One of the very first topics I addressed here at Skeptophilia -- only a few months after I started, in fall of 2010 -- was the idea of the uncanny valley.
The term was coined by Japanese robotics engineer Masahiro Mori way back in 1970, in his book Bukimi No Tani (不気味の谷), the title of which roughly translates to it. The idea, which you're probably familiar with, is that if you map out our emotional response to a face as a function of its proximity to a normal human face, you find a fascinating pattern. Faces very different from our own -- animal faces, stuffed toys, and stylized faces (like the famous "smiley face"), for example -- usually elicit positive, or at least neutral, responses. Normal human faces, of course, are usually viewed positively.
Where you run into trouble is when a face is kinda similar to a human face, but not similar enough. This is why clowns frequently trigger fear rather than amusement. You may recall that the animators of the 2004 movie The Polar Express ran headlong into this, when the animation of the characters, especially the Train Conductor (who was supposed to be a nice character), freaked kids out instead of charming them. Roboticists have been trying like mad to create a humanoid robot whose face doesn't elicit people to recoil with horror, with (thus far) little success.
That dip in the middle, between very non-human faces and completely human ones, is what Mori called "the uncanny valley."
Why this happens is a matter of conjecture. Some psychologists have speculated that the not-quite-human-enough faces that elicit the strongest negative reactions often have a flat affect and a mask-like quality, which might act as primal triggers warning us about people with severe mental disorders like psychosis. But the human psyche is a complex place, and it may well be that the reasons for the near-universal terror sparked by characters like The Gangers in the Doctor Who episode "The Almost People" are multifaceted.
The island is in Lake Xochimilco, south of Mexico City, and it was owned by a peculiar recluse named Don Julián Santana Barrera. Some time in the 1940s, so the story goes, Barrera found the body of a girl who had drowned in the shallows of the lake (another version is that he saw her drowning and was unable to save her). The day after she died, Barrera found a doll floating in the water, and he became convinced that it was the girl's spirit returning. So he put the doll on display, and started looking through the washed up flotsam and jetsam for more.
He found more. Then he started trading produce he'd raised with the locals for more dolls. Ultimately it became an obsession, and in the next five decades he collected over a thousand of them (along with assorted parts). The place became a site for pilgrims, who were convinced that the dolls housed the spirits of the dead. Legends arose that visitors saw the dolls moving or opening their eyes -- and that some heard them whispering to each other.
Barrera himself died in 2001 under (very) mysterious circumstances. His nephew had come to help him -- at that point he was around eighty years old -- and the two were out fishing in the lake when the old man became convinced he heard mermaids calling to him. The nephew rowed them both to shore and went to get assistance, but when he returned his uncle was face down in the water, drowned...
... at the same spot where he'd discovered the little girl's body, over fifty years earlier.
Since then, the island has been popular as a destination for dark tourism -- the attraction some people have for places associated with injury, death, or tragedy. It was the filming location for the extremely creepy music video Lady Gaga released just a month ago, "The Dead Dance."
There's no doubt that dolls fall squarely into the uncanny valley for a lot of people. Their still, unchanging expressions are right in that middle ground between being human and non-human. (Explaining the success of horror flicks like Chucky and M3gan.)
And you can see why Mexico's Island of the Dolls has the draw it does. You don't even need to believe in disembodied spirits of the dead to get the chills from it.
What astonishes me, though, is that Barrera himself wanted to live there. I mean, I'm a fairly staunch disbeliever in all things paranormal, and those things still strike me as scary as fuck.
If I ever visit Mexico, I might be persuaded to go to the island. But no way in hell would I spend the night there.
Just because I'm a skeptic doesn't mean I'm not suggestible. In fact, the case could be argued that I became a skeptic precisely because I'm so suggestible. After all, the other option was running around making little whimpering noises all the time, which is kind of counterproductive.
In any case, I'll be curious to hear what my readers think. Are you susceptible to the uncanny valley? Or resistant enough that you'd stay overnight on Isla de las Muñecas?
Maybe bring along a clown, for good measure?
Me, I'm creeped out just thinking about it.
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