Skip to content

Mood · mood_uncanny

Uncanny

A register in which the familiar is made strange. TWO TIER 1 SOURCES, one of which gives a definition with an author and a date: “Sigmund Freud wrote a celebrated essay on ’The Uncanny’ (1919), which he defined as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’.” The British Library states the resulting effect: “simultaneously frightening, unfamiliar and yet also strangely familiar”. Tate names it as something a whole movement pursued: “The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny , the disregarded and the unconventional.”
Thin
Medium confidenceresearched

No links2 sources · T1

What the research says

mood
Category
threatening
Keywords
uncanny; unheimlich; familiar made strange
Visual traits
a recognisable subject with one property wrong; ordinary objects in impossible relation
Conflicts or cautions
ART-HISTORICAL AND LITERARY, NOT TATTOO-DOMAIN. Neither cited source mentions tattooing. The transfer is inference. It is registered because style_surrealist already exists in this corpus and had no register to point at.

Provenance

2 resolved

  • Gothic motifs (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    John Bowen, The British Library

    British Library Discovering Literature article by Professor John Bowen. Verbatim: Gothic characters "find themselves in a strange place; somewhere other, different, mysterious"; the mode reaches for "the sublime, to shock us out of the limits of our everyday lives with the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation". Fetched from the British Library's .cn mirror because bl.uk paths for this article did not resolve during this task.

    cultural institution · retrieved 2026-08-28

  • Art Terms: Surrealism (opens in a new tab)

    Tier 1

    Tate

    Dates the movement to 1924 and attributes its founding to Andre Breton, quoting the Surrealist Manifesto definition 'pure psychic automatism'. Names dream worlds and psychological tension, the uncanny (the familiar made strange), automatism, and unexpected juxtaposition as its characteristic devices. An art-historical source; it makes no claim about tattooing.

    museum · retrieved 2026-08-28

Related concepts

0 links

No relationship in the corpus touches Uncanny. The graph is sparse; the type listings carry browsing.