Uncanny Valley/Live-Action TV

Return to the main page here.

"In Hugo’s arms, the Doctor hung bonelessly limp, as if he might suddenly flow to the floor in a puddle. Anji had never seen a human body sag like that; no human being had that sort of muscular-skeletal frame. For a frightened instant, she felt more kinship with the man with no limbs than she did with the Doctor."
 * Beginning with the third season, Modern Family has added an extremely unsettling, CGI smile to the face of Baby Lily in the opening credit montage. On first viewing, I noticed something off, and had to review again before finishing the premiere episode.
 * The Adult Swim show Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job uses this trope for comedic effect. Whenever pictures of children are displayed on the show, there's always something terribly wrong with their face. The funny thing is, it's possible for kids to actually look like that.
 * The careful use of slow-motion, freeze frame and camera zoom makes pretty much every human actor fall deep into the valley at one point or another.
 * In an episode of House, the patient, a painter, is doing a portrait of a man's wife. When the painting is done, her husband goes to look at it, and it is horribly distorted. The same patient later sees extremely disturbing doppelgangers of Taub and Thirteen as a result of the same vision distortion... the two actors were brilliantly cast by the creators of the show. The freaky almost-but-not-quite aspect is nailed perfectly.
 * While not actually eerie-looking (since he's played by a real actor) the robotic sheriff from Eureka has this effect on the townspeople, who are unnerved by him and especially by his creepily fixed smile.
 * CAN YOU POINT YOUR FINGERS AND DO THE TWIST?
 * 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.
 * Done deliberately with the Data Doctor from Back in the Red, apparently inspired by Max Headroom.
 * The first Novelization Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers notes that Holograms all have the big chrome "H" on their forehead to make it more acceptable and less creepy for your dead friend to be walking around and talking to you, as it makes it more explicit that the person you're talking to is not actually the real person.
 * Kryten mentions that his predecessor series was a notorious commercial failure because it looked so much more 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.
 * 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*
 * The Family of Blood from the "Human Nature" two-parter. Perfectly normal-looking people turned to pure terror through a combination of Verbal Tics, Creepy Monotone, unsettling facial expressions and body movements.
 * From "The Beast Below", the Smilers with their fixed expressions and rotating heads.
 * A couple of Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel have this apply to the Doctor, who is, after all, a Human Alien. One instance is after he's fainted at a sideshow:

"Their variegated pigmentation, certain small inconsistencies about their facial and bodily forms, evoked a terror in me in some quite other part than if they had been merely monsters. We do not look at a Vlopatuaran land-going octopus or a Wilikranian aerial predatiger and feel quite that fear, I fancy; it takes a man like us in most but not quite, deformed in ways we simply cannot expect, to in this particular manner fright us out our lives."
 * And one even has a character feel something of the sort applies to the Doctor's human companions, who are fairly ordinary-looking 20th-century Earthlings, as said character is a member of a much more homogeneous future human society:

"Tracy: Tell it to me in Star Wars.
 * The infamous Terrifying Pertwee.
 * In the novel 'Nuclear Time', Rory feels this way about a severed plastic robot arm the Doctor tosses to him.
 * The animated episode 'Dreamland' has a crude, stiff style of CG that makes it look unfinished and creepy.
 * In "The Lodger", there was a very strange picture on a wall... and it didn't have anything to do with the episode. You could see a cameraman in the reflection on it, though.
 * The George Lopez Show, of all shows has this in George's childhood flashbacks, which take the head of adult George and paste it onto his childhood body.
 * Naturally, it's because actually "integrated" the head into child George's body, rather than doing a cheap photoshop AFV-style.
 * Parodied brilliantly on the live action show Thirty 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 abundance of nudity mods for popular PC video games seems to indicate that people aren't so creeped out by that as they should be.
 * And of course, this explanation in a way even Tracy Jordan can understand:

Frank: All right. We like R2D2 and C3PO.

Tracy: They’re nice.

Frank: And up here, we have a real person like Han Solo.

Tracy: He acts like he doesn’t care, but he does!

Frank: But down here we have a CGI Storm Trooper or Tom Hanks in The Polar Express.

Tracy: I’m scared! Get me out of there."

""Pinocchio is broken. Its strings have been cut.""
 * The miniseries adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (the one starring Bob Hoskins) subtly uses this one to make the Australopithacines distinctly creepy.
 * Lazy Town. Specifically some of the human characters and their prosthetics. Not to mention that Robbie Rotten looks just a little too close to Bruce Campbell.
 * That's only half of it. This troper found it very hard to tell if Robbie was truly a puppet or a live actor, which disturbed him.
 * 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 Labyrinth 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.
 * Perhaps even more notable to Buffy fans is that actor Camden Toy portrayed both the Gentlemen and the Gnarl, as well as the Übervamps let loose by the First in Season 7, and the Prince of Lies in an episode of Angel. Other notable roles include Creepy Guy, Red (described in the casting announcement only as "tall" and "evil"), and Fresh Dead/Dead Raoul. Not that he's experiencing any Typecasting.
 * What about April the Robot from I Was Made To Love You? She's an in-universe example, as the main characters all slowly realize there is something wrong with the super-cheery way she talks, the way the she walks, and eventually her huge amounts of strength.
 * Max Headroom: The voice! The face! The eyes! The arrogance! (example)
 * However it doesn't completely qualify as Max is played by a live actor (although at the time, this fact was underplayed in the media as a fiction that Max was an actual CG construct was maintained for a while, though this was dropped once the TV series started and the actor started to become known on his own merits).
 * Creepier is the Max Headroom WTTW pirating incident.
 * 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.
 * This Tropette had just recently discovered Max Headroom, and instantly fell in love with the quirky idea of the show. Then, she saw the aforementioned pirating incident on YouTube. Cue her not sleeping for about a week, then deciding to watch the video to "Paranoimia" each night before bed. I'm able to sleep now, since I don't find the "real" Max creepy at all. Just that damned pirating guy!
 * And to this date, no one has caught the perpetrator, let alone learned why they did it. That makes it even worse.
 * The special 200th episode of Stargate SG-1 featured the SG-1 team as marionettes and as shows, it certainly qualifies as Uncanny Valley.
 * Human form replicators definitely qualify. They look perfectly human, and even come off as human for the first thirty seconds they appear in the series. But soon it becomes pretty clear that there's something off. Fifth comes off as much more human and is (originally at least) a sympathetic character as a result.
 * 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.
 * Another Atlantis example is the first few appearances of the Wraith. In an attempt to avert Rubber Forehead Aliens, their eyes and mouths were noticeably slightly too big (apparently with CGI), leading powerfully to this effect. It was apparently too creepy, or else just too expensive, and they abandoned it later on.
 * 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.)


 * 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.
 * In the episode "Clues," everyone on the ship but Data is knocked unconscious after going through a wormhole. He tells them they were out for only a few seconds, but strange hints that he may be lying begin to appear. Picard gets increasingly frustrated as he -- and the audience -- realize just how hard it is to figure out what's going on inside Data's head, and how unsettling that can be.
 * 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 classmate's 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.
 * Speaking of Cameron, this full-scale reproduction of her head-and-torso shot at the Terminator Exhibition in Tokyo definitely qualifies.
 * 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 worked only intermittently, leaving it looking more like a shoulder-mounted pinata.
 * 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 actors, with a mostly-to-completely CGI Abraham Lincoln. The CGI Lincoln squarely falls into the Uncanny Valley.
 * David Lynch filmed several scenes in Twin Peaks within the Black Lodge. All the apparitions 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 )
 * For some, 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. In other cases, this cartoonish defiance from a normal human's appearance drives this into the deepest part of uncanny valley.
 * The Monty Python's Flying Circus sketch "It's a Tree" features pieces of wood and plastic talking through their lips.
 * 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.
 * One episode of the season 5 of Criminal Minds has for title "The Uncanny Valley..
 * For those of you crazy curious, here are some pictures. Sorry, they somewhat overlap...
 * Craig Ferguson's craig.jpg Craig Puppet.
 * Though not alive (or meant to be alive), Buster from Myth Busters 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.
 * This is also the reason why a myth about fooling people with a mask was busted. Even after getting the best masks money could buy, Adam and Jamie couldn't convincingly fool anybody unless they stood very far away and didn't speak. Even complete strangers pointed out that upon closer inspection, something wasn't quite right about the faces they were looking at and they quickly deduced what was going on.
 * In the Aamerican version of Big Brother, at least once a season, often a veto later in the game, producers take pictures of the contestants (it can be any of them) and then morph them together into one picture. The houseguests in the competition then have to identify which two houseguests's facial features are represented in the picture. It can sometimes actually be a bit funny, such as in 10 where the one featuring Jerry (Who was in his 70s) was morphed together with another houseguest signifcantly younger than him was described as a "Demon", or rather disturbing when you see Laura in 11's mouth look significantly bigger than the rest of the face.
 * One episode of Wife Swap featured a New Jersey woman as one of the wives who owned a huge and ever-growing reborn baby dolls. She is shown carrying out a daily routine of brushing their hair, changing their diapers, and carrying them around with her constantly. She even brought one of them with her to her swap family's home, and the wife of the other family was understandably freaked out when she encountered the dolls.
 * Want an example? Look here if you dare...
 * The Seventies husband and wife mime duo "Shields and Yarnell" did a recurring bit on their variety show where they played robots.
 * The first joke in this The Colbert Report Threat Down relies on the Uncanny Valley.
 * The first appearance of the Drakh in Babylon Five were mouthless ghost-like creatures with glowing eyes that appeared distorted as though they were only partly in one place. They were later changed to be Rubber Forehead Aliens with a reptilian look, and future appearances of the mouthless "soldier" caste Drakh were more rendered solid rather than distorted.
 * Series three of Merlin features an elderly version of Merlin, portrayed by Colin Morgan in age make-up. Eerily realistic age make-up. The effect is... unnerving.
 * The educational children's show Téléfrançais has a rather...erm...uncanny puppet character named Pilote. If you're curious, start watching around 4:45 on the first episode.
 * This troper's college French class was utterly freaked out by Pilote. Talking pineapple in drag? Pas problème... AAAH, why is there a scary fake pilot puppet?! Why are the children not panicking!?!
 * The Peter Serafinowicz Show: Michael-6, a robotic talk show host.
 * The Human Being mascot from Community falls under this trope. Having been designed to have no ethically distinguishing features, it ended up being an androgynous White Mask of Doom.
 * Well, the child of the Human Being wasn't as bad.
 * On the show River Monsters, host Jeremy Wade investigated some attacks on people in Papua New Guinea. One victim told him it felt like a person was biting him. Wade eventually catches the culprit, a fish called a pacu. Native to South America, the pacu were imported about fifteen years earlier and had seriously disrupted the ecosystem. Though related to piranhas, pacu were herbivores, and their flat teeth were normally used for crushing seeds and nuts. After being transplanted, though, they were unable to find enough of their regular diet and had expanded to meat-eating, including, apparently, humans. (They were far too small to eat a human whole, but could bite off chunks, including some... painful areas). When Wade catches a big one, he pulls back its lips to reveal the teeth, which at that size were eerily human-looking.
 * Space Above and Beyond features the Silicates, robots who, based on outward appearance, are nearly indistinguishable from humans, except for two things:
 * 1) They have not been properly maintained since they Turned Against Their Masters, so bits of their "skin" have flaked off.
 * 2) All Silicates (even the Sex Bot models) have crosshairs for eyes.
 * The opening theme to Here's Lucy has always freaked me out.
 * Walking with Cavemen's human ancestors, who are actually People in Rubber Suits. Especially Australopithecus, because they are supposed to look weird, but their human proportions make them just slightly less weird than they should.
 * Gerry Anderson's puppets for Thunderbirds and other shows are creepy - Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing a live-action parody are even creepier. Or funnier.
 * The History Channel documentary Ancients Behaving Badly focuses on famous historical figures, forensically reconstructing their personalities (pathologies and all). Unfortunately, these segments always include a CGI rendering of the subject's face — which more often than not looks like an embalmed Gelfling that wants to dine on your tasty, tasty soul.
 * In the live-action The Fairly Odd Parents movie, Timmy's mom and dad are this. Despite being real people, they act a bit too cartoonish.
 * In the Japanese comedy show Vermillion Pleasure Night, the viewers are given Cathy's House.