Unintentional Uncanny Valley / Music Videos

People should not have a smile like this!

Alternative

• 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.
• 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.
• Gorillaz
  • 2D is described in-universe as a Bishōnen type, but he's decidedly creepy. His arms and legs are just slightly too long for his movements to look natural. According to the backstory he has eight-ball fractures in both eyes, rendering them totally black, but if you don't know this it looks like he has no eyes at all, and his name doesn't help — he was nicknamed 2D, short for "Two Dents", after he suffered the two car accidents which wrecked his eyes. Add to this his missing two front teeth, and his smile is pure horror, made worse by the fact that he is still kinda cute. It's particularly noticeable in the videos for "Feel Good Inc" and "Dirty Harry".
  • Underscored in the video for Stylo. 3D Murdoc, 2D and malfunctioning cyborg Noodle are creepy as hell. Then again, Cyborg Noodle is creepy under the best of circumstances.
    • Don't forget the Boogie Man. The way he nearly glides over the earth to get to the cop....brrrr.
  • The Superfast Jellyfish's unchanging smiles and balloon-like movements, even after being microwaved, are weirdly frightening. The side-to-side flopping motion is somehow reminiscent of a hanging victim, and the crazily-smiling guy eating them in the video really does not help.
  • Cyborg Noodle just became even more frightening. The Uncanny Valley has ensured us that this monster will never leave our heads. Why? It's Murdoc's fault. This is completely Nightmare Fuel for unattached face and creepy as fuck smile. DO NOT WATCH IN THE DARK. And as of Melancholy Hill, the Superfast Jellyfish are no longer emotionless jelly bags, and express fear as they rather quickly get sucked up into the jets of the Gorillaz submarine. Even that though has its own creep factor.
  • The music video for "Tranz" starts out innocently enough, but as it goes on, it starts to feel... off. The usually stoic Russel is wearing a big, happy grin, Genki Girl Noodle is unusually subdued, and 2D? His face goes from emotionless to annoyed, which is quite a shift after his happy behavior in "Humility". In the end of the video, we get treated to some Deranged Animation from the minds behind Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, featuring a floppy computer-animated 2D swallowing himself, a lumpy Claymation 2D head with snot coming out of his nose, and finally, 2D melting. It's creepy enough on its own, but when you remember that 2D is implied to either be possessed or have had his soul harvested...
• In the video for Panic! at the Disco's song "Emperor's New Clothes", frontman Brendon Urie slowly transforms into a demonic version of himself throughout the course of the video. The demon looks just enough like Brendon to the point where this could be qualified as an example of this trope.
• 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. And apart from that its teeth are all identical, they're very realistic and humanlike, and it’s pupils can dilate. Plus, it's depicted bleeding and being treated in a hospital, which creates a creepily lifelike effect.
• Björk's strange angular motions in her music videos.
• The video for The Smashing Pumpkins' song "Ava Adore" feature Billy Corgan looking like Nosferatu in that creepy black mu-mu of his moving around in unsettling, jerky motions throughout.
• Linkin Park's music video for "Pts.OF.Athrty" (a remix of their earlier song, Points of Authority) has stunning CGI of an apparent war between aliens and robots commanded by disembodied human heads. All of this is rendered in a quasi-realistic style... up until the close up shot of one of the aforementioned heads' face (the lead singer). Beautifully-textured skin... flat, unshaded cartoon eyes reminiscent of The Sims. The rest of the video is difficult to enjoy.
• Kate Bush's acting in her music videos, with wide eyes and odd, flowing movements, looks very off.
• The music video for Bat Country by Avenged Sevenfold has weird stuff happening all over, although none of it is over the top. Justified in that it's a song based on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is about drugs.
• FKA twigs effectively applies this to her music video for Water Me. It displays FKA twigs with her face edited to have eyes slightly too large and too close to the nose and lips, while her head ticks side to side to the beat of the song, quite jarringly. She also displays this in her other works, including a commercial for Google Glasses.
• Radiohead's "song" 'Fitter Happier' uses a cold, monotone computer-generated voice to read off the lyrics. The lyrics alone are depressing but the voice makes it even more offputting.
  • Thom uses a vocoder in the song Kid A as well, which is unnerving to some listeners.
  • Furthermore, 'Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box', the opening track of Amnesiac has a lot of autotune. It's barely noticeable at first, as the only purpose it serves is to make Thom's voice sound cold and emotionless, but after a few listens something just feels... off.
• The dancing apes in Coldplay's "The Adventure Of A Lifetime" look really bizarre when bipedal and very unnatural when not.

Childrens

• This video from The Wiggles. Those puppets are incredibly unsettling, especially with those dead, crystalline eyes.

Christian Rock

• The puppet-people in the video for Falls Apart by Thousand Foot Krutch.
• The masks used to have the background dancers playing senior citizens toward the end of the music video for Amy Grant's 1984 track "It's Not a Song" easily qualify.

Country

• The music video for "Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy" by Big & Rich features a "mannequin" that's creepily realistic because it isn't actually a mannequin. (The "mannequin" is actually singer Sarah Darling.)

Electronic

• Lower-quality instrument samples, such as those used in cheaper MIDI synths, can evoke this effect. Obvious synthesizers sound cool since they aren't trying to resemble real instruments, and high-quality piano/string samples can fool trained pianists, but crappy imitations of real instruments can fall squarely into the uncanny valley of synthesis.
• The music video for Basement Jaxx's "Where's Your Head At" stars a bunch of adorable monkeys... with the band member's faces. The faces just look wrong.
  • Not to mention the singing baboon... or the mutated dog.
• Just about any Vocaloid song that doesn't have to do with happiness and ice cream involves a mix of this trope with Mind Screw (see Wide Knowledge of Late, Madness; Alice Human Sacrifice; and Dark Woods Circus for more details).
  • As if that wasn't enough, a fan-made Hatsune Miku, the most popular Vocaloid, into HRI-1, a real-life "realistic" robot that doesn't even look like her (it's on the web somewhere). This shit is just overkill.
    • You wouldn't happen to be referring to this thing, would you?
    • That too, but it's beaten by this one.
    • And then there's her live hologram concert.
  • Vocaloid songs in general, regardless of the content, are just robotic and twangy enough to fall into the Uncanny Valley. For some songs, the voice sounds perfectly human (or close enough to be out of the valley), but then there is just that one note where the creator didn't quite tune the voice right...
  • A special mention should be given to Circle You, Circle You/Kagome Kagome (the Miku & Luka version). The images in the video are disturbing in and of themselves, but certain ways Miku and Luka's voice match up falls right into this trope.
  • Miku herself (despite being real now) is also featured in this video, Machine Muzik. Watch and know the truth about Vocaloid...
  • Also, the trailer for Hatsune Miku: Project Diva 2. Realistically-moving characters with anime faces, rubber skin, and plastic hair are extremely unsettling.
  • KAITO's box art◊ might be the closest to Uncanny Valley if compared to the others', most noticeably his eyes and torso.
    • To summarise, Vocaloids as an entity are polarising to the public, and as shown in things like 'Kids react to Hatsune Miku', this is primarily because they have trouble getting over the logic of something that is not human not only being the face of a performance, but being the principal reason people went to the concert in the first place. It doesn't help that Vocaloid voices are still very robotic and Auto-tuned, stopping them being human and dropping them into the valley for those who do not like or see the point of them. Plus the fear of a robot uprising, but that's a whole other kettle of fish ...
• The faces and almost anything else in Aphex Twin's music videos. Just watch for yourself.
• And who could forget Kraftwerk? They were defined by this trope!
  • Case in point: "The Robots". German version here. It's actually pretty impressive with their ability to stand that still during a performance.
  • Not to mention this very early (1986) attempt at 3D computer-generated human heads, which float in the middle of the screen in the video for "Musique Non-Stop".
  • There's a story in Karl Bartos' memoir about the band being pulled over by a cop once while on tour, and the cop nearly having a heart attack when he opened the back of the truck and found the robotic dummy versions of the band members that were used in concerts, thinking they were corpses.
• Rwandan/Belgian singer Stromae's song Papaoutai (a phonetic rendering of "Papa, où t'es?" or "Daddy, where are you?" in French) is based on his real-life experience of having lost his father in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, although it is obscured by a catchy EDM beat. In the video, a young boy representing Stromae runs around his neighborhood looking for his father, but all he finds is a Stepford Smiler Demonic Dummy. That's creepy enough, but it becomes even creepier when one realizes that the "dummy" is actually Stromae himself wearing makeup that makes him look eerily like an Auton. Hard to tell whether this is more Nightmare Fuel or Tear Jerker. Taken further in this live performance.
  • His music video for "Quand c'est?" has him dancing in a very creepy, almost inhuman manner, and seen only in silhouette. There are even a few very brief and easy-to-miss moments when he has an extra arm or leg, which only makes it that much creepier.
• The music video of "Rainbow Bubble" by Butterfly for the Taiwanese online game Fairyland 2 has an unsettling method in deforming their live action members to the game's scenes. Just the Roger Rabbit Effect in reverse plus the creepy deformations in conjunction with the game's cartoony characters.
• Mindless Self Indulgence's Shut Me Up video. Everything in the video is just a bit off, and the guy's movements are so exaggerated and such that it's like watching a cartoon with realistic people.
• Covenant - Bullet
• The music video for Keep it Goin' Louder, by Major Lazer, has four, *ahem*, women, whose lips are enlarged and whose eyes are brought closer together and lowered so they they are almost touching their noses. Possibly Played for Laughs, as it helps give the video a surreal feel.
• The ending of the video of LFO's "Freak", which is the scariest part of an already very off video. After we see a group of little Asian girls dancing erratically to the song, another girl shows up and gets in a fight over a teddy bear that ends with that girl being thrown to the ground. The video ends with her sitting up, revealing a face that looks just CGI enough to perfectly encompass this trope, and smiling directly at the camera.
• "Spacer Woman" by Charlie features blue, fish-like humanoid aliens with semi-realistic faces, large foreheads, and giant red bulbous eyes◊. The overall weird imagery of the video doesn't really detract from the creepiness much.

Experimental

• Laurie Anderson loves this trope. It's probably most notable in her video for "Sharkey's Day," in which she wears an eerie Chroma Key mask with fake white eyes and articulated lips that move as she sings. Also, any time she uses the "Big Voice" (her own voice electronically treated to sound male).
• Some of the stranger music genres such as avant-retard and lowercase can invoke this seeing as they sound nothing like what usually springs to mind when you think of music, in some places not even conforming to the usual rules of music.
• Steam Powered Giraffe is a band consisting of three human performers portraying robots. They invoke this trope rather effectively through their movements, which are choreographed to look as convincingly robotic as possible. Or rather, choreographed to look like robots who are trying their hardest to look as convincingly human as possible, but are not quite managing it. This, coupled with their glitching and occasional outright breakdowns, can make them very jarring to watch if you aren't used to them.
  • That being said, once you've adjusted and learned more about the world they're in and their backstory, these can become rather heartwarming, or even outright adorable.

Funk

• The robots in Herbie Hancock's "Rockit" video.

Indie

• 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.

J-Pop

• Puffy AmiYumi's video for "Hataraku Otoko" (the theme song of Hataraki Man). We get close-ups of lips and backs of heads, but The Reveal comes in at 1:10 and scares you half to death. You can go here to see some pictures from the video.
  • Even before then, you can just tell there's something...wrong with how the backs of their heads look.
• The video for HEART by group_inou features animated characters with lovingly rendered detail but (purposely) terrible anatomy.
• The music video for Sakanaction's "Bach no Senritsu o Yoru ni Kiita Sei Desu" has the main singer dancing with some pretty creepy life-sized replicas of himself.

Metal

• Cradle of Filth takes this up to 11 with their video for "From Cradle to Enslave." Danger, NSFW.
• The band members' costumes in the music video for Wyona's Big Brown Beaver by Primus. They were so cumbersome that they had to mime the song at half its original speed to get the performance down correctly.
• Any music video made by tool would qualify as Uncanny Valley-esque, due to the weird CGI and puppets they use in their videos.
• Epica embraced this trope as its own on "Requiem For The Indifferent".
• The "mile-wide-grin" from Warrant's video for "Cherry Pie".

New Wave

• The extensive use of cheap Halloween masks in Devo's early oeuvre apply, notably Booji Boy.
  • The Secret Agent Man video features the guys wearing shiny translucent masks that, combined with their performances style, make them look like mannequins that have come mostly to life.

Pop

• The music video for E.T. by Katy Perry ft. Kanye West. When they show close-ups of her face with the obvious CGI and makeup, it's CREEPY AS HELL! That scary albino alien dude also sends some chills. But the icing on the cake is when Katy removes her robe/dress at the end and inexplicably reveals that she has a FAUN BODY! It was frightening to see those thin hoofed legs. Who ever expected THAT?
• David Guetta's "Turn Me On". It contains the trifecta of Uncanny Valley nightmares, including half formed, yet still animated, robots (a la AI), a terrifying amount of CGI, and truly abominable doll-faced humans. Most likely one of the most terrifying music videos in existence.
• The remixed version of Mike Posner's "I Took a Pill in Ibiza". At the beginning of the video, Posner takes the titular pill, and the ensuing trip causes his head to appear as a giant, dead-eyed, papier-mache head. However, this could be seen as a Justified Trope, as the song itself is about how Posner is desperately trying to appear cool, but whatever fame he has/had is just making him feel empty inside.
• In 1986, BBC Two released a stop-motion music video of Jackie Wilson's 1957 hit "Reet Petite". The animators gave Jackie a puffy and pronounced face. Add the fact that he morphs into various objects, and the end result can be pretty unnerving.
• Any of Lady Gaga's videos.
  • ESPECIALLY "Bad Romance" and "Alejandro", in which she uses computer effects to enlarge and shrink her eyes. It's really unsettling to see her with these huge bug eyes◊ in one video, and these squinted tiny ones◊ in another.

Prog Rock

• The "Supermassive Black Hole" music video for the band Muse has people with digitally projected faces. And people in skinsuits with weird textures dancing around weirdly. You can just imagine...
  • Also on the subject of Muse, Feeling Good may be even worse.
  • The video for "Plug in Baby" falls under it in certain parts. Hint: Watch the ladies, particularly near the end...
  • How about any of the CGI-Made videos for Will of the People?
    • The glassy-eyed, expressionless, perpetually-smiling old man. in "Won't Stand Down".
    • EVERYONE in "Compliance.
• Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree is in love with this trope, and the video for his song Index, from his latest solo album Grace For Drowning, proves it most of all. It IS the trope! Steven himself even seems to look like he's one of the mannequins surrounding him, given how unnaturally still he's sitting as he sings. The death-march-like beat and sadistic lyrics only add to the Nightmare Fuel..
• Mastodon's instrumental "Pendulous Skin" is a strange musical example. A casual listener would assume that the song features Troy Sanders and Brent Hinds scatting over the song's instrumental backing. However, the "vocal" sounds are apparently entirely synthesized, and there are no vocals on the song. The resulting product sounds uncannily like vocals, but a listener will strain to understand what is being said - because, of course, nothing is being said. "Bladecatcher", another instrumental with synthesized effects that sound like vocals, also gets this to some extent, although the "vocal" sounds are much stranger on this one, more resembling the work of a band like Melt-Banana.
• Genesis' Land of Confusion is this.
• The music videos for "Steam" and "Kiss That Frog" by Peter Gabriel have some truly nightmarish CGI, with this moment from the former being especially terrifying.
• The masked children in Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" who get grinded into pink goo. You almost feel relieved when they rip off the masks towards the end of the video.

Punk

• Enter Shikari's video for Thumper is a mix of a "regular" (albeit Deliberately Monochrome) Performance Video and an exaggerated cartoon version of the band performing. It's... deeply unsettling to say the least.
• Does It Offend You, Yeah's Weird Science music video.

Rap

• 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 plasticky and strange.
• The music video for the Black Eyed Peas' "Boom Boom Pow."
• Coachella 2012 gave us a holographic version of Tupac Shakur that joined Dr. Dre & Snoop Dogg onstage to perform a couple of his songs. The realness of the projection made it beyond creepy.
• Tyler, The Creator's video IFHY gives us more human/doll people. And is creepy as hell.
• The music video for Kanye West's "Black Skin Head" invokes this by having most of the video focus on a realistic yet imperfect computer generated Kanye West model. It looks like him, but is just off enough to feel uncanny.

R&B

• The three Christina Aguileras from the Candyman music video, anyone? It's only really when they're all side by side, because they all look so animated, since they're supposed to be tributes to hand-drawn pinups, obviously, so what we essentially have is three identical three-dimensional ink people.
  • Although they created the triplet effect by filming Christina Aguilera three times from the same angles and compositing the shots together. The Uncanny Valley effect might be due to the fact that you don't expect three different people, triplets or not, to look exactly the same except for hair color, along with the fact that they could obviously only pretend to interact with each other.

Rock

• The animatronic Lou Reed in "No Money Down". Pulling off the rubber flesh almost reduces the effect.
• Face Dances part 2, by Pete Townshend. Good song, weird video. Almost as weird as the singer's nose.

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