The Creep

You've all witnessed and been witnessed by the Creep, but what attributes compose this unsettling character? Why do we fear the creep and what, indeed, are we to make of the Creep in the mirror? Join Robert and Joe for an autopsy of this most unsavory archetype.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
today we're gonna be talking about creeps. Yes, about creeps, creepiness,
the nature of creepiness, and what makes creeps creepy. And

(00:25):
maybe in the end we will find a way to
love the creep too, because there's a little bit of
a creep in all of us. Yes, this will give
everyone the chance to connect with their inner creep. And
I think also like rethink their creep analysis. They're creep
judgments that they've passed uh uh in in previous times. Okay, so, Robert,
I want to test our intuitions a little bit about

(00:47):
creepiness by running a few scenarios by you. Because creep
creep is a word we apply intuitively, creepy is a
word we imply intuitively. But sometimes it's hard to make
a distinction, like what is creeping us? What is a
creep and how is it different than like a scary
guy or a terrifying situation? Yeah, a creep a creeper

(01:07):
if you will creeping uh is it's sometimes referred. Okay,
let me know what you think about this. You're standing
in line at the bank and a man with a
hunting rifle runs in the door, aims the rifle straight
at your face and shouts at everybody in the room freeze,
hands up. Is that creepy? Not creepy? That's terrifying, scary, traumatic,

(01:27):
but not creepy. I totally agree, not creepy at all. Okay,
here's another one. You go out for a walk with
your dog and when you get back home, somebody has
taped a handwritten note to your front door that says
why do you take such long walks? That I could
see that being? That is bull's eye creepy to me.
It's but I wonder if that goes beyond creepy and

(01:48):
it's like outright scary because under under what scenario is
that a valid act by somebody? Is that under under
for what reason would that be possibly be okay for
someone to leave that note on your door? Well, I mean,
creepy things aren't necessarily okay. I mean we're just testing
our intuitions. Come on, surely your gut says that's creepy?

(02:10):
Mine does? I've I think that would be like hard creepy.
This would be this would be creepy bordering on frightening,
because I'm gonna immediately be concerned about my surroundings. I'm
gonna be I'm gonna start looking for dead rabbits and
uh and so forth. Okay, I got another one. Your
company has been downsizing recently. You arrive at work one

(02:30):
day to receive an email from your boss that just says,
please come see me in my office first thing this morning.
Is that creepy? It's not creepy. Certainly anxiety producing, but
not not creepy, right story even, but not creepy. Obviously,
there's something that can be a strong indicator of anxiety.
It can even be kind of ambiguous in a way,

(02:51):
but that's not creepy. Okay. So how about you're at
a funeral for a close friends recently dead relative, and
as you approach the open casket to pay your risk specs,
the person in the casket opens her eyes and starts screaming.
Not creepy, No, No, that's outright terrifying and I'm probably
losing my mind, right, Okay, one more. You're on a

(03:12):
train or a bus, uh, and a man comes and
sits down next to you. He begins rummaging around in
his backpack, and out of the backpack he produces a
doll and then sits there in his seat brushing the
doll's hair. Is that creepy? I think it depends entirely
how into the brushing he is. Like, because I've been
having written The Train quite a bit, you do see
some strange behaviors now and then, but sometimes it's just

(03:34):
the the attitude of the person can sell you on it.
So I can easily imagine a dude who's just kind
of like tired, and he like pulls a doll out
and he's combing its hair. And if the vibe is
this is just something this guy does every day. He
has to do it. I don't know why. Maybe his
for his job, he has to have this this doll
properly groomed. Right, Maybe he's a professional doll groomer. Yeah,
so if it If that's the case, I would say

(03:56):
not creepy. However, if he's getting it out and like
lovingly stroking its hair and whispering to it while he
u while he grooms it, then yes, that would be creepy. Yeah.
What if he's just singing a little bit. Yeah, singing
does that enhance the creepiness if it's like a lullaby?
I guess? Yeah? What if he's singing bon Jovi? Less creepy?
I guess. This is the thing. It gets difficult and

(04:17):
you start you're you're trying to find the figure out
the why behind a scenario. What's up with this individual?
Why are they doing the thing that they're doing, and
why are they behaving like this? Why do they dressed
like this? And your mind's just just crunching it, processing
and as fast as as as it can, and then
you have to decide creepy or not creepy? Right, Okay,

(04:38):
so all these things that they're gonna get some kind
of fear response like we talked about, but they're not
all creepy. And likewise, the creep as a person is
a particular figure, but different than a monster, or maybe
different than a dangerous person or a scary guy or
a predator. Even though we very strongly have this idea

(04:58):
of what a creep is, though it may be very
ambiguous to us. In the big hazy thing, right, and
the creep, especially in fiction, the creep may turn out
to be monster. The creep may turn out to be hero.
And example that instantly comes to mind Boo Radley from
To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh, perfect creepy character. But he
ends up it ends up not being the threat and

(05:19):
ends up saving the day. So you think he's a creep,
but then he turns out to be a good guy.
Is he still a creep after you know he's a
good guy? No, because there, for the most part not,
I would guess, because the threat analysis has been fully computated.
He's proven himself to be a non creep. Okay, well,
let's get into the literary history of the creep a

(05:42):
little bit. First of all, I was wondering how long
has the word creepy been in English. It it seems
to get a lot more mileage than it ever has before,
but from what I could tell, it dates back at
least to Charles Dickens, who some sources have alleged coined
the term, and it appears in David Copperfield. Did you
ever read the copper Field? I never have? Yeah, So
eighteen forty nine, Dickens writes of a character named Mrs Gummage,

(06:06):
which is a great creepy name. Dickens as great at
those quote. She was constantly complaining of the cold and
of its occasioning a visitation in her back, which she
called the creeps. Okay, so it's not it. It's a
little bit removed from our current usage of the word.
Yeah exactly. So uh, this means like a physical sensation,

(06:27):
and it's mostly unrelated to the way we use it now.
But I do want to make a side note that Dickens,
by the way, is full of great creeps, like of
any author in English, there's creeps everywhere and they're great.
Who's the child catcher in Oliver Oliver? In Oliver Twist,
I can't remember childcatcher? Yeah, or I keep there are
a lot of I remember in Uh. In Oliver Twist,

(06:50):
it describes describes Noah Claypool as eel like I think
he's a creep. Man, I'm blanking on the name of
this character. I'm sure someone will remind Yeah. But by now,
of course, the creeps, creepiness and of course the person
who is a creep has come to mean something very different,
right And from my experience, the concept of creepiness is

(07:11):
utterly pervasive and everyday conversation, we we talk about it
all the time. The creep is a standard type of
person we encounter and under the wrong circumstances or with
a bit of bad luck or awkward behavior, we are
all ourselves sometimes the creep. Yeah. I think this is
an important thing to drive home. No matter how handsome
or suave you happen to think you are, no matter
how harmless you think your appearance or demeanor happens to be,

(07:35):
no matter how chill you are, you have come off
as a creep at some point in the past. Absolutely,
you have acted weird. We've all acted weird. Sometimes it's creepy,
but we definitely do live in the age of creepiness.
This is something that a couple of writers were going
to talk about today have alluded to. But I decided
to do a Google Ingram search for creepy, you know

(07:56):
the Ingram viewer where it'll it'll chart the usage of
a word about printed literature across a long period of time.
And so I looked at the word creepy from the
r eighteen hundred until two thousand eight, and it's interesting
there's sort of a rising and falling bell curve of
creepy usage from about nineteen hundred to nineteen forty and

(08:17):
then creepy goes dormant through the fifties and sixties. I
wonder why that is. But then around nineteen seventy nineteen
eighty it begins to rise again. And then there is
this dramatic, precipitous spike way above the norm coming up
to the two thousand's. So for some reason, the millennium
is the millennium of creepiness. Well that sounds about right.

(08:39):
But maybe we can get a better idea of what
the creep is, who the creep is if we just
look at some great examples of creeps for for context. Sure, um,
while start off by mentioning that the name of the
character from Oliver Twist came to mind, and that's Fagan. Fagan. Oh,
of course Fagan a creep. Though I don't know if
Fagan's a creep. Noah Claypools are creep, but Fagan, I remember, see.

(09:01):
I remember being in a musical, like a community theater
musical version of Oliver and our our drama teacher played
Fagan and I felt like he did a very creepy
take on Fagan. So that's the one that's that's stuck
in my mind. He was great at it. Wait, I
guess when you think about the details of it, it
is truly creepy. He's this guy who collects an army
of little children who he Yeah, yeah, he's kind of

(09:24):
a creep. But but certainly there are some more iconic
creeps that instantly come to mind. So have you seen
the Lonely Island video for Do the Creep? Yes? Was
it snl or uh It's well, they sort of came
out of snl okay and then they did this album
with all these videos. Yeah. Yeah, it's got uh Andy
Sandberg and Nicki Minaj and Nicki Minaj that's a guest

(09:46):
stuff spot in it as a female creep, which we
can come back to. But then also John Waters introduces
it and they're kind of dressed like young John Waters
in this video as they're they're doing the creek, they're
they're taking on these anerisms of a very creepy male individual,
a guy who's got a pencil mustache and invades your

(10:06):
personal space. Yeah, it will come back to John Waters
in a in a bit too. But I feel like
he's an individual who has embraced his creepiness and thus
transcended it. Yes, like he's adorable now. Yeah, so it's
kind of an interesting area there. In a way, it's
like the more you know a creep either either it's
going to firmly establish their creepiness or it's going to
dissolve them a bit and dissolve the creepiness. Right, nobody

(10:28):
ever remains the same amount of creepy they seemed at first.
It either gets better or gets worse. That's that's some
sound sound advice there. Um for me. There's a well,
there's an actor by the name of Lucky Yates who
some of the anyone who listens or rather watches Archer
maybe familiar with with him because he does one of
the voices on that show. Does Dr Creeker does a

(10:51):
doctor of character. But he he also has a character,
and I don't know that he does this character anymore,
but he did for a while here in the Atlanta area.
He did this character of the Fiend and the theme
would would host various events such as a late night
horror creepy show, puppet show, and various puppet slams in
the area. And uh and this was kind of a
like imagine like a little bit of Vincent Price, a

(11:12):
little bit of little Richard all sort of dashed together
and that was the fiend. This does not sound like
a creep to me. This sounds like a like a
a suave dude, suave but a little threatening like kind
of that's the thing. You're not really sure if he's threatening,
but he certainly came off as uh is a little

(11:34):
bit creepy, kind of a pencil than mustache going on,
as I recall, and also kind of a a pan
sexual aura. Um. Other characters, well, first of all, most characters.
I think that Peter Lori play Peter Lori, who what
a great creep he was in Casablanca as he creep? Yeah,
he's kind of a creep. Yeah, I have a hard
time remembering him not but I guess in like Twenty

(11:55):
Leagues under the Sea wasn't a creep and uh, and
I guess in some movies he plays more of an
outright monster type character. This is true of some actors.
There are people who get type cast as creeps. And
I would have to introduce the name of a guy
who I greatly love and respect as an actor, but
he's always a creep. Tom Noonan God bless him. Oh yes,

(12:18):
tom noonon Is is always I can't think of a
non creepy tom Noon and Roll, and I wonder what
it's like to be tom Noon. I mean, I don't
know anything about him personally. I'm sure he is just
a wonderfully sweet, great guy, you know. I I can't
imagine that he's actually a creep in real life. But
what's it like to be that guy who's always cast
as a creep because he's perfect for it? Right? Because

(12:40):
he was the bad guy in RoboCop two, the drug
dealer who ends up inside the machine. He was the
great Red Dragon in Man Hunter? Yes, who else was?
He's in an episode of The X Files where he
plays like a child murderer. He was a creepy priest
on an episode of Louis Yeah, and he's also in
House of the Devil, playing a world endingly creepy role. Well.

(13:03):
One thing is I guess interesting to point out about
character actors is character actors often have kind of a
unique look, maybe even a slightly grotesque look. And then
that is that is blown evermore out of a proportion
by either acting opposite perfect looking starring humanoid individuals, or

(13:24):
just you know, having increasingly creepy settings makeup etcetera. So
I've got a creep for us. Yeah. Uh. One of
the writers that we were reading in preparation for this episode,
a cultural critic named Adam Kotsko, wrote this piece called
nice to Meet You in New Inquiry, and he expanded
it into a book about creepiness. But he calls attention

(13:45):
to the Burger King King. Oh yes, right, the advertising
phenomenon beginning in like the mid two thousands of the
Creepy King, which is Burger King's lurking mascot. I don't know, Robert,
I put some links in the in our notes to
these videos. Did you go back and watch these? Yeah,
we watched at least one of them. I remember them
making the rounds back back in the day, and everyone

(14:07):
embraced this creep factor exactly, so they got great word
of mouth. It was sort of a viral marketing sensation,
except I don't think it made anybody want to eat
Burger King. But the most common version of this type
of commercial is somebody gets freaked out because they discover
the Burger King. Who's this guy in a king outfit

(14:28):
with a unmoving, smiling king mask. The mask itself is
kind of reminiscent of the the anonymous v for Vendetta
mask sort of, except it's got this big grin. Um, yeah, yeah,
it's it's pretty awful. But they discovered somebody in the
commercial discovers the King is like watching them or leaning

(14:52):
over their bed or staring at them from somewhere, and
they get creeped out rightly because the King is creepy.
But then they're anxiety is calmed because the King offers
them some disgusting Burger King products. Uh, well, tell me this.
I know we're both fans of of this particular film,
or at least treatments of this film. But Torgo from

(15:14):
Manos the Hands of Faith, Torgo is the ultimate creep.
If there is one creep to list, it is Torgo.
If you haven't seen this movie, it was a it
was a great hit on Mystery Science Theater three thousand.
But it was a film produced in El Paso, Texas
in the nineteen sixties, and it has this character in
it who's kind of I mean, what can you You

(15:34):
don't know much about him in the movie. He's just
a guy with very large knees who kind of talks
like this. That's a good Torgo, like apparently he was
supposed to be a satyr. I think so, but it's
not really. The sader effects are not great. So he
just looks like he has enormous weird legs and he
shuffles about and he's helpful sometimes, you know, but very

(15:59):
very very cree be. Yeah, never tally inappropriate behavior, right,
and but never completely feels like a threat. Oh no,
later in the but early on, like I'm thinking, when
like the Famili's first encounters him, he's he's just carrying luggage, yes,
and just eating up lots of lots of screen time. Okay,

(16:19):
we we can't do too manymore, but at one I
gotta mention you ever seen Crinkles, the clown from the
nineteen sixties post sugar rice Crinkles commercial. I have not,
and I knows you put the now I noticed you
put the link in the notes and I didn't click
on it. Well, that that's worth a look. It's this
clown who's eating cereal. And I think part of what's
creepy about it is the production of the commercial. So

(16:41):
it's not even all the clown clowns get a bad rap.
We can talk about clowns, but I have to admit
he is kind of creepy looking, but it's the production
of the commercial that does not have like rapid editing
like commercials do now. So there are scenes of this
clown just eating cereal and taking a long time to
say anything after he has a bite, and it's quite creepy.

(17:06):
I think the silence makes it creepier. Okay, well, I
will definitely have to watch that and creep myself out. Um.
One that comes to my mind instantly too is riff Raff,
played by Richard O'Brien in Rocky HRR Picture Show. And
I guess really most characters that Richard O'Brien plays fall
into that creepy role because he's see another Tom Noonan type. Yeah, yeah,

(17:27):
he has this natural Will you remember Dark City he
played the what Mr Hand as one of the strangers. Yeah,
so he's he definitely pops up in my mind. Is
both a riff Raff is a creepy character, but then
Richard O'Brien himself is kind of I think I think
it would be fair to say he is a proud
creep as well. And uh you know, I also from

(17:48):
a personal note, I have to think back to the
monster science videos that have done here for how stuff
works where I play the character Dr Anton Jessup. Um, wait,
that was you that. I know it was such a
performance it's hard, too hard to believe. But yes, that
was actually made Joe, and uh, you know, and it's

(18:09):
a very two dimensional character. I didn't when really that's
the thing about a creep. A creep is two dimensional.
Once they become three dimensional, there's something infinitely worse or
something infinitely more human. But but we did try to
implement greasy hair, overly enthusiastic nature, poor posture, excessive gesticulation,

(18:32):
excessive smiling, lack of boundaries, pale skin, obsessiveness. Yeah, and
and as I say these things, I also have to realize,
like a lot of these are they're not They're not
too far removed, probably from how I am in real life.
So I have to come back to what we said
earlier about no matter you know, how you think you
carry yourself in in our world, you've probably come off

(18:54):
as a creeper. So whatever I'm trying to achieve with
Dr Anton Jessup, people have probably seen me in public
and thought exactly the same thing with me. So in
many cases, it may be the difference between normal person
and a creep is just a difference in some mannerisms
and grooming. Yeah, and I think the who is observing
you and you know what moment have they caught you in? Okay?

(19:17):
So one thing you might have noticed with us talking
about all these examples so far is that I think
every single one of them we mentioned is male. Yes,
so is creepiness inherently a male property? Is there such
a thing as a lady creep? Or culturally do we
just tend to assume if you're talking about a creep,

(19:37):
that creep is a man, And if you're talking about
somebody being creepy, you're probably referring to a person who
is male. This is a certainly a topic that it's
that's explored in some of the literature we've looked at,
and it it does seem to be this double standard
that exposes a lot of our a lot of the
sexual politics and our culture. That Yeah, I mean, I

(19:58):
don't even have to to elaborate on it too much,
but you are I found that you you are kind
of It pains to come up with good examples of
even a fictional creepy female. Um, the best that I
can come up with is clearly going to be Jerry
Blank from Strangers with Candy. Now, I've never seen Stranger,

(20:18):
so you got to explain Jerry Blank to me. Okay.
So this was a character played by Amy Sadaris and
the show also featured Stephen Colbert. It's one of the teachers,
but it was like an after school special on the show.
Jerry is um an older x con whose returned to
an actual high school and it's taking high school classes

(20:40):
alongside more or less real teenagers. Quite plausible. Yeah, but
she's acting like a teenager as well, So there's a
there's a lot of grotesque body humor. Uh you know,
Jerry's this older lady. Sadaris wore a fat suit to
play the role. She's always making these these funny twisted faces.

(21:01):
But she's also pans sexually aggressive, I guess you'd say,
And she's generally and generally inappropriate ways. She's also a
little bit racist, and that comes out in in what
she's talking about. Most of the time, she makes terrible choices.
But yet even in this comedy, we find ourselves caring
about her, like we know in a way they achieve

(21:22):
something special with Jerry because we care about Jerry we
know enough about Jerry and granted it's a comic character,
it's an unreal character, but she is still kind of
a grotesque character, and she's still a creepy character. I
think how much of that do you think is the
character and how much is just what Amy Sadaris brings
to it. Oh, I mean, it's hard to separate the

(21:43):
two because it's yeah, it's so much of it is
just Amy Sadaris is wonderful, twitchy performance. It's really one
of the great comedic performances of all time. You know,
Amy Sadaris actually plays a kind of creepy character in
Kimmy Schmidt as well. Oh yeah, she's like the Lackey character, right, yeah, yeah,
And that's interesting. We'll come back to another lackey in

(22:03):
a bit. So you mentioned Rocky Horror Picture Show riff
Raff Richard O'Brien, but there are some lady creeps in
that as well. There are and those were some other
examples that came to mind, So particularly Colombia and Magenta
from Rocky Are Picture Show, who are kind of who
kind of lackeys of riff Raff and uh uh and
uh and Frank and further and and I bring them

(22:26):
up because they're both definitely female fictional characters that come
off as creepy intentionally, so and we'll ignore the fact
that they're both technical I think they're one of them
is technically an alien. But but I always found that
the key with the characters both creepy and attractive. So,
if anything, their otherness, their creepiness is eroticized, I think,

(22:47):
so that the sense of danger that you get from
them is not based on physical deformity, but like they're
sort of countercultural aspects there. Yeah, I guess you could
say goffinus to a certain extent. And also their their
sexual freedom, especially when when they're juxtaposed to Brad and Janet,
who are like the ultimate straight people. Like that's that's

(23:09):
kind of like everything that works or doesn't work in
Rocky Hard depending on your your your viewpoint, UH stems
from an encounter between squares between norms and UH and
complete fringe individuals. Oh yeah, well, I mean in Rocky Horror,
the creepiness is liberating. It's a liberated sort of heroic
creepiness that is contrasted to this horrible norminus. All right, well,

(23:33):
you know we've rolled through some examples here, so I
think we should probably take a quick break and when
we come back we will get into the science of creepiness.
We'll get into what the what study, what studies one
study in particular, have to say about our criteria for creepiness.
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we've talked about how one of the problems here is
that there's a lot of uh, ambiguity and subjectivity and
how we define the idea of the creep Lots of

(24:59):
people will probably agree on what's a creepy situation, what
which person is a creep? But what what what are
the actual criteria? Yeah, I mean it's so subjective. One
of the articles I was looking at was the Age
of the Age of Creepiness by Nathan Heller, published in
The New Yorker and uh he and he brings up
a number of fictional characters as thought experiments. Here, for instance,

(25:23):
he says, is John Travolta creepy as a disco predator
in Saturday Night Fever? Hard to say? Is he creepy
as a weathered black clad gentleman who leers at women
while fondling their chins. Yes, very much and now forever more?
What change? He's of course referring to Uh, classic John
Travolta versus modern John Travolta. And does modern John Travolta

(25:46):
affect the way you feel about classic John Travolta? Yeah?
And I don't know, like men at the time, did
anyone would anyone dare say? Is John Travolta creepy and
satura Saturday night to fever? Or is that merely us
looking at current John travol To and then looking backwards
through time? And it brings up the question of like,
how does the suaveness of the dude inform whether or

(26:08):
not you think he's creepy? Yeah. Like another example that
Heller brings up is Don Draper from Madman. Don Draper
is a suave character. Uh. John Ham is a very
handsome actor, and we get to know a lot about
his complexities and his dark side, and you know what's
good in him, But he's he's definitely a creeper. Uh

(26:28):
some of the time, maybe a lot of the time.
But how do you how do you actually categorize it?
When is he a creep and when is he uh endearing?
In that book we mentioned Creepiness by Adam Cootsko. He
also argues that creepy types are haunting due to their
quote peculiar power of attraction. So our eyes are drawn
to the creep. You know, how can you how can

(26:49):
you not look at the creep You can't let them
just disappear into the background because they're capturing your attention. Yeah,
you you have to process who and what they are.
Though he's primarily focused on fictional characters right like on TV.
So I think it's time to look at a study
that will actually quantify what makes a creep uh. And
so this study is called on the Nature of Creepiness

(27:12):
and it's published in New Ideas in Psychology this year,
and the researchers, Frank McAndrew and Sarah Kinkey tried for
the first time that we know of in the history
of science, to take an empirical and quantified look at
the experience of creepiness and how it relates to usage
of the word. And I think this is really interesting

(27:34):
because lots of scientists have studied fear, anxiety and all
that and creepiness as we've been talking about. Is this
seemingly universal and utterly conversationally pervasive topic, but until now
it hasn't really been studied on its own to look
at what makes it unique. Yeah, it's been it's been
the twilight, everyone's setting the light in the dark. That's

(27:56):
a that's a very nice way of putting it. But anyway,
So I want to quote their mission statements sort of
what what they set out to do. Quote. It is
the goal of this paper to introduce a theoretical perspective
on the common psychological experience of feeling creeped out and
to uncover the cues that we use to label other
people as creepy. So two main questions, what does it

(28:19):
mean to be creeped out? And who's creepy? Okay, So
McAndrew and ken Ki they're uh, they're they're sort of working.
Assumption is that we have this internal creepiness detector that
is a defense system warning us against some kind of threat.
And they based this on research indicating things like that
creepy interactions literally make us feel the chills, uh, and

(28:43):
that other psychological research has associated feelings of literal coldness
with other types of threats, such as the social threat
triggered by the experience of social exclusion. Um. But it's
not just a warning against a threat because simply observing
common usage. As we talked about at the very beginning
of this episode, you would not describe an overtly terrify

(29:04):
terrifying encounter as creepy. If a friend tells you, uh,
he was chased down the street by a maniac with
a chainsaw, that is not creepy. Creepy is what if
there was a guy standing across the street staring at you,
that's probably creepy, right. Yeah. It's kind of like if
you're walking down the street and you're trying to decide
whether to remain on this side of the street or

(29:25):
to cross over and continue on the other side. Is
the individual on this side of the street are they
like karate punching the air and like beating trash cans
with something that would be more overtly threatening, And you
would say, I choose not to walk on that side
of the street. If it's just somebody out there like
feeding pigeons or reading a newspaper, You're like, no problem,
I walked by people doing that all the time. Not

(29:47):
a threat. It's that person who's kind of shifty that
person who you you can't quite get a read on.
What if it's a guy just sitting on the sidewalk
revving a wood chipper but not putting anything in it.
M hmmm, depends how much woods around. I guess that's
again it's I'm gonna have to look for more contextual quotes,
will come back to it. Okay, So the authors they
offer a hypothesis explaining the nature of creepiness, which is that, um,

(30:12):
the distinct feature that makes something creepy is ambiguity, meaning
a lack of certainty about whether someone or something is threatening,
or a lack of certainty about the nature of the threat. Um.
So already I can hear that. Okay, that that's making
sense to me. Creepiness involves some kind of uh feeling

(30:33):
of not being sure how to react to something. But
then they've got an additional hypothesis. Creepiness may be related
to the concept of in evolutionary psychology of agency detection.
Now we've talked about agency detection on the show before. Um,
sort of having an overactive or hyperactive agency detection means
that if you're walking down the road and you hear

(30:56):
some leaves wrestling, you say who's there instead of just assuming, well,
that's just the wind. I don't even need to look, right,
And why would this be favored evolutionarily, Well, false false
positives don't cost you much checking to see who's there
when nobody's there. That's not a big risk to take.
But false negatives can get you killed if it wrestles
and you don't look. You know, one in a million times,

(31:18):
that might be the maniac with the chainsaw. Yeah, it's
a type one errorsus a type two error. And nature
is going to select for freaking out a little bit
too much over things that are not a threat. Right,
So they say that our tendency is to sort of
over value cautiousness in potentially threatening situations, which could lead
to the experience of creepiness. You know, this guy here,
he hasn't done anything overtly dangerous or threatening. You're just

(31:41):
getting some cues that's set off that over sensitive threat alarm,
and it keeps you on guard. And that feeling of
creepiness is the biological sensation of being kept on guard.
All right. Now, They've got four explicit hypotheses in the
paper that they want to test through their their experiment,
which is going to be in the form of a

(32:02):
of a big survey to get people's attitudes on creepiness.
So the first hypothesis is, h if creepiness communicates a threat,
males are going to be more likely to be perceived
as creepy than females simply since males are more violent
and physically threatening to more people. Makes sense. Uh. Second hypothesis, UH,
females are going to be more likely than males to

(32:24):
perceive some sort of sexual threat from a creepy person. Okay, okay,
I understand that too. Third hypothesis, there are certainly they're
gonna be certain occupations that will be perceived as more
creepy than other ones, like occupations that signal a fascination
with what they call threatening stimuli like death or non

(32:45):
normative sex, unacceptable types of sex. And and that that
one that particular description I don't doubt at all. But
it also it really underlines the problematic, contextual, and and
individual aspects of UH of that the threat analysis that's
going on, like what is normal sex exactly to to

(33:06):
to any given individual right, it's going to be based
on the you know, it's gonna very person to person
it is your is the character here walking you know,
through an Amish town or they're walking down the streets
of nineteen seventies New York and a Scorsese film. You know, Yeah,
some bad lieutenants are creepier than others. And then their
last hypothesis, since they hypothesize that creepiness is about uncertainty, Uh,

(33:31):
they're gonna say that non normative nonverbal behavior, so weird
mannerisms and behaviors and actions or characteristics associated with unpredictability
will be positively associated with perceptions of creepiness. So that's
uh sort of to say that acting weird and acting unusual,
acting unpredictable is going to be associated with creepiness. Okay, yeah,

(33:55):
because because there is like shiftiness is creepiness for the
most part. Right, Yeah, So what are their methods? How
are they going to test this? Well, they admit that
this uh, this first research, since you know, creepiness hasn't
really been studied this way before. This is mostly exploratory,
so they're just trying to get some places to start
test the waters, figure out the depths, and then it's uh,

(34:17):
it's future studies and meta analysis that will give us
perhaps some real understanding exactly. So in this study, it
was one thousand, three d forty one individuals heavily weighted
towards females. There were a thousand, twenty nine females and
three hundred and twelve males, ranging an age from eighteen
to seventy seven, the main age of about twenty nine,

(34:38):
and they were all recruited online to respond to a
survey for quote, a study about creepiness. I wonder if
people who are interested in answering questions about creepiness have
a non standard view of creepiness. That's always a concern
with research, right exactly, And they admit that in their study.
They talk about the some of the limitations of their
methods at the end of the paper, and you can

(35:00):
mention those in a bit. Uh one. One other problem
that they mentioned is that they wish that they had
gotten data on the participants country of origin. They do
not have that. They believe the sample is primarily American
but contained a significant portion of international participants. But we
don't know, so we shouldn't really consider that um at
least for the purpose of this study. Exactly. As we'll

(35:21):
get into a bit. I I have some some strong
feelings about the Nate the role of this absolutely Yeah,
well I think creepiness is going to be highly culturally determined.
So yes. Um, So, here's the first part of the study.
You get in there, imagine you're participating in this study.
The first thing is a forced choice question, is a
creepy person more likely to be male or female? Well,

(35:43):
male is going to be the the answer they're going
to give. Survey says you are absolutely correct. The result
was point three percent of respondents thought that creepy people
were much more likely to be males than females. Unquote.
So also, males and females were in almost perfectly well
agreement that males were more likely to be creepy. So yes.

(36:03):
When we asked earlier, is creepin as a male issue,
it really seems like it is. Men and women agree
that men are generally the creeps. Then they get to
the next section. The next session is a scenario that
they're prompted to imagine. So it goes like this quote,
imagine a close friend of yours whose judgment you trust, Robert,
have you got the close friend in mind? Okay, a

(36:25):
close friend of mine. Now imagine that this friend tells
you that she or he just met someone for the
first time and tells you that the person was creepy. Okay.
After reading the prompt, these participants, they're given a list
of forty four behaviors and physical traits. Just a couple
of examples had lots of tattoos or never looked your

(36:46):
friend in the eye, and they're asked to rate the
likelihood on a scale of one to five, one being
not likely at all, five being very likely that the
creep from the friends creep encounter exhibited these traits. And
as you can expect, some traits were considered much creepier
than others. So they say, and the results that that

(37:06):
there are some things highly correlated to creepiness that people
gave the answer for here. One of them was this
big composite variable that they put together out of these
appearance and nonverbal behaviors traits that people rated as creepy,
such as the person stood too close to your friend,
the person had greasy hair, the person had a peculiar smile,

(37:27):
the person had bulging eyes, and things like that. Though
I kind of like bulging eyes, but anyway, and then
they go on to say also other things that were
rated as creepy in this section where being of the
opposite sex as the friend, though they think this is
probably due to the predominantly female sample in the study
being extremely thin. That's strange. I don't usually think of

(37:49):
that as a creepy trait, but well, I guess it
comes into what's extremely thin? Yeah, so extremely I guess. So. Yeah.
But even it, like we're getting into judgment hall is
based on someone's physical appearance, right, But I mean that's
how the mind works. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean I
think this explicitly calls out a lot of unfair, prejudicial attitudes, right,

(38:10):
a lot of these things. I mean, there's nothing wrong
with having greasy hair, right, No, I mean that's not
threatening in itself. I mean it it depending on the
context and the culture. Like greased back, slicked back hair
could be the height of fashion like that, it shows
that you were exceedingly well groomed. In other scenarios you
can afford the special pomade. Yeah, you're you're you're slicked back,

(38:31):
you're dapper dan man, you know. But other times it
just means that your hair is greasy and you haven't
taken care of yourself. So it it varies. It depends
what the fashion is, what the uh, what the individual's
expectations are, right, But of course they're testing people's attitudes,
and people's attitudes aren't necessarily always so enlightened. But anyway,

(38:52):
So going on from that, another thing that's uh that's
cited as not looking the interaction partner in the eye.
If somebody's like, you know, not just not make an
eye contact, staring at the floor, maybe asking to take
a picture of the interaction partner. I can see that
watching people before interacting with them. This, I think this

(39:13):
is going to be very significant. Asking about details of
one's personal life, having a mental illness, there's another prejudicial attitude,
I guess, uh, talking about his or her own personal life,
displaying too much or too little emotion, being older, and
steering the conversation towards sex. On the other hand, I

(39:34):
was just wondering, what are the least creepy descriptors, Like,
what did they rate the lowest? Uh? These include was
a child. Okay, that's funny because I can think of
lots of creepy children, but they're usually in movies and stuff. Yeah,
they're they're doing something that's out of context and unchildlike
and then also was fashionably dressed, talked a lot about clothes.

(39:57):
These are these are interesting, like the fashionably s like,
I wonder, like how much of it is the weight
of the scenario that the individual is is bringing to mind,
like they're imagining like a bar setting perhaps, and then
they would the impeccably dressed kind of I'm guessing to
go back to Saturday Night Live. I'm thinking that the
Roxbury guys, right, are they fashionably dressed? Um? But they

(40:19):
are creeps. They are creeps and they they are they
are Yeah, we should have mentioned them earlier because they
are invading personal space there there. They seem to have
put way too much thought into their fashion, whether or
not their fashion actually lines up with what is uh
currently culturally the norm. Okay, next part of the thing.

(40:40):
They also looked at occupations, right, same thing, rate rate
and occupation on the scale of one to five. How
creepy is it? This was really this is really interesting.
This is one of my favorite parts of the study
because we end up seeing, like the their scale of
the professions that came up creepy, the less the least creepy.
The creepiest is the clown of course, the poor clown

(41:03):
right up there with like undertakers and the individuals we
mentioned earlier people engaged in uh some sort of sexual business.
The four that were significantly higher than the mean were
the clown, the taxidermists, the sex shop owner, and the
funeral directory. But one of these is not like the other.

(41:23):
I mean, what's wrong with clowns other than the fact
that you don't like the way they look? Yeah? Well,
I think the taxidermist one, too, is one where it
totally depends on your setting. Like if you're talking about
rural Tennessee. Uh, but the taxidermists, they're just doing their thing.
They're just stuffing those deer heads and those fish and all.
That's just a part of your life. Taxidermist in the
big city slightly different vibe going on. But they the

(41:47):
clown is ever problematic, and it's is kind of a
unique intry here. We should do a whole episode sometime
on the maligned clown. Yeah, I would love to, because
I'm very much of the mind that this we've kind
of convinced ourselves that clowns are creepy. Yes, there are
clown examples that are avertly creepy. But we've kind of
been telling ourselves the same creepy clown joke over and

(42:09):
over again until we can't see anything else. But I digress. No,
I think you're exactly right. I think a lot of
clown fear is performative. Though at the same time I
acknowledge sometimes clowns can be creepy. But why why is
this a recently emergent phenomenon. You don't hear people talking
about clowns being creepy hundred years ago. Yeah, clowns were great.
Clowns were the the entertainment of choice for young and

(42:32):
old alike. Uh. And here's the thing. People often say, Oh, well,
the clown is creepy because the clown is like a
false face and you don't really know what's behind it.
And yet the least creepy profession on this scale was
the meteorologist. And and I get the same vibe off
of like most meteorologists like he you know, kind of
the standard newscaster type of person. Here is someone who

(42:52):
I really can't get a read on because they're putting
out this demeanor. You know. The funny thing is I
I know of some specific creep be meteorologists like we're
involved in crimes. But funny side note. Also there's a
weather dot com article gloating over the fact that meteorologists
got rated the least creepy of all professions. Um, and

(43:14):
so I think, I think just we've got to remember
now to put somebody at ease, always be a fashionably
dressed child meteorologist who can't stop talking about clothes. Yeah.
Now you people are probably wondering where do I rank? Well,
you can certainly look up this, uh this article and
find yourself. We find out fund to find ourselves as
writers kind of in the middle of the scale though.

(43:36):
It so our mean is two point fourteen, and that
means we're below the mean of the scale, right, if
the mean is three, it's one to five scales. So
we're generally considered less than the medium creepiness. Most professions
on here got less than medium creepiness. That I can't
I can't get over the fact though that according to
this we are more creepy than actors. I'm maybe I

(44:00):
just know some creepy actors, but well we're not much
it's almost the same. Almost. Yeah, I guess we're we
were kind of equivalent. Over that that tiny slice of
a percentage point. It's true actors should be at the
top of the list. Do I think one could make
an argument for that, but hey, we're no, at least
when we're not the taxidermist, clown, sex shop owner, who

(44:22):
would be like right there at the top. Okay, so
we did, we did occupations. But also they wanted to
see about hobbies. And in this next section they didn't
have a list of hobbies. Instead that this was a
different format. They were just asked to list, in a
free prompt, a couple of hobbies that the subjects would
consider creepy. Yes, the creepy. The creepy hobbies here. Um

(44:43):
so collecting things, especially dolls, insects, and body parts with
collecting body parts. Again, one of these things is not
like the other. I think it calls to mind like
questions of like where did that come from? How did
you get it? Yeah? The body Yeah, the body part
one is is far creepier than collecting insects and and

(45:03):
and dolls. Like my sister collects dolls, shouldn't collect body parts.
I would be concerned if it was body parts. Um
what does she just collect doll parts? Full full dolls?
But that at any rate. Yeah, there's kind of I
feel like maybe there's an unfair stigma with that too,
with the collecting of dolls, this is my arms room.

(45:25):
There's They also pointed out hobbies that entail a great
deal of watching, either in the form of photographing people, uh,
bird watching and uh. And also they pointed out taxidermy
and having quote a fascination with pornography or exotic sexual activity.
But yet again, this is going to be one of

(45:45):
those things where we we do wish we had had
country data on this, right, because this is probably gonna
be highly culturally variable. Yeah, I mean exotic sexual activity
like that, it depends entirely and you choose to define that, Like,
there are plenty of individuals out there who might define uh,
you know, homosexual activity as that. And therefore any um,

(46:08):
you know, gay or lesbian or bisexual individual is then
a de facto creep based on this scale. Oh, I
think that is like, if you go back fifty years
I think that there is a like an American culture
fifty years ago, you will see a strong association between,
for example, a gay man and the concept of creepiness. Yeah. Now,
I guess hopefully we seem to be losing that. I

(46:30):
don't really get a sense of that today, but now
that that's certainly like the homophobic attitude towards uh gay's
gay men in particular, is that is that yes they
are there's something threatening, there's something creepy about them that
like the the idea that this individual is gay and
they want to have sex with me, like for the

(46:52):
like gay in or out there, uh you know, cruising
around for for straight bottled up uh square to to
warp or something you know, Oh no, oh no, yeah, yeah,
they're coming for you. They're not coming for you, trust me.
Um uh but but yeah, that's I think undoubtedly a
part of this. Okay, we're getting towards the end of

(47:14):
the study, but there's there's another section. In this next section,
subjects are asked to rate, on a scale of one
to five their level of agreement with fifteen statements about
creepy people. That would start with a prompt like when
I meet someone that seems creepy dot dot dot, and
then you'd have a statement to complete, do you agree
with this or not? For example, I think this person
has sexual interest in me, or people are creepier online

(47:38):
than when I meet them. Face to face, and so
they did some analysis on that and the results. Analyzing
the results from the section, the authors sort of conclude
that the following statements are the most commonly believed to
be true about creepy people. So they make us feel
feel fearful or anxious. Uh. They believe that the creepiness

(47:59):
resides in the individual more than in his or her behavior.
And I feel like that's unfortunate. I think people probably
do feel that way like that. It's it's really that
a person is a creep and always a creep, rather
than that what they're doing right now is creepy. I
feel more the opposite. Yeah, but it does come into
this whole idea that we just dismiss someone as a creep.

(48:19):
We write them off as a creep until additional information, uh,
you know tells us otherwise. But if we're just dismissing them,
that information may never come because it's not like we're
gonna get to gonna know the creep unless we have
to write. Right. Okay, So more creepy behaviors. We think
they may have a sexual interest in us. That seems key,
you know, it represents a sexual threat. Um. Uh, they're

(48:42):
creepy when they exhibit multiple symptoms of creepiness rather than
just one. And I think that makes sense because I
would sort of call this creep clustering similar to the
crank clustering. Like if you meet somebody who believes in
one crank theory, they probably believe in a lot of
crank theories. If you meet somebody who's into time cube,
but they're probably also I don't know, flat earther, Actually

(49:05):
they probably wouldn't be both of those, as they're incompatible.
But but you know what I mean about that. Yeah, yeah, So,
for instance, like the kind of person who might encounter
like nine or era or even modern era Glynn Danzig, Like,
if they're the kind of person who thinks, you know,
some other things they're into, well, okay, I guess the
thing is if they're the type of person that's going

(49:26):
to think tattoos or long black hair happens to be creepy,
they're also going to think that having like sharpened fingernails
is going to be creepy. They're gonna think that that
other aspects of his persona are also creepy. How can
sharpened fingernails be creepy? I know, it's it's it's beautiful. Okay,

(49:47):
so a few more so, Uh, the expected intimacy and
frequency of the interaction with the person moderates perceptions of creepiness.
So uh, just sort of like expectations are going to
change the way you receive the conversation. That obviously makes sense. Uh.
Something that is done by somebody who's close to you
is not physically but you know, a close friend of

(50:09):
yours is might not be creepy, but if a stranger
did it, it it would be creepy. That's kind of obvious.
Next thing that people believe that creepy people are unable
to change, but they do not necessarily have bad intentions.
And uh, and then finally, people who follow social rules
of behavior are not perceived as creepy. So basically, if
you if you mind your manners and you follow all

(50:31):
the rules of normal social interaction, as often kind of
ambiguous and unstated as they are, you can avoid being
considered creepy. So the serial murderer who completely buries uh
their true identity is not creepy. Dexter is not creepy,
That's true. Dexter came up in some of the literature
we're looking at, either I think they made the argument

(50:52):
that Dexter does become creepy later on because there's some
sort of a an incest angle or something. Maybe. I mean,
I never really I only watched a little bit of Dexter.
But he's not um, he's he doesn't come off as
creepy to people who know him, right just because he's
I don't know. He basically minds his manners and doesn't
act too weird in public. Yeah, and and I didn't

(51:14):
watch a lot of the show, but you also, I
did not get the strong impression that he really enjoyed
what he was doing all that much, like he just
kind of did it because he had to. I think
he did. Yeah. I mean again, we're sitting here talking
about a show we haven't really seen. It's true, okay,
but that is the creepy judgment. Saying someone is creepy
is judging a show you haven't really seen. Okay. So

(51:36):
a little more about their their analysis. They did say
that from the results, they think the hypothesis that creepiness
is linked to unpredictability is somewhat supported. Uh. They say
that subjects more often agreed that the statement quote I
am uncomfortable because I cannot predict how he or she
will behave was descriptive of their reaction to a creepy person,

(51:57):
and people were close to neutral on the statement quote,
even though someone maybe creepy, I usually think that I
understand his or her intentions. So it seems like there's
some support for creepiness being unpredictability. They also found support
for the hypothesis that women are more likely to perceive
a creepy person as a sexual threat. Uh. And then

(52:17):
in the final section that the last thing that was
on the study was a single yes no question do
most creepy people know that they are creepy? The responses
were a hundred and fifteen yes. That was like eight
point six percent, seven hundred nine seven No, that was
like six and uh four hundred and twenty nine unsure,

(52:40):
which was like thirty two. So generally people don't think
that creepy people know that they're creepy, or they can't
tell whether they know or not, and then other straight
stray observations. I thought this was kind of interesting. The
authors point out that older participants seem to be a
little bit less concerned about creepy people and less likely
to perceive sex fual threat or an intent to harm,

(53:02):
which is interesting. I don't know if I would have
predicted that that older people are less creeped out. Huh,
that is interesting, Like to what maybe do you know,
basically like they just don't see themselves as being threatened
that much by the creeps in their midst or does
that mean there maybe even more open to their own
creepiness and the creepiness of others. It could be or

(53:22):
maybe I don't know, maybe over time. I mean, as
we've discussed discussed, you encounter a lot of creeps in
the world. Creepiness is a common everyday experience. And the
more you experience creepiness and it does no harm to you,
maybably become desensitized to it. Or Yeah, one or two
things is going to happen, right, Either you're gonna you're
gonna be desensitized to it or you are gonna just

(53:44):
really go down the well of fearing the creep all
around you. Right. Yeah, so uh, we we should move
on from this study. But one thing I do want
to mention at the end is the authors acknowledge some
limitations of their study. Like we talked about, this is
you know, this is an online survey. So this is
very preliminary. It's more sort of like establishing uh leads
for other research in the future. Because with an online

(54:07):
survey like this, one possibility that you have is a
problem with self selection bias of the participants. Right, So,
since it's an online volunteer survey, we're not necessarily hearing
from a truly random sample of people, but from the
kind of people who would click on a Facebook link
to fill out an online psychological psychological survey about creepiness.
That that is presumably a type of person indeed, um

(54:30):
and they might be giving different types of answers than
a truly random sampling of the population would. Also we
already pointed out, for example, the lack of data and
country of origin. This would be very interesting to look into,
and it's probably, you know, if somebody's going to study this.
Moving ahead from this point, I think this would be
one of the most interesting things to look at. What

(54:51):
in what ways are these creepy behaviors culturally variable and
which ones are more universal? One thing I would say,
it's well known, for example, that some cultures have very
different feelings about things like eye contact yes than other
cultures do, like sometimes making prolonged eye contact with somebody.
In one place that might be totally normal and nice

(55:12):
thing to do, and in other places it might be
considered very creepy, right, or staring in general, like is
it okay to stare at somebody who stands out a
little bit? Yeah? Yeah, it's going to vary from culture
to culture. All right, let's take a quick break and
we come back. We'll look at a few more aspects
of creepiness. Hi, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, a host of the

(55:33):
new House to works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be
bringing you three stories from our team about the weird
and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology, and culture.
Fresh episodes will be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify,
Google Play Music, and everywhere else that find podcasts are found.

(55:54):
So one of the big takeaways from this study we
looked at and from some of the discussion we've had
so far, is the idea of the threat ambiguity right
in creepiness. That creepiness is different from scariness because when
you are scared, you're scared of something that is overt
or that being scared might be a part of creepiness,
but it's okay to openly display fear and revulsion from

(56:16):
something that is overtly threatening. Like we said, guy running
at you with a chainsaw, it's okay to scream and
run away from that. If there's a guy who's just
being a little bit creepy and you scream and run
away from him, we sort of have this conflict, right,
like we're feeling, Am I just being rude? Right? If
I do that? Um and the one of the authors
of the study of Frank McAndrew. In another essay, he

(56:39):
terms this the conflict between self preservation and self presentation,
and I think that's a good way of putting it. Yeah,
we're all walking this web of social expectations and societal norms,
and there's an individual up ahead. It's kind of shaking
the web a little bit, and we don't want to
plumb it off the web with them. Don't want something

(57:00):
bad to happen. But we also don't want to shake
the web ourselves exactly so, So in that sense, creepiness
is uncomfortable, not just because it entails anxiety, but also
because it's inherently awkward. It's uncertain, you don't know what
the best thing to do, is, so you're stuck in
this state of I'm not comfortable, I don't know what

(57:20):
to do, and that itself is a source of distress.
One more thing I want to mention real quickly is
that mc andrew of the Creepiness Study is also interested
in the creepiness of places. Were primarily focused on creepy
people today, but he has an essay at the Conversation
you can check out about the evolutionary psychology of haunted houses. Interested. So,
I know, I know what a number of you are

(57:41):
probably thinking out there. Well, this is all great, but
what did Freud have to say about it? Right? He's
the final authority today? Well, uh, Sigmund Freud did not
discuss the creep specifically, but in nineteen nineteens the uncanny
he did have this to say, and you know is
it will discuss This involves translation of the terms, but

(58:04):
he said, the subject of the uncanny is a province
of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible,
to all that arouses dread and creeping horror. It is
equally certain, too, that the word is not always used
in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to
coincide with whatever excites dread. Yet we may expect that

(58:25):
it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of
a special name. One is curious to know what this
peculiar quality is, which allows us to distinguish as uncanny
certain things within the boundaries of what is fearful. So
he's start of playing the same game that we've been doing,
trying to find a distinction. He's got this term uncanny

(58:46):
literally in the German, I think it's das unheimlich, right,
das unheimlich translated as the uncanny, this sort of creepiness feeling.
But I think there's an important distinction to make between
what we mean when we say creepiness and what Freud
meant by the uncanny or dassunheimlich and um. But but
he's playing the same kind of tight rope walk of Okay,

(59:08):
it's not exactly just fear, right, it's something else. And
Freud quotes Ernst Ginch to find a He's trying to
find a perfect example of what encapsulates his idea of
the uncanny experience. He writes, quote doubts whether and apparently
inanimate being is really alive or conversely whether a lifeless

(59:30):
object might not be in fact animate. Okay, so I
guess I can can see that like that can be creepy.
People often refer to things in the uncanny valleys creepy, right,
something that's a little close to being similar to human
but not close enough that it's real, and so it
gives you the willie's uh. And they give the example

(59:50):
of waxwork figures, artificial dolls or automatons. Freud gives that, yeah,
I would agree that, yet wax models of individuals life
wax models are are uncanny and are perhaps a little creepy.
Have you ever been to a wax museum? I have,
It's been a while, but yeah, I've I've been to
a really have been to, like a small one that
had a few different exhibits. They should be illegal. But

(01:00:13):
but a writer we talked about earlier, Kotsko, he talks
about Freud's concepts, right, yeah, and he he makes the
argument essentially that that that the uncannying is here, the
Lunheimlich essentially boils down, to quote, the inherent creepiness of
human desire. Okay, well, if it's Freud, obviously desires coming

(01:00:34):
in right, and and Yeah, I think human desires maybe
inherently creepy if you look at it in the right light. Uh. Now.
He also points out there on Freud's list of suggested
translations for unheimlich um, there is uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny,
ghastly haunted in reference to a house, and of a

(01:00:54):
in reference to a man, quote a repulsive fellow. Uh.
Some of those get it better than others. I mean,
creepiness is inherently uncomfortable and uneasy. I think those are good.
Ghastly gloomy. Nah, that's not really right. And you know,
I actually I end up kind of waffling on this
interpretation of of all this when Freud says the following

(01:01:16):
in the same work, dismembered limbs, a severed head, a
hand cut off at the wrist, feet which danced by themselves.
All these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when,
as in the last instance, they prove able to move
of themselves. In addition, what, yeah, I would say, that
is not creepy like that is that is the realm

(01:01:37):
of like straight up maddening terror. Yeah, that's the person
in the casket opens her eyes and starts screaming yeah,
Like you can't compare a weird character played by Steve V.
Simmy in a film to two disembodied parts like flopping
around or a or a or or or a human
head rolling around and moaning or totally yeah, yeah, I

(01:01:59):
completely agree. I think Freud's and Heimlich is something different
from creepiness. Uh. The the overlap is kind of interesting
because it seems in some senses to kind of capture creepiness.
One of the things that Freud goes on to talk
about is this idea of you know, of course, the
familiarity aspect, like Heimlich is a word in German that

(01:02:19):
so it has a lot of range of meaning. It
sort of means hidden or private sort of, but it
also encapsulates the idea of something feeling at home like homeie,
homely or familiar um, and so it can take on
all these different kinds of meanings, bringing lots of connotations.
And I think that's that's where a lot of this

(01:02:39):
ambiguity comes from. It's this huge, loaded, big word in German,
and creepiness is not the same way in English. Creepiness
in English, I think is a much more uh specific word.
If that makes any sense. Yeah, and it's certainly. Certainly
if any listeners out there have have other ex amples

(01:03:00):
of linguistic models for creepiness, other translations of it that
have that carry slightly different weight within a given culture,
I would love to hear about that. What one quote
that I do think might be a little bit useful
is that Freud quotes Shelling in his essay on on
the Uncanny and says that Shelling defined the uncanny is

(01:03:22):
everything that ought to have remained hidden and secret and
yet comes to light. Okay, that now sounds like they're
that he's talking about creepiness again. Sort of, Yeah, because
you can kind of see that like something some a
person who's behaving creepy, there's there is like a pressure
building in them. Often, you know, there's like something that

(01:03:42):
is a behavior that you are worried they may express
but they're not yet expressing or something like that. Alright,
So we've we've pretty much we've pretty much covered what
we currently know about creepiness, and we've discussed some examples
of creepiness, uh and and try to to you know,
dismantle uh, the notion itself. One thing this is I

(01:04:06):
want to bring up something that I kept thinking about
as as we're discussing these these various creepy factors on
the creepy checklists, the various creepy characters that come to mind,
and that is, you know, to to what extent is
uh is the perception of a creep like inherently racist?

(01:04:27):
Like like how much ethnic fear and ethnic anxiety is
is wound up in our perception of the creep. You know,
I can honestly say that when you said this, I
hadn't encountered anything to make me think this, because there's
obviously plenty of you know, racism and bias in the
way people assess potentially threatening or negative characteristics of other people.

(01:04:51):
You know, we we all have implicit biases, um, and
and we make judgments about people that are unfair based
on you know, superficial external character sticks. But as I've
always interpreted interpreted it to me, creep is a fairly
like a race or ethno neutral concept. When when I
think of a creep, I I certainly don't think of

(01:05:11):
a person of a of a different race or different culture, right, um.
But I can see how it certainly could be interpreted
that way because as we've talked about the creep in
many ways, is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah,
I mean, there are some activities that are probably going
to be pretty universally considered creepy. But then there are
other things that are just basically reflecting the prejudices of

(01:05:33):
the of the creepy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're definitely
not at the point where if you call someone or creep,
they're gonna come back and call you a racist for it.
But yeah, I'm pondering here, I guess is that there's
there's a lot in the stereotypical creep that lines up
not only with character ambiguity, but also racial ambiguity. So
the other the you know, one whose physical characteristics diverge

(01:05:56):
from the norm, whose fashion sense diverges from the norm,
who's social graces, grasp of language, and perhaps even expectations
of relationship interactions is different or is believed to differ
from the status quo. Uh And so, as as I
looked at some of the stereotypical mainstream examples, I kept
asking myself, Wait, is this person considered creepy because of

(01:06:18):
at least implicit racism or xenophobia? Uh? So I have
an example here all right, So, and I present this
as an open question. I'm not pretending to have this
all figured out. But The Big Lebowski one of my
favorite movies, and I am I am not in any
way of uh, you know, criticizing the film or or

(01:06:40):
you know, criticizing the Cohen Brothers. But it's probably freshen
my mind because I saw it last week. So we
have a number of fabulous creepy characters played by very
talented actors. H And they're creepy for multiple reasons. So
let's first of all, this Jesus and Jesus Jesus and
overtly we can say Jesus is cre because he's an

(01:07:01):
alleged sex offender. It's loud, he invokes threats of sexual violence. Yeah.
Then there's a Lulie nukel n uncle. Yes, the nihilist
Peter Stormaer. Yes, fabulous, fabulous actor plays a great creep
especially in this. So he's a nihilist, he's a pornographic actor,
he's a musician and a criminal. It's plenty to be

(01:07:23):
to find creepy there or so, I don't know if
I find really creepy really maybe, well, I don't know. Again,
perspective plays a key here, but he's at least soft creepy, okay.
Uh Knox Harrington, the video artist, pencil thin mustache, he's
kind of an observer in the background. He has a

(01:07:44):
strange laugh. It's David Fuellis, yea, who plays him. It's
a very bit part. But he's also he's the guy
who plays the werewolf in the Harry Potter movies. Right,
that's right. Yeah, he was also in uh, the the
Island of Dr Moreau movie that we've discussed here before.
He is creepy. Knox Harrington is creepy. Yeah. And then
and then of course there's Jackie Treehorn, the pornographer Loan Shark.

(01:08:07):
He's fascinated with the erotic. He comes off very suave
in the movie. But you can certainly make a case
based on the criteria we're discussing earlier that he's a
creepy dude and he does drug the dude. So, yeah,
that's true. For some reason, the main two I would
think of as creepy or the Jesus and Knox Harrington.
So but also whoa, whoa, whoa, there are other creeps

(01:08:30):
in The Big Lebowski. Uh. Philip Seymour Hoffman's brand is
absolutely creepy. He is definitely creepy. And I think he's
a good example that yes, there's a there, here's a
very white creep character because he's just such a lackey
to to the Big Lebowski Jeffrey Lebowski. So we have
all these reasons to find these individuals creepy, but for

(01:08:50):
the first four that I mentioned, on top of these
create these these these avert reasons. It's also worth noting
that the characters are respectively Sto Rican, German, English, and
possibly Italian American. The actors are respectively Italian American, Swedish English,
and Italian Americans. So there's there is a certain ethnic

(01:09:12):
otherness in all of these characters. And so I have
that to to wonder, like to what extent is that
weighing it? Like, yeah, it could be like certainly the
Jesus would be creepy if he were white. I'm not
saying he wouldn't be. But do we do we end
up pulling in certain uh fears of the ethnic other
into these creepy stereotypes. Huh, Well, I'm not sure that

(01:09:36):
happens in the Big Lebowski, but I can definitely see
how that would happen. Um and m M. I guess though.
I mean this is probably one of the most innocuous
because it's englishness. Knox Harrington's englishness, his English accent is
maybe one of the creepiest things about him. Yeah, he
comes off Yeah indeed, Um, he's also got that mustache.

(01:10:02):
I mean, certainly we can think of various movies, whether
it's like an ethnic heavy shows up, like the the
Odd Job situation, where you know, or out of nowhere,
there's this uh this this Asian uh thug character who's
working for the supervillain and uh yeah, and there's a
certain ethnic otherness that's that's wrapped up in their persona. Yeah,
I think it's definitely there. In James Bond, I mean

(01:10:24):
there we get back into times when it was I
think more okay to just overtly make your creeps somebody
who's you know, vaguely foreign. Um. And And it's there
because a lot of times in in James Bond, you'll
have a creep who is some kind of vaguely foreign
or overtly foreign creep who also just watches the watching.
You know, he doesn't talk much like Odd Job he

(01:10:46):
just stares at you. He doesn't say anything. That that
is I think pretty standard creepy behavior watching without talking.
But it can also it's equally can be described as
someone who simply does not speak your language and and
that a loss to interact. Yeah, there you go. Um,
you know, there are plenty of other I think characters
that come to mind of like creepy foreigner stereotypes. Um,

(01:11:08):
there's Ortega. Remember Ortega from one of the ms T
s Oh Yeah, from the Incredibly Strange Creatures who stopped
living and became mixed up zombies. Yeah, there was kind
of this weird uh like racist Latin American kind of concoction. Uh.
Peppy Lapew the that the French skunk from the cartoons. No,
Peppy Lapew goes definitely beyond any ambiguity of threat, Like

(01:11:31):
Peppy Lapeuw is a rapist. Yeah, yeah, yeah he is.
He's he is actively chasing down the Was it a
dog or her cat? It's a cat? Yeah. I think
Bruno and Burrat are both strong examples of this. You
can make a case for Hannibal Lector as we see
him in the TV show, is having certain ethnic otherness
to him. M Hmmm, I don't know. Is Hannibal creepy?

(01:11:55):
Is Hannibal Lecture creepy? He should be? Should he's in
that don dre promote exactly. I think where we we
kind of waffle back and forth between finding him just
endlessly um, almost seductive. You know, he's like a vampire,
but then he you know, he's also creepy. There's almost
a certain level of confidence in one's behavior that pre empts, uh,

(01:12:17):
some amount of creepy characterization. Like one of the things
we were reading about, and you mentioned earlier that New
Yorker article which talks about the inherent self consciousness of creepiness,
which is again in opposition to one of the things
that was found in the study we talked about, you know,
where people don't think that creeps No, they're creepy. But

(01:12:37):
in that New Yorker article, uh, there was a section
about how, you know, the constant self consciousness we have
is is itself kind of creepy? Like being very self
conscious about your behavior can lead to creepiness. Yeah. I
mean to bring it back to Hannibal. Hannibal Lecter is
less creepy than than Buffalo Bill, right, because Buffalo Bill

(01:12:59):
acts less sure of himself and less in control of
his his his persona. Yeah, though I guess hannibals probably
creepy once he well, no, I was gonna say he's
creepy once he starts eating you, but then he's just
outright terrifying. Yeah, yeah, there's so maybe there's less less
twilight there. Yeah. Well, there you have it, some some

(01:13:20):
food for thought there at the end, uh cannibalistic or
otherwise about the creep, about how we perceived the creep,
why we perceived the creep, and what the creep means.
We gotta come back sometime and actually do an episode
about clowns. Yes, yeah, I would totally be game for that.
I think there's there's some good resources out there, and
I have I have a lot of personal thoughts on

(01:13:40):
the meatic. We're gonna shut down your creepy clown names
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(01:14:02):
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