Sandbox / Uncanny Valley IUEO

Comic Books

• Marvel Universe: The Vision — a "synthezoid", a robot built out of synthetic organs and tissues — is often described as being this, and this is especially emphasized in his 2015 miniseries. The Vision and his artificial family look mostly like humans and have emotions, but their emotional responses seem "off" compared to most people (sometimes muted to the extreme, sometimes well beyond what would be considered normal), and their bodies feel "off" when touched (one character likens his handshake to a warm sandwich bag).

Fan Works

• A Speeding Bullet: Night and Fog are so boring and repetitive — even having the same conversation every morning — that they give Taylor the creeps.
• Under the Northern Lights: Spike perceives the nidhoggs as this — they're superficially very similar to dragons like himself, but with a too-flat face, too-small eyes, no limbs, and a pebbled skin that looks like scales but isn't, resulting a very unsettling feeling of subverted familiarity.

Film — Animation

• Princess Mononoke: The Great Forest Spirit has a stylized, doll-like face that's almost human but not quite, mounted on a realistic deer-like body. This serves to emphasize how otherworldly the creature is.
• Wreck-It Ralph: Turbo, the lead character in Turbo Time, is a game character that's human, but due to the graphic limitations of his 8-bit game he has grey skin, an oversized head, bright yellow teeth (which are all exactly the same size and shape, and perfectly straight so that they all seem to be one piece), glowing, sunken yellow eyes ringed with dark circles, a pudgy body, and skinny limbs, giving him the appearance of a zombie. In-universe, this caused his game to lose popularity to later, more visually polished titles.

Film — Live-Action

• The Abyss: Some of the scenes of Coffey's descent into madness are shown with the film running backwards, so that his movements look odd in a way that the audience can't quite put their finger on.
• I, Robot: Detective Spooner finds that the new robot models having faces makes them creepier than the older, purely mechanical versions.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Spider-Man is entirely human in appearance, but his powers and the way he casually uses them to move in ways that humans don't often unsettle other characters. In Civil War, seeing Peter Wall Crawl is enough to break through Bucky Barnes' normal stoic behavior and make him asks what the hell he even is. Falcon asks if the webs are actually coming out Spidey's body, clearly unnerved. Even when he's just being normal, Peter's body is just unnatural — for instance, when the Spider Sense kicks in◊ and his forearm hairs stand on end.
• Mean Girls: Cady finds Mrs. George to fall deep into the Valley, thanks to her plastic surgery. The sight of her fake breasts approaching Cady is met with "Psycho" Strings, and Cady is clearly unnerved by her lack of reaction to her little chihuahua gnawing on her tit.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Judge Doom appearance and behavior are all calculated to be just slightly off and unsettling as foreshadowing of his actually being an Ax-Crazy toon disguised as a human.
  1. He is at least half a head taller than any other character.
  2. He never blinks. Christopher Lloyd only blinked between takes or when his face was out of frame.
  3. Every smile is a Slasher Smile.
  4. He has a lot more strength than an average man. He is shown ripping the industrial dip barrel open with one hand.
  5. His skin is pale and lifeless.
  6. His vocal cadence is either too clipped or too drawn out to be normal. He talks, just, Like, THIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSS!

Literature

• Eisenhorn:
  • Alizabeth Bequin is a pariah, a human born with no psychic presence whatsoever. Other humans find her naturally unsettling and offputting for reasons they can't quite explain, which has resulted in her living a life of constant vagrancy due to her inability to form lasting social bonds.
  • Bequin: Alizabeth herself finds the Blackwards dolls to be deeply unsettling due to how highly detailed and lifelike they are, such as the girl doll having a wig of actual human hair. She finds them even more unsettling when they come to life and attack her.
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: This is a general moral rule in-universe. Humans can be good or evil, and obviously nonhuman beings can be good or evil, but humanlike beings that aren't actually humans — such as truly nonhuman humanoids, or things that used to be human, or the like — are almost invariably bad and to be avoided.
  Mr. Beaver: There may be two views about Humans (meaning no offence to the present company). But there's no two views about things that look like Humans and aren't.
  Mrs. Beaver: I've known good dwarfs.
  Mr. Beaver: So've I, now you come to speak of it, but precious few, and they were the ones least like men. But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that's going to be Human and isn't yet, or used to be Human once and isn't now, or ought to be Human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.
• New Series Adventures The Clockwise Man: Due to Melissa's information on how humans looked being inaccurate, her face is described as a "parody of humanity", with eyes that seem too human.
• Sector General: One of the series's main alien species are the kelgians, who are human-sized furry mammalian caterpillars, with constantly mobile fur that expresses their emotions. In one of the later novels, a character is introduced from a different species, which has a similar body plan but black, immobile fur. The kelgians find him intensely unsettling.
• The Silent War: Serdra is an immortal in her 130s, with a youthful face yet somehow radiates age. Her nearly emotionless demeanour and constantly intense gaze disturbs people, and she tends to let her pupil do the talking to muggles.
• Sunshine: Vampires are described in-universe as human-shaped but wrong in an inherently threatening way, with unnaturally fluid movements, slightly inhuman voices, and a persistent smell of fresh blood. However, they can suppress it well enough to pass for human when they want.

Live-Action TV

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: This is the explicit reason why Radcliffe used a real person's appearance when building Aida; starting from scratch always resulted in this trope. Personality-wise, she still dances on the edge of this trope by way of her Dissonant Serenity, although not enough for people who aren't robotics experts to figure out why.
• Black Mirror: In "Be Right Back", a woman buys an artificial meat effigy of her dead husband coded with a facsimile of his personality based on his social media posts. It starts to have this effect on her after a while, when she begins to pick up on things like the fact that he doesn't breathe, and that instead of sleeping he lies next to her with his eyes open, and how the pores and creases on his skin are completely two-dimensional and "bump-mapped".
• Daredevil (2015): Season 3 deliberately invokes this whenever we see Dex impersonating Daredevil as part of a False Flag Operation on Wilson Fisk's orders. When Matt wears the red Daredevil suit in seasons 1 and 2, he is like a silent guardian and moves in an agile, ninja-like manner. When Dex is wearing a replica of this in season 3, the cinematography puts a lot of emphasis on the mask's empty statue-like eyes, and he walks in a robotic manner.
• Extant: John says that the uncanny valley issue is not with his robots' appearance — which he's solved, as they cannot be outwardly distinguished from humans. Rather it's their behavior, which is still inhuman.

Eureka: The robotic sheriff has this effect on the townspeople, who are unnerved by him and especially by his creepily fixed smile.

• Red Dwarf: Kryten mentions that his predecessor series was a notorious commercial failure because it looked so human that it made humans uncomfortable, while Kryten's "novelty eraser-shaped head" (as Rimmer puts it) is sufficiently far enough from human appearance to avoid the valley effect.
• Stargate Atlantis: FRAN, the replicator created by Rodney McKay, acts perfectly human, friendly, but is willing to unquestioningly obey any order (including being ordered to commit suicide) and is even slightly enthusiastic about it. The other characters (including as McKay himself) find her very unsettling.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: Manei Domini agents are cyborgs who have been given a variety of implants, most of which are subdermal in nature. In theory any one high-quality implant is largely hidden, as is the case for standard characters who may need them. Too many, however, and they become subtly inhuman — agents with subdermal armor or strength enhancers have bodies that look more like a Rob Liefeld drawing than anything human, while agents with secret bio-weapon upgrades have odd patterns of head movement and speech because the location of the implants in their throats and mouths makes them sound "off". The tabletop roleplaying game Mechwarrior reflects this by forcing such affected characters to take unavoidable flaws that reduce their Charisma rating and make it harder to interact with others.
• Deadlands: The Whateleys are an entire family of uncanny valley residents, thanks to a combination of demonic influence to gain magical powers and a family tree that's really more of a family stunted shrub. Player character Whateleys in Reloaded take a noticeable Charisma penalty to represent that they freak everyone around them out. (Unless they're female, in which case they can choose to instead be "exotic" and get a Charisma bonus.)
• Dungeons & Dragons: The Elan race's skin is too perfect, their hair too red. This is because they are aberrations that merely look human. The game represents this by giving them an inherent Charisma penalty.
• Eclipse Phase: "Uncanny Valley" is the name of a trait that can be taken in exchange for Customization Points. It means that your character's body (or "morph," in the game's lingo) is designed to look human (and not like a spider robot or an evolved monkey or something) and doesn't quite make the grade. It has the effect of giving a -10 penalty on all social interactions with humans.
• Pathfinder: Changelings, the Half-Human Hybrid offspring of hags, are Always Female and conventionally attractive, but their otherworldly demeanor and minor deformities (like heterochromia) make them disconcerting to be around.

• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Blanks, people who are born without a soul, look and act like completely regular people, but others are subconsciously aware of their lack of a soul, and the sheer unnaturalness of it causes them to instinctively hate and fear Blanks. Even if being a Blank makes you immune to the Warp, it won't do much good when you get lynched by an angry mob.
  • In some material, the Eldar — literal Space Elves and the most humanoid alien species in the setting — are described as looking just enough like humans that their nonhuman traits stand out all the more, making them seem much more unsettling than obviously inhuman beings. The way they move has specifically been singled out in the fiction; it's so smooth and elegant that it wraps back to boneless and creepy.
• The World of Darkness:
  • Beast: The Primordial: Ingamu, like all Beasts, draw from a strain of fears, and their fear is of "the other". As such, they carry around a sense that they just aren't right... which is driven home by their Horrors, which often appear human but has something distinctly ''off' about them.
  • Mage: The Awakening: In Night Horrors: The Unbidden, there's a genetic ailment called the Ractain Strain, actually the result of a semi-successful incursion by an Abyssal entity called the Ractain. Those possessing the Strain have leonine features, lobeless, flat ears, and a general sense of something being off. This imposes a penalty to Social rolls, as people find them very offputting. (Taking the Striking Looks merit can help negate the penalty by making the unusual features of being a Strain bearer look more exotic than creepy.) They especially bother werewolves, as their scent is completely wrong; as such, werewolves absolutely refuse to associate with Ractain Strain bearers, and thus they can't be wolf-blooded.
  • Promethean: The Created: 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.
  • Vampire: The Requiem:
    • As vampires 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 by default, 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.