Valley of The Dolls?

As previously noted, one of the cornerstones of horror lies in things not happening as expected. While this is principle is easy to apply in the context of fiction, why is it so true yet so seemingly difficult to explain in the context of real life?

You would be hard pressed in this day and age to find someone living in an industrialized nation who hasn’t seen a Warner Bros. or Disney cartoon. There seems, on a base level, to be an innate charm to vaguely humanoid creatures gifted with speech and independent thought. Furthermore, Humans have a tendency to assign human characteristics to animals and other non-human entities. This habit is called Anthropomorphism. One need only take a brief stroll through mythology and fable to discover that this habit permeates nearly all elements of history and human experience.

So what would happen if you house pet began to speak?

While Science Fiction is full of seemingly human entities, actual science is only now beginning to make headway towards convincing replicas of human beings. Until recently, Robots have served a functional purpose in industry and mechanics for years, but Androids (robots which function to replicate human beings) have yet to find a function, in part due to failing to actually replicate people convincingly.


Japan and South Korea, both having a cultural and industrial leaning towards technology, have become leaders in the field of robotics research and development. The Intelligent Robotics Lab of Osaka University teamed with the Kokoro Co., Ltd. To produce an android called DER 2. A complex arrangement of servomotors and pressurized air allow this machine to mimic a wide variety of human mannerisms (though it is still incapable of independent movement.) Not to be outdone, a research group with the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology, led by Baeg Moon-hong, unveiled EveR-1, a female android capable of limited speech in English and Korean, emotional display and response, as well as making and keeping eye contact.

As fascinating as these development may be, an almost inevitable reaction to any sort of humanoid automaton that replicates the actions of people is discomfort. While this seems counter-intuitive, humans seem almost hard-wired to want robots and other creations to look and behave like robots, and can only tolerate a small amount of human appearance and behavior from them.

Sigmund Freud penned an essay in 1919 entitled The Uncanny. The article expanded upon an article written in 1906 by Ernst Jentsch, which described how cognitive dissonance is sometimes caused by a sensation of an item or experience being foreign and familiar all at once. Regarding robots that behave or replicate human behavior, Mori Masahiro may have an explanation.

Mori, a roboticist coined the term Bukimi no Tani, or “The Uncanny Valley.” Mori theorized that human beings can identify and empathize with non-human entities more as they begin to look less like machines and more like organic creatures. However, the closer this thing comes close to perfect replication of the human form, something dramatic occurs. As a non-human begins to become indistinguishable from an actual human (or by extrapolation, if a corpse, which is already considered mildly unsettling, where to suddenly reanimate and crave the flesh of the living) humans stop view it as a robot acting like a person, but instead begin to view it as a human who is acting strangely, even behaving incorrectly. On a graph, subjective reaction to one of the entities can be measured as rising to a peak; as the entity grows more likable, the line grows vertically. Suddenly, the line drops due to being disturbed by the android or entity, causing a “valley” in the chart.

The “Uncanny Valley” reaction begs a question: Why do humans continue to strive toward perfecting a human replica when such a large section of the population will invariably be repulsed by the results? Perhaps the desire to assign an anthropomorphic quality to our surroundings and world is an inevitability. Humans being locked into our own perceptions and notions of consciousness need to project that framework onto reality. So when an entity that “should behave as we do” does not, we are horrified.

From this, two more questions emerge. At what point does this sense of disgust stop? Will we ever outgrow this sensation? Perhaps, the fear lies at this: what if we were to discover a soul in the machine, or perhaps, that we do not have really have one of our own.