Hello!
At the end of our last Body Horror session (sob), I mentioned that the Comma Press Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction has opened for submissions on the theme of The Uncanny - I’ll pop the link here too for those interested!
First coined by Sigmund Freud in his paper ‘The Uncanny’, the term refers to a psychological experience that unsettles and feels frightening in a way that is “strangely familiar”. Freud explains the etymology of the ‘Uncanny’ as steaming from the German word ‘unheimlich’, meaning ‘un-home’.
Some things that are deemed ‘Uncanny’ include:
Inanimate objects coming to life
Thoughts appearing to have an effect in the real world
Seeing you double/ doppelganger
Repetitions
Representations of death
Mimicry
Dolls
Mirrors
Dreams blurring the line of reality
Are you going to enter?
Terri-Jane