and... Pizza, anyone?
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.
  - Like street performers all over the country, some of whom wear metallic paint and clothing to resemble a statue. They mostly remain statue-still, but some may occasionally dance, or show gratitude for tips with robotic gestures.
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.
- Four words. I am iron man.
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.
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 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!◊
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.
- "Evil Singing Robot Of Death Should Be Smashed With A Hammer". I think the article is being rather kind.
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.
- In fact, the Uncanny Valley is a common objection to the project of cloning a Neanderthal.
  - Probably even worse for early Homo species and the australopithecines, which were humanlike but probably unsettlingly different at the same time (physically and mentally).
- Doubly so for Oliver the chimp and any other chimp walking on two legs. That simple act alone makes them look eerily human (I mean, even by primate standards). Ditto hairless chimps, for the same effect by a different method.
One can't◊ forget the◊ 30-year old Japanese woman◊ who had◊ plastic surgery◊, giving her the◊ appearance of a◊ Real Life anime girl◊. Oh so cute◊ and oh so creepy...
- 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! [1]◊ 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.
  - Oh absolutely. And Alec Baldwin also.
William Randolph Hearst. 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: [2]. 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.◊
- Your Mileage May Vary. He's pulling freaky-ass expressions, but that doesn't necessarily place him in the Valley.
  - If you ask me, that first picture could pass for a prosthetic face.
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.
Bunraku puppets dance in and out of the valley. What's frightening is that they don't move like any other sort of puppet, they move exactly like little tiny people.
- Noh masks, for that matter.
Joel Osteen◊. A few sustained seconds of looking at that eerie smile can produce nightmares for weeks.
Aiko, created by Le Trung from Toronto, probably belongs here. You can see her in action here.
Ryan Alexander Jenkins and Jasmine Fiore, the Canadian millionaire murderer and his victim. The pic at 2:13 of Jasmine shows the most uncanny-ness.
The Hands Resist Him◊, anyone? Not to mention the albeit brilliant Bill Stoneham's other creepy work.
Why has no one mentioned little girls in beauty pageants? If you don't know what I'm talking about, here are some highly disturbing pictures
- [3]◊
- [4]◊
- [5]◊
- [6]◊
- [7]◊
- [8]◊
3D sonograms. Between the not-quite-baby-shaped fetus and the blobby low-resolution images, they look like aliens◊ encased in carbonite◊.
Gay porn stars. Even if you are gay, many of these men look and seem so fake, even in their real-life photographs and appearances completely unconnected to their pornographic work. It may be that, since they are famous and groomed for ideal "perfect" features, they cannot be taken seriously in terms of beauty or personality. They can often look creepy, as if they are molded out of plastic or have had botched plastic surgeries. Not that people usually care if they're just trying to get off. Nude male models in photography have a better track record of avoiding this trope, as they tend to be valued more for their subtle photogenics and ability to evoke thought and feeling rather than their ability to "act" in front of video cameras.
Check out this collection of lifeless, soulless Photoshop abominations. Those glassy-eyed stares are guaranteed to keep you up tonight...
RealDolls. Disturbingly realistic sex toys for people with more money than brains. More than one person has remarked on the necrophilic overtones.
Saya the fembot.
Billy Graham◊. As if he weren't creepy enough.

Close Real Life

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.
- This is precisely why the Burger King is awesome.
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.
- Here, have a shiver.
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.
- That's Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs.
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.
- Not to mention, being an anthropomorphized piggy bank, he has a hole in his head.
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!
A new Evian ad featured babies break dancing to the Sugarhill Gang. Some found it cute, many found it incredibly creepy. The babies are CGI and look human except for a few disturbing features.
A recent commercial for Swedish Kavli had a baby who starts to dance after tasting their food. When the baby's body switches from real to CGI, its arm are noticeably thinner! The dance moves only made it more freaky, which is probably why this didn't run for long.
Until recently, the commercials for Honey Nut Cheerios had its mascot bee and friends animated in a computer-animated hive metropolis, something along the lines of a Sprite Polygon Mix. Its most recent ad cut out the middleman, which would happen to be the "sprite" part, resulting in a gang of CGI honeybees that just look awkward.
The new Palm Pre ads with Tamara Hope. The sort of cute, sort of albino girl falls squarely in the uncanny valley whenever she starts talking in that slow, deliberate way, like she's a space alien getting used to this human concept you call 'speech.'
Cartoon myself? Oh, well that sounds fu- OHCHRISTOHCHRISTOHCHRISTOHCHRISTOHCHRIST
The most recent commercial for Sun-Maid Raisins features a new CG version of the titular Sun Maid herself, and...well....we've seen her inanimate for so long, this is just..not right. So not right.

Close Commercials

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