Georgia State University Perimeter College)
What makes something eerie? Eeriness is a property both of real life situations (an empty
airport at three in the morning, strange noises or appearances, abandoned places or things,
and very old artifacts) and artistic works that represent eeriness in their content (as in works
of literature, television and film), or evoke it through other means (eerie music). Most
discussions of eeriness in philosophical and other literature focus on eeriness in fiction while
neglecting the eeriness of real life situations. I am to provide a theory of eeriness that
encompasses both categories, since plausibly what makes an occurrence in a story eerie is
secondary to what makes situations eerie in real life.
I consider three candidate theories of eeriness, from Sigmund Freud, Mark Fisher, and Mark
Windsor. The literature on the topic mainly addresses what Freud called ‘the uncanny’ (or
unheimlich). Freud’s account ties the uncanny to his psychoanalytic theories; he suggests
that the uncanny is the result of something that reminds one of an earlier stage in
psychological development, which is familiar but has been repressed. Fisher holds that the
eerie is the result of presence where absence should be, or absence where presence should
be. Windsor argues that the uncanny is the result of the “uncertainty about what is real
cause by an apparent impossibility” (2019, 59). None of these accounts is, however,
sufficiently general to capture everything that elicits eerie feelings.
Freud’s account does not explain why situations that do not explicitly invoke the magical or
supernatural in any way are eerie. Twilight might prompt one to feel as though supernatural
things might be possible, but the question why it does remains unanswered. And while
many eerie things do involve presence where absence should be or absence where presence
should be, not all of them do (for example, eerie music). Finally, not all eerie things involve
apparent impossibilities. Eerie lighting, distorted music, or empty places that are usually
busy do not feature apparent impossibilities: this is too strong. Rather, I will argue, what
makes things eerie is the judgment that there is or might be an invisible threat in the
situation.
On cognitive and partly cognitive theories of emotion, each emotion includes a
characteristic judgment about how things are, in addition, perhaps, to other features
(associated feelings and dispositions). I argue that the characteristic judgment of eeriness is
that there might be an invisible threat. On this view, the feeling of eeriness is related to the
feeling of ominousness, which I take to be the feeling that something dangerous could be
lurking in the vicinity. We find situations eerie when it seems as though a threat we can’t see
might be hiding somewhere within, and art is eerie when it depicts situations like this or
evokes the mood through non-representational means.
In some cases, the invisible threat is epistemic. What is striking about the theories of the
uncanny I examine and reject is that they have an epistemic component: Windsor defines
the uncanny as a kind of uncertainty about what is real, and Freud suggests that part of
what is uncanny about uncanny things is that they are familiar but also unfamiliar. Many
thought experiments in epistemology are eerie: for example, the thought that the world
could seem exactly as it does but be an illusion produced in you by an evil genius, or the
idea that we could all be brains in a vat and the world would seem as it does.
My account of eeriness explains why these thought experiments often strike us as eerie.
One type of threat that might be invisibly lurking around the corners of our everyday world
might be the possibility that the world we know is not the real world—a threat, that is, to
the security of our most basic beliefs about reality. The evil genius, like a ghost, or like the
reason for the eerie absence of people after a virus or a zombie takeover, is a threat that is
distant and hard—or perhaps impossible—to detect. The unknown or mysterious can strike us as eerie for a similar reason. Artifacts from the stone age like the Loewenmensch (lion-
man) are eerie both because they are mysterious—we do not know what they were for—and
as a result they seem both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The combination of
familiarity and unfamiliarity, which Freud originally noticed as part of the uncanny, is
epistemically disorienting: it represents a threat to our epistemic security, but a subtle one.
It is not that we have discovered we were wrong about the world, or even that we might be,
but that something is slightly off.
This theory has the benefit of explaining why many different types of thing can seem eerie.
It explains the eeriness of situations involving spooky lighting (bad things could be lurking
there), absent people (where did they go?), as well as doppelgangers and epistemic thought
experiments (epistemic threats). It also explains why music can be eerie. Distortion and low-
fi techniques in music, together with reverberation, can produce the sense that the music is
deteriorating and being played in a place that is empty and distant, thus evoking eerie
situations. If I am right, eeriness might be a form of epistemic emotion—a kind of mild fear
directed at possible threats to our security, physical or epistemic.
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