Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: today we're gonna be talking about creeps. Yes, about creeps, creepiness,
Speaker 1: the nature of creepiness, and what makes creeps creepy. And
Speaker 1: maybe in the end we will find a way to
Speaker 1: love the creep too, because there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a creep in all of us. Yes, this will give
Speaker 1: everyone the chance to connect with their inner creep. And
Speaker 1: I think also like rethink their creep analysis. They're creep
Speaker 1: judgments that they've passed uh uh in in previous times. Okay, so, Robert,
Speaker 1: I want to test our intuitions a little bit about
Speaker 1: creepiness by running a few scenarios by you. Because creep
Speaker 1: creep is a word we apply intuitively, creepy is a
Speaker 1: word we imply intuitively. But sometimes it's hard to make
Speaker 1: a distinction, like what is creeping us? What is a
Speaker 1: creep and how is it different than like a scary
Speaker 1: guy or a terrifying situation? Yeah, a creep a creeper
Speaker 1: if you will creeping uh is it's sometimes referred. Okay,
Speaker 1: let me know what you think about this. You're standing
Speaker 1: in line at the bank and a man with a
Speaker 1: hunting rifle runs in the door, aims the rifle straight
Speaker 1: at your face and shouts at everybody in the room freeze,
Speaker 1: hands up. Is that creepy? Not creepy? That's terrifying, scary, traumatic,
Speaker 1: but not creepy. I totally agree, not creepy at all. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's another one. You go out for a walk with
Speaker 1: your dog and when you get back home, somebody has
Speaker 1: taped a handwritten note to your front door that says
Speaker 1: why do you take such long walks? That I could
Speaker 1: see that being? That is bull's eye creepy to me.
Speaker 1: It's but I wonder if that goes beyond creepy and
Speaker 1: it's like outright scary because under under what scenario is
Speaker 1: that a valid act by somebody? Is that under under
Speaker 1: for what reason would that be possibly be okay for
Speaker 1: someone to leave that note on your door? Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: creepy things aren't necessarily okay. I mean we're just testing
Speaker 1: our intuitions. Come on, surely your gut says that's creepy?
Speaker 1: Mine does? I've I think that would be like hard creepy.
Speaker 1: This would be this would be creepy bordering on frightening,
Speaker 1: because I'm gonna immediately be concerned about my surroundings. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be I'm gonna start looking for dead rabbits and
Speaker 1: uh and so forth. Okay, I got another one. Your
Speaker 1: company has been downsizing recently. You arrive at work one
Speaker 1: day to receive an email from your boss that just says,
Speaker 1: please come see me in my office first thing this morning.
Speaker 1: Is that creepy? It's not creepy. Certainly anxiety producing, but
Speaker 1: not not creepy, right story even, but not creepy. Obviously,
Speaker 1: there's something that can be a strong indicator of anxiety.
Speaker 1: It can even be kind of ambiguous in a way,
Speaker 1: but that's not creepy. Okay. So how about you're at
Speaker 1: a funeral for a close friends recently dead relative, and
Speaker 1: as you approach the open casket to pay your risk specs,
Speaker 1: the person in the casket opens her eyes and starts screaming.
Speaker 1: Not creepy, No, No, that's outright terrifying and I'm probably
Speaker 1: losing my mind, right, Okay, one more. You're on a
Speaker 1: train or a bus, uh, and a man comes and
Speaker 1: sits down next to you. He begins rummaging around in
Speaker 1: his backpack, and out of the backpack he produces a
Speaker 1: doll and then sits there in his seat brushing the
Speaker 1: doll's hair. Is that creepy? I think it depends entirely
Speaker 1: how into the brushing he is. Like, because I've been
Speaker 1: having written The Train quite a bit, you do see
Speaker 1: some strange behaviors now and then, but sometimes it's just
Speaker 1: the the attitude of the person can sell you on it.
Speaker 1: So I can easily imagine a dude who's just kind
Speaker 1: of like tired, and he like pulls a doll out
Speaker 1: and he's combing its hair. And if the vibe is
Speaker 1: this is just something this guy does every day. He
Speaker 1: has to do it. I don't know why. Maybe his
Speaker 1: for his job, he has to have this this doll
Speaker 1: properly groomed. Right, Maybe he's a professional doll groomer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if it If that's the case, I would say
Speaker 1: not creepy. However, if he's getting it out and like
Speaker 1: lovingly stroking its hair and whispering to it while he
Speaker 1: u while he grooms it, then yes, that would be creepy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What if he's just singing a little bit. Yeah, singing
Speaker 1: does that enhance the creepiness if it's like a lullaby?
Speaker 1: I guess? Yeah? What if he's singing bon Jovi? Less creepy?
Speaker 1: I guess. This is the thing. It gets difficult and
Speaker 1: you start you're you're trying to find the figure out
Speaker 1: the why behind a scenario. What's up with this individual?
Speaker 1: Why are they doing the thing that they're doing, and
Speaker 1: why are they behaving like this? Why do they dressed
Speaker 1: like this? And your mind's just just crunching it, processing
Speaker 1: and as fast as as as it can, and then
Speaker 1: you have to decide creepy or not creepy? Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: so all these things that they're gonna get some kind
Speaker 1: of fear response like we talked about, but they're not
Speaker 1: all creepy. And likewise, the creep as a person is
Speaker 1: a particular figure, but different than a monster, or maybe
Speaker 1: different than a dangerous person or a scary guy or
Speaker 1: a predator. Even though we very strongly have this idea
Speaker 1: of what a creep is, though it may be very
Speaker 1: ambiguous to us. In the big hazy thing, right, and
Speaker 1: the creep, especially in fiction, the creep may turn out
Speaker 1: to be monster. The creep may turn out to be hero.
Speaker 1: And example that instantly comes to mind Boo Radley from
Speaker 1: To Kill a Mockingbird. Oh, perfect creepy character. But he
Speaker 1: ends up it ends up not being the threat and
Speaker 1: ends up saving the day. So you think he's a creep,
Speaker 1: but then he turns out to be a good guy.
Speaker 1: Is he still a creep after you know he's a
Speaker 1: good guy? No, because there, for the most part not,
Speaker 1: I would guess, because the threat analysis has been fully computated.
Speaker 1: He's proven himself to be a non creep. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: let's get into the literary history of the creep a
Speaker 1: little bit. First of all, I was wondering how long
Speaker 1: has the word creepy been in English. It it seems
Speaker 1: to get a lot more mileage than it ever has before,
Speaker 1: but from what I could tell, it dates back at
Speaker 1: least to Charles Dickens, who some sources have alleged coined
Speaker 1: the term, and it appears in David Copperfield. Did you
Speaker 1: ever read the copper Field? I never have? Yeah, So
Speaker 1: eighteen forty nine, Dickens writes of a character named Mrs Gummage,
Speaker 1: which is a great creepy name. Dickens as great at
Speaker 1: those quote. She was constantly complaining of the cold and
Speaker 1: of its occasioning a visitation in her back, which she
Speaker 1: called the creeps. Okay, so it's not it. It's a
Speaker 1: little bit removed from our current usage of the word.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly. So uh, this means like a physical sensation,
Speaker 1: and it's mostly unrelated to the way we use it now.
Speaker 1: But I do want to make a side note that Dickens,
Speaker 1: by the way, is full of great creeps, like of
Speaker 1: any author in English, there's creeps everywhere and they're great.
Speaker 1: Who's the child catcher in Oliver Oliver? In Oliver Twist,
Speaker 1: I can't remember childcatcher? Yeah, or I keep there are
Speaker 1: a lot of I remember in Uh. In Oliver Twist,
Speaker 1: it describes describes Noah Claypool as eel like I think
Speaker 1: he's a creep. Man, I'm blanking on the name of
Speaker 1: this character. I'm sure someone will remind Yeah. But by now,
Speaker 1: of course, the creeps, creepiness and of course the person
Speaker 1: who is a creep has come to mean something very different,
Speaker 1: right And from my experience, the concept of creepiness is
Speaker 1: utterly pervasive and everyday conversation, we we talk about it
Speaker 1: all the time. The creep is a standard type of
Speaker 1: person we encounter and under the wrong circumstances or with
Speaker 1: a bit of bad luck or awkward behavior, we are
Speaker 1: all ourselves sometimes the creep. Yeah. I think this is
Speaker 1: an important thing to drive home. No matter how handsome
Speaker 1: or suave you happen to think you are, no matter
Speaker 1: how harmless you think your appearance or demeanor happens to be,
Speaker 1: no matter how chill you are, you have come off
Speaker 1: as a creep at some point in the past. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: you have acted weird. We've all acted weird. Sometimes it's creepy,
Speaker 1: but we definitely do live in the age of creepiness.
Speaker 1: This is something that a couple of writers were going
Speaker 1: to talk about today have alluded to. But I decided
Speaker 1: to do a Google Ingram search for creepy, you know
Speaker 1: the Ingram viewer where it'll it'll chart the usage of
Speaker 1: a word about printed literature across a long period of time.
Speaker 1: And so I looked at the word creepy from the
Speaker 1: r eighteen hundred until two thousand eight, and it's interesting
Speaker 1: there's sort of a rising and falling bell curve of
Speaker 1: creepy usage from about nineteen hundred to nineteen forty and
Speaker 1: then creepy goes dormant through the fifties and sixties. I
Speaker 1: wonder why that is. But then around nineteen seventy nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty it begins to rise again. And then there is
Speaker 1: this dramatic, precipitous spike way above the norm coming up
Speaker 1: to the two thousand's. So for some reason, the millennium
Speaker 1: is the millennium of creepiness. Well that sounds about right.
Speaker 1: But maybe we can get a better idea of what
Speaker 1: the creep is, who the creep is if we just
Speaker 1: look at some great examples of creeps for for context. Sure, um,
Speaker 1: while start off by mentioning that the name of the
Speaker 1: character from Oliver Twist came to mind, and that's Fagan. Fagan. Oh,
Speaker 1: of course Fagan a creep. Though I don't know if
Speaker 1: Fagan's a creep. Noah Claypools are creep, but Fagan, I remember, see.
Speaker 1: I remember being in a musical, like a community theater
Speaker 1: musical version of Oliver and our our drama teacher played
Speaker 1: Fagan and I felt like he did a very creepy
Speaker 1: take on Fagan. So that's the one that's that's stuck
Speaker 1: in my mind. He was great at it. Wait, I
Speaker 1: guess when you think about the details of it, it
Speaker 1: is truly creepy. He's this guy who collects an army
Speaker 1: of little children who he Yeah, yeah, he's kind of
Speaker 1: a creep. But but certainly there are some more iconic
Speaker 1: creeps that instantly come to mind. So have you seen
Speaker 1: the Lonely Island video for Do the Creep? Yes? Was
Speaker 1: it snl or uh It's well, they sort of came
Speaker 1: out of snl okay and then they did this album
Speaker 1: with all these videos. Yeah. Yeah, it's got uh Andy
Speaker 1: Sandberg and Nicki Minaj and Nicki Minaj that's a guest
Speaker 1: stuff spot in it as a female creep, which we
Speaker 1: can come back to. But then also John Waters introduces
Speaker 1: it and they're kind of dressed like young John Waters
Speaker 1: in this video as they're they're doing the creek, they're
Speaker 1: they're taking on these anerisms of a very creepy male individual,
Speaker 1: a guy who's got a pencil mustache and invades your
Speaker 1: personal space. Yeah, it will come back to John Waters
Speaker 1: in a in a bit too. But I feel like
Speaker 1: he's an individual who has embraced his creepiness and thus
Speaker 1: transcended it. Yes, like he's adorable now. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: kind of an interesting area there. In a way, it's
Speaker 1: like the more you know a creep either either it's
Speaker 1: going to firmly establish their creepiness or it's going to
Speaker 1: dissolve them a bit and dissolve the creepiness. Right, nobody
Speaker 1: ever remains the same amount of creepy they seemed at first.
Speaker 1: It either gets better or gets worse. That's that's some
Speaker 1: sound sound advice there. Um for me. There's a well,
Speaker 1: there's an actor by the name of Lucky Yates who
Speaker 1: some of the anyone who listens or rather watches Archer
Speaker 1: maybe familiar with with him because he does one of
Speaker 1: the voices on that show. Does Dr Creeker does a
Speaker 1: doctor of character. But he he also has a character,
Speaker 1: and I don't know that he does this character anymore,
Speaker 1: but he did for a while here in the Atlanta area.
Speaker 1: He did this character of the Fiend and the theme
Speaker 1: would would host various events such as a late night
Speaker 1: horror creepy show, puppet show, and various puppet slams in
Speaker 1: the area. And uh and this was kind of a
Speaker 1: like imagine like a little bit of Vincent Price, a
Speaker 1: little bit of little Richard all sort of dashed together
Speaker 1: and that was the fiend. This does not sound like
Speaker 1: a creep to me. This sounds like a like a
Speaker 1: a suave dude, suave but a little threatening like kind
Speaker 1: of that's the thing. You're not really sure if he's threatening,
Speaker 1: but he certainly came off as uh is a little
Speaker 1: bit creepy, kind of a pencil than mustache going on,
Speaker 1: as I recall, and also kind of a a pan
Speaker 1: sexual aura. Um. Other characters, well, first of all, most characters.
Speaker 1: I think that Peter Lori play Peter Lori, who what
Speaker 1: a great creep he was in Casablanca as he creep? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's kind of a creep. Yeah, I have a hard
Speaker 1: time remembering him not but I guess in like Twenty
Speaker 1: Leagues under the Sea wasn't a creep and uh, and
Speaker 1: I guess in some movies he plays more of an
Speaker 1: outright monster type character. This is true of some actors.
Speaker 1: There are people who get type cast as creeps. And
Speaker 1: I would have to introduce the name of a guy
Speaker 1: who I greatly love and respect as an actor, but
Speaker 1: he's always a creep. Tom Noonan God bless him. Oh yes,
Speaker 1: tom noonon Is is always I can't think of a
Speaker 1: non creepy tom Noon and Roll, and I wonder what
Speaker 1: it's like to be tom Noon. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about him personally. I'm sure he is just
Speaker 1: a wonderfully sweet, great guy, you know. I I can't
Speaker 1: imagine that he's actually a creep in real life. But
Speaker 1: what's it like to be that guy who's always cast
Speaker 1: as a creep because he's perfect for it? Right? Because
Speaker 1: he was the bad guy in RoboCop two, the drug
Speaker 1: dealer who ends up inside the machine. He was the
Speaker 1: great Red Dragon in Man Hunter? Yes, who else was?
Speaker 1: He's in an episode of The X Files where he
Speaker 1: plays like a child murderer. He was a creepy priest
Speaker 1: on an episode of Louis Yeah, and he's also in
Speaker 1: House of the Devil, playing a world endingly creepy role. Well.
Speaker 1: One thing is I guess interesting to point out about
Speaker 1: character actors is character actors often have kind of a
Speaker 1: unique look, maybe even a slightly grotesque look. And then
Speaker 1: that is that is blown evermore out of a proportion
Speaker 1: by either acting opposite perfect looking starring humanoid individuals, or
Speaker 1: just you know, having increasingly creepy settings makeup etcetera. So
Speaker 1: I've got a creep for us. Yeah. Uh. One of
Speaker 1: the writers that we were reading in preparation for this episode,
Speaker 1: a cultural critic named Adam Kotsko, wrote this piece called
Speaker 1: nice to Meet You in New Inquiry, and he expanded
Speaker 1: it into a book about creepiness. But he calls attention
Speaker 1: to the Burger King King. Oh yes, right, the advertising
Speaker 1: phenomenon beginning in like the mid two thousands of the
Speaker 1: Creepy King, which is Burger King's lurking mascot. I don't know, Robert,
Speaker 1: I put some links in the in our notes to
Speaker 1: these videos. Did you go back and watch these? Yeah,
Speaker 1: we watched at least one of them. I remember them
Speaker 1: making the rounds back back in the day, and everyone
Speaker 1: embraced this creep factor exactly, so they got great word
Speaker 1: of mouth. It was sort of a viral marketing sensation,
Speaker 1: except I don't think it made anybody want to eat
Speaker 1: Burger King. But the most common version of this type
Speaker 1: of commercial is somebody gets freaked out because they discover
Speaker 1: the Burger King. Who's this guy in a king outfit
Speaker 1: with a unmoving, smiling king mask. The mask itself is
Speaker 1: kind of reminiscent of the the anonymous v for Vendetta
Speaker 1: mask sort of, except it's got this big grin. Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty awful. But they discovered somebody in the
Speaker 1: commercial discovers the King is like watching them or leaning
Speaker 1: over their bed or staring at them from somewhere, and
Speaker 1: they get creeped out rightly because the King is creepy.
Speaker 1: But then they're anxiety is calmed because the King offers
Speaker 1: them some disgusting Burger King products. Uh, well, tell me this.
Speaker 1: I know we're both fans of of this particular film,
Speaker 1: or at least treatments of this film. But Torgo from
Speaker 1: Manos the Hands of Faith, Torgo is the ultimate creep.
Speaker 1: If there is one creep to list, it is Torgo.
Speaker 1: If you haven't seen this movie, it was a it
Speaker 1: was a great hit on Mystery Science Theater three thousand.
Speaker 1: But it was a film produced in El Paso, Texas
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties, and it has this character in
Speaker 1: it who's kind of I mean, what can you You
Speaker 1: don't know much about him in the movie. He's just
Speaker 1: a guy with very large knees who kind of talks
Speaker 1: like this. That's a good Torgo, like apparently he was
Speaker 1: supposed to be a satyr. I think so, but it's
Speaker 1: not really. The sader effects are not great. So he
Speaker 1: just looks like he has enormous weird legs and he
Speaker 1: shuffles about and he's helpful sometimes, you know, but very
Speaker 1: very very cree be. Yeah, never tally inappropriate behavior, right,
Speaker 1: and but never completely feels like a threat. Oh no,
Speaker 1: later in the but early on, like I'm thinking, when
Speaker 1: like the Famili's first encounters him, he's he's just carrying luggage, yes,
Speaker 1: and just eating up lots of lots of screen time. Okay,
Speaker 1: we we can't do too manymore, but at one I
Speaker 1: gotta mention you ever seen Crinkles, the clown from the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties post sugar rice Crinkles commercial. I have not,
Speaker 1: and I knows you put the now I noticed you
Speaker 1: put the link in the notes and I didn't click
Speaker 1: on it. Well, that that's worth a look. It's this
Speaker 1: clown who's eating cereal. And I think part of what's
Speaker 1: creepy about it is the production of the commercial. So
Speaker 1: it's not even all the clown clowns get a bad rap.
Speaker 1: We can talk about clowns, but I have to admit
Speaker 1: he is kind of creepy looking, but it's the production
Speaker 1: of the commercial that does not have like rapid editing
Speaker 1: like commercials do now. So there are scenes of this
Speaker 1: clown just eating cereal and taking a long time to
Speaker 1: say anything after he has a bite, and it's quite creepy.
Speaker 1: I think the silence makes it creepier. Okay, well, I
Speaker 1: will definitely have to watch that and creep myself out. Um.
Speaker 1: One that comes to my mind instantly too is riff Raff,
Speaker 1: played by Richard O'Brien in Rocky HRR Picture Show. And
Speaker 1: I guess really most characters that Richard O'Brien plays fall
Speaker 1: into that creepy role because he's see another Tom Noonan type. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: he has this natural Will you remember Dark City he
Speaker 1: played the what Mr Hand as one of the strangers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he's he definitely pops up in my mind. Is
Speaker 1: both a riff Raff is a creepy character, but then
Speaker 1: Richard O'Brien himself is kind of I think I think
Speaker 1: it would be fair to say he is a proud
Speaker 1: creep as well. And uh you know, I also from
Speaker 1: a personal note, I have to think back to the
Speaker 1: monster science videos that have done here for how stuff
Speaker 1: works where I play the character Dr Anton Jessup. Um, wait,
Speaker 1: that was you that. I know it was such a
Speaker 1: performance it's hard, too hard to believe. But yes, that
Speaker 1: was actually made Joe, and uh, you know, and it's
Speaker 1: a very two dimensional character. I didn't when really that's
Speaker 1: the thing about a creep. A creep is two dimensional.
Speaker 1: Once they become three dimensional, there's something infinitely worse or
Speaker 1: something infinitely more human. But but we did try to
Speaker 1: implement greasy hair, overly enthusiastic nature, poor posture, excessive gesticulation,
Speaker 1: excessive smiling, lack of boundaries, pale skin, obsessiveness. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and as I say these things, I also have to realize,
Speaker 1: like a lot of these are they're not They're not
Speaker 1: too far removed, probably from how I am in real life.
Speaker 1: So I have to come back to what we said
Speaker 1: earlier about no matter you know, how you think you
Speaker 1: carry yourself in in our world, you've probably come off
Speaker 1: as a creeper. So whatever I'm trying to achieve with
Speaker 1: Dr Anton Jessup, people have probably seen me in public
Speaker 1: and thought exactly the same thing with me. So in
Speaker 1: many cases, it may be the difference between normal person
Speaker 1: and a creep is just a difference in some mannerisms
Speaker 1: and grooming. Yeah, and I think the who is observing
Speaker 1: you and you know what moment have they caught you in? Okay?
Speaker 1: So one thing you might have noticed with us talking
Speaker 1: about all these examples so far is that I think
Speaker 1: every single one of them we mentioned is male. Yes,
Speaker 1: so is creepiness inherently a male property? Is there such
Speaker 1: a thing as a lady creep? Or culturally do we
Speaker 1: just tend to assume if you're talking about a creep,
Speaker 1: that creep is a man, And if you're talking about
Speaker 1: somebody being creepy, you're probably referring to a person who
Speaker 1: is male. This is a certainly a topic that it's
Speaker 1: that's explored in some of the literature we've looked at,
Speaker 1: and it it does seem to be this double standard
Speaker 1: that exposes a lot of our a lot of the
Speaker 1: sexual politics and our culture. That Yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 1: don't even have to to elaborate on it too much,
Speaker 1: but you are I found that you you are kind
Speaker 1: of It pains to come up with good examples of
Speaker 1: even a fictional creepy female. Um, the best that I
Speaker 1: can come up with is clearly going to be Jerry
Speaker 1: Blank from Strangers with Candy. Now, I've never seen Stranger,
Speaker 1: so you got to explain Jerry Blank to me. Okay.
Speaker 1: So this was a character played by Amy Sadaris and
Speaker 1: the show also featured Stephen Colbert. It's one of the teachers,
Speaker 1: but it was like an after school special on the show.
Speaker 1: Jerry is um an older x con whose returned to
Speaker 1: an actual high school and it's taking high school classes
Speaker 1: alongside more or less real teenagers. Quite plausible. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: she's acting like a teenager as well, So there's a
Speaker 1: there's a lot of grotesque body humor. Uh you know,
Speaker 1: Jerry's this older lady. Sadaris wore a fat suit to
Speaker 1: play the role. She's always making these these funny twisted faces.
Speaker 1: But she's also pans sexually aggressive, I guess you'd say,
Speaker 1: And she's generally and generally inappropriate ways. She's also a
Speaker 1: little bit racist, and that comes out in in what
Speaker 1: she's talking about. Most of the time, she makes terrible choices.
Speaker 1: But yet even in this comedy, we find ourselves caring
Speaker 1: about her, like we know in a way they achieve
Speaker 1: something special with Jerry because we care about Jerry we
Speaker 1: know enough about Jerry and granted it's a comic character,
Speaker 1: it's an unreal character, but she is still kind of
Speaker 1: a grotesque character, and she's still a creepy character. I
Speaker 1: think how much of that do you think is the
Speaker 1: character and how much is just what Amy Sadaris brings
Speaker 1: to it. Oh, I mean, it's hard to separate the
Speaker 1: two because it's yeah, it's so much of it is
Speaker 1: just Amy Sadaris is wonderful, twitchy performance. It's really one
Speaker 1: of the great comedic performances of all time. You know,
Speaker 1: Amy Sadaris actually plays a kind of creepy character in
Speaker 1: Kimmy Schmidt as well. Oh yeah, she's like the Lackey character, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's interesting. We'll come back to another lackey in
Speaker 1: a bit. So you mentioned Rocky Horror Picture Show riff
Speaker 1: Raff Richard O'Brien, but there are some lady creeps in
Speaker 1: that as well. There are and those were some other
Speaker 1: examples that came to mind, So particularly Colombia and Magenta
Speaker 1: from Rocky Are Picture Show, who are kind of who
Speaker 1: kind of lackeys of riff Raff and uh uh and
Speaker 1: uh and Frank and further and and I bring them
Speaker 1: up because they're both definitely female fictional characters that come
Speaker 1: off as creepy intentionally, so and we'll ignore the fact
Speaker 1: that they're both technical I think they're one of them
Speaker 1: is technically an alien. But but I always found that
Speaker 1: the key with the characters both creepy and attractive. So,
Speaker 1: if anything, their otherness, their creepiness is eroticized, I think,
Speaker 1: so that the sense of danger that you get from
Speaker 1: them is not based on physical deformity, but like they're
Speaker 1: sort of countercultural aspects there. Yeah, I guess you could
Speaker 1: say goffinus to a certain extent. And also their their
Speaker 1: sexual freedom, especially when when they're juxtaposed to Brad and Janet,
Speaker 1: who are like the ultimate straight people. Like that's that's
Speaker 1: kind of like everything that works or doesn't work in
Speaker 1: Rocky Hard depending on your your your viewpoint, UH stems
Speaker 1: from an encounter between squares between norms and UH and
Speaker 1: complete fringe individuals. Oh yeah, well, I mean in Rocky Horror,
Speaker 1: the creepiness is liberating. It's a liberated sort of heroic
Speaker 1: creepiness that is contrasted to this horrible norminus. All right, well,
Speaker 1: you know we've rolled through some examples here, so I
Speaker 1: think we should probably take a quick break and when
Speaker 1: we come back we will get into the science of creepiness.
Speaker 1: We'll get into what the what study, what studies one
Speaker 1: study in particular, have to say about our criteria for creepiness.
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Speaker 1: stamps dot com inter stuff and start mailing things. So
Speaker 1: we've talked about how one of the problems here is
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of uh, ambiguity and subjectivity and
Speaker 1: how we define the idea of the creep Lots of
Speaker 1: people will probably agree on what's a creepy situation, what
Speaker 1: which person is a creep? But what what what are
Speaker 1: the actual criteria? Yeah, I mean it's so subjective. One
Speaker 1: of the articles I was looking at was the Age
Speaker 1: of the Age of Creepiness by Nathan Heller, published in
Speaker 1: The New Yorker and uh he and he brings up
Speaker 1: a number of fictional characters as thought experiments. Here, for instance,
Speaker 1: he says, is John Travolta creepy as a disco predator
Speaker 1: in Saturday Night Fever? Hard to say? Is he creepy
Speaker 1: as a weathered black clad gentleman who leers at women
Speaker 1: while fondling their chins. Yes, very much and now forever more?
Speaker 1: What change? He's of course referring to Uh, classic John
Speaker 1: Travolta versus modern John Travolta. And does modern John Travolta
Speaker 1: affect the way you feel about classic John Travolta? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I don't know, like men at the time, did
Speaker 1: anyone would anyone dare say? Is John Travolta creepy and
Speaker 1: satura Saturday night to fever? Or is that merely us
Speaker 1: looking at current John travol To and then looking backwards
Speaker 1: through time? And it brings up the question of like,
Speaker 1: how does the suaveness of the dude inform whether or
Speaker 1: not you think he's creepy? Yeah. Like another example that
Speaker 1: Heller brings up is Don Draper from Madman. Don Draper
Speaker 1: is a suave character. Uh. John Ham is a very
Speaker 1: handsome actor, and we get to know a lot about
Speaker 1: his complexities and his dark side, and you know what's
Speaker 1: good in him, But he's he's definitely a creeper. Uh
Speaker 1: some of the time, maybe a lot of the time.
Speaker 1: But how do you how do you actually categorize it?
Speaker 1: When is he a creep and when is he uh endearing?
Speaker 1: In that book we mentioned Creepiness by Adam Cootsko. He
Speaker 1: also argues that creepy types are haunting due to their
Speaker 1: quote peculiar power of attraction. So our eyes are drawn
Speaker 1: to the creep. You know, how can you how can
Speaker 1: you not look at the creep You can't let them
Speaker 1: just disappear into the background because they're capturing your attention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you you have to process who and what they are.
Speaker 1: Though he's primarily focused on fictional characters right like on TV.
Speaker 1: So I think it's time to look at a study
Speaker 1: that will actually quantify what makes a creep uh. And
Speaker 1: so this study is called on the Nature of Creepiness
Speaker 1: and it's published in New Ideas in Psychology this year,
Speaker 1: and the researchers, Frank McAndrew and Sarah Kinkey tried for
Speaker 1: the first time that we know of in the history
Speaker 1: of science, to take an empirical and quantified look at
Speaker 1: the experience of creepiness and how it relates to usage
Speaker 1: of the word. And I think this is really interesting
Speaker 1: because lots of scientists have studied fear, anxiety and all
Speaker 1: that and creepiness as we've been talking about. Is this
Speaker 1: seemingly universal and utterly conversationally pervasive topic, but until now
Speaker 1: it hasn't really been studied on its own to look
Speaker 1: at what makes it unique. Yeah, it's been it's been
Speaker 1: the twilight, everyone's setting the light in the dark. That's
Speaker 1: a that's a very nice way of putting it. But anyway,
Speaker 1: So I want to quote their mission statements sort of
Speaker 1: what what they set out to do. Quote. It is
Speaker 1: the goal of this paper to introduce a theoretical perspective
Speaker 1: on the common psychological experience of feeling creeped out and
Speaker 1: to uncover the cues that we use to label other
Speaker 1: people as creepy. So two main questions, what does it
Speaker 1: mean to be creeped out? And who's creepy? Okay, So
Speaker 1: McAndrew and ken Ki they're uh, they're they're sort of working.
Speaker 1: Assumption is that we have this internal creepiness detector that
Speaker 1: is a defense system warning us against some kind of threat.
Speaker 1: And they based this on research indicating things like that
Speaker 1: creepy interactions literally make us feel the chills, uh, and
Speaker 1: that other psychological research has associated feelings of literal coldness
Speaker 1: with other types of threats, such as the social threat
Speaker 1: triggered by the experience of social exclusion. Um. But it's
Speaker 1: not just a warning against a threat because simply observing
Speaker 1: common usage. As we talked about at the very beginning
Speaker 1: of this episode, you would not describe an overtly terrify
Speaker 1: terrifying encounter as creepy. If a friend tells you, uh,
Speaker 1: he was chased down the street by a maniac with
Speaker 1: a chainsaw, that is not creepy. Creepy is what if
Speaker 1: there was a guy standing across the street staring at you,
Speaker 1: that's probably creepy, right. Yeah. It's kind of like if
Speaker 1: you're walking down the street and you're trying to decide
Speaker 1: whether to remain on this side of the street or
Speaker 1: to cross over and continue on the other side. Is
Speaker 1: the individual on this side of the street are they
Speaker 1: like karate punching the air and like beating trash cans
Speaker 1: with something that would be more overtly threatening, And you
Speaker 1: would say, I choose not to walk on that side
Speaker 1: of the street. If it's just somebody out there like
Speaker 1: feeding pigeons or reading a newspaper, You're like, no problem,
Speaker 1: I walked by people doing that all the time. Not
Speaker 1: a threat. It's that person who's kind of shifty that
Speaker 1: person who you you can't quite get a read on.
Speaker 1: What if it's a guy just sitting on the sidewalk
Speaker 1: revving a wood chipper but not putting anything in it.
Speaker 1: M hmmm, depends how much woods around. I guess that's
Speaker 1: again it's I'm gonna have to look for more contextual quotes,
Speaker 1: will come back to it. Okay, So the authors they
Speaker 1: offer a hypothesis explaining the nature of creepiness, which is that, um,
Speaker 1: the distinct feature that makes something creepy is ambiguity, meaning
Speaker 1: a lack of certainty about whether someone or something is threatening,
Speaker 1: or a lack of certainty about the nature of the threat. Um.
Speaker 1: So already I can hear that. Okay, that that's making
Speaker 1: sense to me. Creepiness involves some kind of uh feeling
Speaker 1: of not being sure how to react to something. But
Speaker 1: then they've got an additional hypothesis. Creepiness may be related
Speaker 1: to the concept of in evolutionary psychology of agency detection.
Speaker 1: Now we've talked about agency detection on the show before. Um,
Speaker 1: sort of having an overactive or hyperactive agency detection means
Speaker 1: that if you're walking down the road and you hear
Speaker 1: some leaves wrestling, you say who's there instead of just assuming, well,
Speaker 1: that's just the wind. I don't even need to look, right,
Speaker 1: And why would this be favored evolutionarily, Well, false false
Speaker 1: positives don't cost you much checking to see who's there
Speaker 1: when nobody's there. That's not a big risk to take.
Speaker 1: But false negatives can get you killed if it wrestles
Speaker 1: and you don't look. You know, one in a million times,
Speaker 1: that might be the maniac with the chainsaw. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a type one errorsus a type two error. And nature
Speaker 1: is going to select for freaking out a little bit
Speaker 1: too much over things that are not a threat. Right,
Speaker 1: So they say that our tendency is to sort of
Speaker 1: over value cautiousness in potentially threatening situations, which could lead
Speaker 1: to the experience of creepiness. You know, this guy here,
Speaker 1: he hasn't done anything overtly dangerous or threatening. You're just
Speaker 1: getting some cues that's set off that over sensitive threat alarm,
Speaker 1: and it keeps you on guard. And that feeling of
Speaker 1: creepiness is the biological sensation of being kept on guard.
Speaker 1: All right. Now, They've got four explicit hypotheses in the
Speaker 1: paper that they want to test through their their experiment,
Speaker 1: which is going to be in the form of a
Speaker 1: of a big survey to get people's attitudes on creepiness.
Speaker 1: So the first hypothesis is, h if creepiness communicates a threat,
Speaker 1: males are going to be more likely to be perceived
Speaker 1: as creepy than females simply since males are more violent
Speaker 1: and physically threatening to more people. Makes sense. Uh. Second hypothesis, UH,
Speaker 1: females are going to be more likely than males to
Speaker 1: perceive some sort of sexual threat from a creepy person. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: I understand that too. Third hypothesis, there are certainly they're
Speaker 1: gonna be certain occupations that will be perceived as more
Speaker 1: creepy than other ones, like occupations that signal a fascination
Speaker 1: with what they call threatening stimuli like death or non
Speaker 1: normative sex, unacceptable types of sex. And and that that
Speaker 1: one that particular description I don't doubt at all. But
Speaker 1: it also it really underlines the problematic, contextual, and and
Speaker 1: individual aspects of UH of that the threat analysis that's
Speaker 1: going on, like what is normal sex exactly to to
Speaker 1: to any given individual right, it's going to be based
Speaker 1: on the you know, it's gonna very person to person
Speaker 1: it is your is the character here walking you know,
Speaker 1: through an Amish town or they're walking down the streets
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventies New York and a Scorsese film. You know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: some bad lieutenants are creepier than others. And then their
Speaker 1: last hypothesis, since they hypothesize that creepiness is about uncertainty, Uh,
Speaker 1: they're gonna say that non normative nonverbal behavior, so weird
Speaker 1: mannerisms and behaviors and actions or characteristics associated with unpredictability
Speaker 1: will be positively associated with perceptions of creepiness. So that's
Speaker 1: uh sort of to say that acting weird and acting unusual,
Speaker 1: acting unpredictable is going to be associated with creepiness. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: because because there is like shiftiness is creepiness for the
Speaker 1: most part. Right, Yeah, So what are their methods? How
Speaker 1: are they going to test this? Well, they admit that
Speaker 1: this uh, this first research, since you know, creepiness hasn't
Speaker 1: really been studied this way before. This is mostly exploratory,
Speaker 1: so they're just trying to get some places to start
Speaker 1: test the waters, figure out the depths, and then it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's future studies and meta analysis that will give us
Speaker 1: perhaps some real understanding exactly. So in this study, it
Speaker 1: was one thousand, three d forty one individuals heavily weighted
Speaker 1: towards females. There were a thousand, twenty nine females and
Speaker 1: three hundred and twelve males, ranging an age from eighteen
Speaker 1: to seventy seven, the main age of about twenty nine,
Speaker 1: and they were all recruited online to respond to a
Speaker 1: survey for quote, a study about creepiness. I wonder if
Speaker 1: people who are interested in answering questions about creepiness have
Speaker 1: a non standard view of creepiness. That's always a concern
Speaker 1: with research, right exactly, And they admit that in their study.
Speaker 1: They talk about the some of the limitations of their
Speaker 1: methods at the end of the paper, and you can
Speaker 1: mention those in a bit. Uh one. One other problem
Speaker 1: that they mentioned is that they wish that they had
Speaker 1: gotten data on the participants country of origin. They do
Speaker 1: not have that. They believe the sample is primarily American
Speaker 1: but contained a significant portion of international participants. But we
Speaker 1: don't know, so we shouldn't really consider that um at
Speaker 1: least for the purpose of this study. Exactly. As we'll
Speaker 1: get into a bit. I I have some some strong
Speaker 1: feelings about the Nate the role of this absolutely Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I think creepiness is going to be highly culturally determined.
Speaker 1: So yes. Um, So, here's the first part of the study.
Speaker 1: You get in there, imagine you're participating in this study.
Speaker 1: The first thing is a forced choice question, is a
Speaker 1: creepy person more likely to be male or female? Well,
Speaker 1: male is going to be the the answer they're going
Speaker 1: to give. Survey says you are absolutely correct. The result
Speaker 1: was point three percent of respondents thought that creepy people
Speaker 1: were much more likely to be males than females. Unquote.
Speaker 1: So also, males and females were in almost perfectly well
Speaker 1: agreement that males were more likely to be creepy. So yes.
Speaker 1: When we asked earlier, is creepin as a male issue,
Speaker 1: it really seems like it is. Men and women agree
Speaker 1: that men are generally the creeps. Then they get to
Speaker 1: the next section. The next session is a scenario that
Speaker 1: they're prompted to imagine. So it goes like this quote,
Speaker 1: imagine a close friend of yours whose judgment you trust, Robert,
Speaker 1: have you got the close friend in mind? Okay, a
Speaker 1: close friend of mine. Now imagine that this friend tells
Speaker 1: you that she or he just met someone for the
Speaker 1: first time and tells you that the person was creepy. Okay.
Speaker 1: After reading the prompt, these participants, they're given a list
Speaker 1: of forty four behaviors and physical traits. Just a couple
Speaker 1: of examples had lots of tattoos or never looked your
Speaker 1: friend in the eye, and they're asked to rate the
Speaker 1: likelihood on a scale of one to five, one being
Speaker 1: not likely at all, five being very likely that the
Speaker 1: creep from the friends creep encounter exhibited these traits. And
Speaker 1: as you can expect, some traits were considered much creepier
Speaker 1: than others. So they say, and the results that that
Speaker 1: there are some things highly correlated to creepiness that people
Speaker 1: gave the answer for here. One of them was this
Speaker 1: big composite variable that they put together out of these
Speaker 1: appearance and nonverbal behaviors traits that people rated as creepy,
Speaker 1: such as the person stood too close to your friend,
Speaker 1: the person had greasy hair, the person had a peculiar smile,
Speaker 1: the person had bulging eyes, and things like that. Though
Speaker 1: I kind of like bulging eyes, but anyway, and then
Speaker 1: they go on to say also other things that were
Speaker 1: rated as creepy in this section where being of the
Speaker 1: opposite sex as the friend, though they think this is
Speaker 1: probably due to the predominantly female sample in the study
Speaker 1: being extremely thin. That's strange. I don't usually think of
Speaker 1: that as a creepy trait, but well, I guess it
Speaker 1: comes into what's extremely thin? Yeah, so extremely I guess. So. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But even it, like we're getting into judgment hall is
Speaker 1: based on someone's physical appearance, right, But I mean that's
Speaker 1: how the mind works. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean I
Speaker 1: think this explicitly calls out a lot of unfair, prejudicial attitudes, right,
Speaker 1: a lot of these things. I mean, there's nothing wrong
Speaker 1: with having greasy hair, right, No, I mean that's not
Speaker 1: threatening in itself. I mean it it depending on the
Speaker 1: context and the culture. Like greased back, slicked back hair
Speaker 1: could be the height of fashion like that, it shows
Speaker 1: that you were exceedingly well groomed. In other scenarios you
Speaker 1: can afford the special pomade. Yeah, you're you're you're slicked back,
Speaker 1: you're dapper dan man, you know. But other times it
Speaker 1: just means that your hair is greasy and you haven't
Speaker 1: taken care of yourself. So it it varies. It depends
Speaker 1: what the fashion is, what the uh, what the individual's
Speaker 1: expectations are, right, But of course they're testing people's attitudes,
Speaker 1: and people's attitudes aren't necessarily always so enlightened. But anyway,
Speaker 1: So going on from that, another thing that's uh that's
Speaker 1: cited as not looking the interaction partner in the eye.
Speaker 1: If somebody's like, you know, not just not make an
Speaker 1: eye contact, staring at the floor, maybe asking to take
Speaker 1: a picture of the interaction partner. I can see that
Speaker 1: watching people before interacting with them. This, I think this
Speaker 1: is going to be very significant. Asking about details of
Speaker 1: one's personal life, having a mental illness, there's another prejudicial attitude,
Speaker 1: I guess, uh, talking about his or her own personal life,
Speaker 1: displaying too much or too little emotion, being older, and
Speaker 1: steering the conversation towards sex. On the other hand, I
Speaker 1: was just wondering, what are the least creepy descriptors, Like,
Speaker 1: what did they rate the lowest? Uh? These include was
Speaker 1: a child. Okay, that's funny because I can think of
Speaker 1: lots of creepy children, but they're usually in movies and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're doing something that's out of context and unchildlike
Speaker 1: and then also was fashionably dressed, talked a lot about clothes.
Speaker 1: These are these are interesting, like the fashionably s like,
Speaker 1: I wonder, like how much of it is the weight
Speaker 1: of the scenario that the individual is is bringing to mind,
Speaker 1: like they're imagining like a bar setting perhaps, and then
Speaker 1: they would the impeccably dressed kind of I'm guessing to
Speaker 1: go back to Saturday Night Live. I'm thinking that the
Speaker 1: Roxbury guys, right, are they fashionably dressed? Um? But they
Speaker 1: are creeps. They are creeps and they they are they
Speaker 1: are Yeah, we should have mentioned them earlier because they
Speaker 1: are invading personal space there there. They seem to have
Speaker 1: put way too much thought into their fashion, whether or
Speaker 1: not their fashion actually lines up with what is uh
Speaker 1: currently culturally the norm. Okay, next part of the thing.
Speaker 1: They also looked at occupations, right, same thing, rate rate
Speaker 1: and occupation on the scale of one to five. How
Speaker 1: creepy is it? This was really this is really interesting.
Speaker 1: This is one of my favorite parts of the study
Speaker 1: because we end up seeing, like the their scale of
Speaker 1: the professions that came up creepy, the less the least creepy.
Speaker 1: The creepiest is the clown of course, the poor clown
Speaker 1: right up there with like undertakers and the individuals we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier people engaged in uh some sort of sexual business.
Speaker 1: The four that were significantly higher than the mean were
Speaker 1: the clown, the taxidermists, the sex shop owner, and the
Speaker 1: funeral directory. But one of these is not like the other.
Speaker 1: I mean, what's wrong with clowns other than the fact
Speaker 1: that you don't like the way they look? Yeah? Well,
Speaker 1: I think the taxidermist one, too, is one where it
Speaker 1: totally depends on your setting. Like if you're talking about
Speaker 1: rural Tennessee. Uh, but the taxidermists, they're just doing their thing.
Speaker 1: They're just stuffing those deer heads and those fish and all.
Speaker 1: That's just a part of your life. Taxidermist in the
Speaker 1: big city slightly different vibe going on. But they the
Speaker 1: clown is ever problematic, and it's is kind of a
Speaker 1: unique intry here. We should do a whole episode sometime
Speaker 1: on the maligned clown. Yeah, I would love to, because
Speaker 1: I'm very much of the mind that this we've kind
Speaker 1: of convinced ourselves that clowns are creepy. Yes, there are
Speaker 1: clown examples that are avertly creepy. But we've kind of
Speaker 1: been telling ourselves the same creepy clown joke over and
Speaker 1: over again until we can't see anything else. But I digress. No,
Speaker 1: I think you're exactly right. I think a lot of
Speaker 1: clown fear is performative. Though at the same time I
Speaker 1: acknowledge sometimes clowns can be creepy. But why why is
Speaker 1: this a recently emergent phenomenon. You don't hear people talking
Speaker 1: about clowns being creepy hundred years ago. Yeah, clowns were great.
Speaker 1: Clowns were the the entertainment of choice for young and
Speaker 1: old alike. Uh. And here's the thing. People often say, Oh, well,
Speaker 1: the clown is creepy because the clown is like a
Speaker 1: false face and you don't really know what's behind it.
Speaker 1: And yet the least creepy profession on this scale was
Speaker 1: the meteorologist. And and I get the same vibe off
Speaker 1: of like most meteorologists like he you know, kind of
Speaker 1: the standard newscaster type of person. Here is someone who
Speaker 1: I really can't get a read on because they're putting
Speaker 1: out this demeanor. You know. The funny thing is I
Speaker 1: I know of some specific creep be meteorologists like we're
Speaker 1: involved in crimes. But funny side note. Also there's a
Speaker 1: weather dot com article gloating over the fact that meteorologists
Speaker 1: got rated the least creepy of all professions. Um, and
Speaker 1: so I think, I think just we've got to remember
Speaker 1: now to put somebody at ease, always be a fashionably
Speaker 1: dressed child meteorologist who can't stop talking about clothes. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now you people are probably wondering where do I rank? Well,
Speaker 1: you can certainly look up this, uh this article and
Speaker 1: find yourself. We find out fund to find ourselves as
Speaker 1: writers kind of in the middle of the scale though.
Speaker 1: It so our mean is two point fourteen, and that
Speaker 1: means we're below the mean of the scale, right, if
Speaker 1: the mean is three, it's one to five scales. So
Speaker 1: we're generally considered less than the medium creepiness. Most professions
Speaker 1: on here got less than medium creepiness. That I can't
Speaker 1: I can't get over the fact though that according to
Speaker 1: this we are more creepy than actors. I'm maybe I
Speaker 1: just know some creepy actors, but well we're not much
Speaker 1: it's almost the same. Almost. Yeah, I guess we're we
Speaker 1: were kind of equivalent. Over that that tiny slice of
Speaker 1: a percentage point. It's true actors should be at the
Speaker 1: top of the list. Do I think one could make
Speaker 1: an argument for that, but hey, we're no, at least
Speaker 1: when we're not the taxidermist, clown, sex shop owner, who
Speaker 1: would be like right there at the top. Okay, so
Speaker 1: we did, we did occupations. But also they wanted to
Speaker 1: see about hobbies. And in this next section they didn't
Speaker 1: have a list of hobbies. Instead that this was a
Speaker 1: different format. They were just asked to list, in a
Speaker 1: free prompt, a couple of hobbies that the subjects would
Speaker 1: consider creepy. Yes, the creepy. The creepy hobbies here. Um
Speaker 1: so collecting things, especially dolls, insects, and body parts with
Speaker 1: collecting body parts. Again, one of these things is not
Speaker 1: like the other. I think it calls to mind like
Speaker 1: questions of like where did that come from? How did
Speaker 1: you get it? Yeah? The body Yeah, the body part
Speaker 1: one is is far creepier than collecting insects and and
Speaker 1: and dolls. Like my sister collects dolls, shouldn't collect body parts.
Speaker 1: I would be concerned if it was body parts. Um
Speaker 1: what does she just collect doll parts? Full full dolls?
Speaker 1: But that at any rate. Yeah, there's kind of I
Speaker 1: feel like maybe there's an unfair stigma with that too,
Speaker 1: with the collecting of dolls, this is my arms room.
Speaker 1: There's They also pointed out hobbies that entail a great
Speaker 1: deal of watching, either in the form of photographing people, uh,
Speaker 1: bird watching and uh. And also they pointed out taxidermy
Speaker 1: and having quote a fascination with pornography or exotic sexual activity.
Speaker 1: But yet again, this is going to be one of
Speaker 1: those things where we we do wish we had had
Speaker 1: country data on this, right, because this is probably gonna
Speaker 1: be highly culturally variable. Yeah, I mean exotic sexual activity
Speaker 1: like that, it depends entirely and you choose to define that, Like,
Speaker 1: there are plenty of individuals out there who might define uh,
Speaker 1: you know, homosexual activity as that. And therefore any um,
Speaker 1: you know, gay or lesbian or bisexual individual is then
Speaker 1: a de facto creep based on this scale. Oh, I
Speaker 1: think that is like, if you go back fifty years
Speaker 1: I think that there is a like an American culture
Speaker 1: fifty years ago, you will see a strong association between,
Speaker 1: for example, a gay man and the concept of creepiness. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: I guess hopefully we seem to be losing that. I
Speaker 1: don't really get a sense of that today, but now
Speaker 1: that that's certainly like the homophobic attitude towards uh gay's
Speaker 1: gay men in particular, is that is that yes they
Speaker 1: are there's something threatening, there's something creepy about them that
Speaker 1: like the the idea that this individual is gay and
Speaker 1: they want to have sex with me, like for the
Speaker 1: like gay in or out there, uh you know, cruising
Speaker 1: around for for straight bottled up uh square to to
Speaker 1: warp or something you know, Oh no, oh no, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're coming for you. They're not coming for you, trust me.
Speaker 1: Um uh but but yeah, that's I think undoubtedly a
Speaker 1: part of this. Okay, we're getting towards the end of
Speaker 1: the study, but there's there's another section. In this next section,
Speaker 1: subjects are asked to rate, on a scale of one
Speaker 1: to five their level of agreement with fifteen statements about
Speaker 1: creepy people. That would start with a prompt like when
Speaker 1: I meet someone that seems creepy dot dot dot, and
Speaker 1: then you'd have a statement to complete, do you agree
Speaker 1: with this or not? For example, I think this person
Speaker 1: has sexual interest in me, or people are creepier online
Speaker 1: than when I meet them. Face to face, and so
Speaker 1: they did some analysis on that and the results. Analyzing
Speaker 1: the results from the section, the authors sort of conclude
Speaker 1: that the following statements are the most commonly believed to
Speaker 1: be true about creepy people. So they make us feel
Speaker 1: feel fearful or anxious. Uh. They believe that the creepiness
Speaker 1: resides in the individual more than in his or her behavior.
Speaker 1: And I feel like that's unfortunate. I think people probably
Speaker 1: do feel that way like that. It's it's really that
Speaker 1: a person is a creep and always a creep, rather
Speaker 1: than that what they're doing right now is creepy. I
Speaker 1: feel more the opposite. Yeah, but it does come into
Speaker 1: this whole idea that we just dismiss someone as a creep.
Speaker 1: We write them off as a creep until additional information, uh,
Speaker 1: you know tells us otherwise. But if we're just dismissing them,
Speaker 1: that information may never come because it's not like we're
Speaker 1: gonna get to gonna know the creep unless we have
Speaker 1: to write. Right. Okay, So more creepy behaviors. We think
Speaker 1: they may have a sexual interest in us. That seems key,
Speaker 1: you know, it represents a sexual threat. Um. Uh, they're
Speaker 1: creepy when they exhibit multiple symptoms of creepiness rather than
Speaker 1: just one. And I think that makes sense because I
Speaker 1: would sort of call this creep clustering similar to the
Speaker 1: crank clustering. Like if you meet somebody who believes in
Speaker 1: one crank theory, they probably believe in a lot of
Speaker 1: crank theories. If you meet somebody who's into time cube,
Speaker 1: but they're probably also I don't know, flat earther, Actually
Speaker 1: they probably wouldn't be both of those, as they're incompatible.
Speaker 1: But but you know what I mean about that. Yeah, yeah, So,
Speaker 1: for instance, like the kind of person who might encounter
Speaker 1: like nine or era or even modern era Glynn Danzig, Like,
Speaker 1: if they're the kind of person who thinks, you know,
Speaker 1: some other things they're into, well, okay, I guess the
Speaker 1: thing is if they're the type of person that's going
Speaker 1: to think tattoos or long black hair happens to be creepy,
Speaker 1: they're also going to think that having like sharpened fingernails
Speaker 1: is going to be creepy. They're gonna think that that
Speaker 1: other aspects of his persona are also creepy. How can
Speaker 1: sharpened fingernails be creepy? I know, it's it's it's beautiful. Okay,
Speaker 1: so a few more so, Uh, the expected intimacy and
Speaker 1: frequency of the interaction with the person moderates perceptions of creepiness.
Speaker 1: So uh, just sort of like expectations are going to
Speaker 1: change the way you receive the conversation. That obviously makes sense. Uh.
Speaker 1: Something that is done by somebody who's close to you
Speaker 1: is not physically but you know, a close friend of
Speaker 1: yours is might not be creepy, but if a stranger
Speaker 1: did it, it it would be creepy. That's kind of obvious.
Speaker 1: Next thing that people believe that creepy people are unable
Speaker 1: to change, but they do not necessarily have bad intentions.
Speaker 1: And uh, and then finally, people who follow social rules
Speaker 1: of behavior are not perceived as creepy. So basically, if
Speaker 1: you if you mind your manners and you follow all
Speaker 1: the rules of normal social interaction, as often kind of
Speaker 1: ambiguous and unstated as they are, you can avoid being
Speaker 1: considered creepy. So the serial murderer who completely buries uh
Speaker 1: their true identity is not creepy. Dexter is not creepy,
Speaker 1: That's true. Dexter came up in some of the literature
Speaker 1: we're looking at, either I think they made the argument
Speaker 1: that Dexter does become creepy later on because there's some
Speaker 1: sort of a an incest angle or something. Maybe. I mean,
Speaker 1: I never really I only watched a little bit of Dexter.
Speaker 1: But he's not um, he's he doesn't come off as
Speaker 1: creepy to people who know him, right just because he's
Speaker 1: I don't know. He basically minds his manners and doesn't
Speaker 1: act too weird in public. Yeah, and and I didn't
Speaker 1: watch a lot of the show, but you also, I
Speaker 1: did not get the strong impression that he really enjoyed
Speaker 1: what he was doing all that much, like he just
Speaker 1: kind of did it because he had to. I think
Speaker 1: he did. Yeah. I mean again, we're sitting here talking
Speaker 1: about a show we haven't really seen. It's true, okay,
Speaker 1: but that is the creepy judgment. Saying someone is creepy
Speaker 1: is judging a show you haven't really seen. Okay. So
Speaker 1: a little more about their their analysis. They did say
Speaker 1: that from the results, they think the hypothesis that creepiness
Speaker 1: is linked to unpredictability is somewhat supported. Uh. They say
Speaker 1: that subjects more often agreed that the statement quote I
Speaker 1: am uncomfortable because I cannot predict how he or she
Speaker 1: will behave was descriptive of their reaction to a creepy person,
Speaker 1: and people were close to neutral on the statement quote,
Speaker 1: even though someone maybe creepy, I usually think that I
Speaker 1: understand his or her intentions. So it seems like there's
Speaker 1: some support for creepiness being unpredictability. They also found support
Speaker 1: for the hypothesis that women are more likely to perceive
Speaker 1: a creepy person as a sexual threat. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: in the final section that the last thing that was
Speaker 1: on the study was a single yes no question do
Speaker 1: most creepy people know that they are creepy? The responses
Speaker 1: were a hundred and fifteen yes. That was like eight
Speaker 1: point six percent, seven hundred nine seven No, that was
Speaker 1: like six and uh four hundred and twenty nine unsure,
Speaker 1: which was like thirty two. So generally people don't think
Speaker 1: that creepy people know that they're creepy, or they can't
Speaker 1: tell whether they know or not, and then other straight
Speaker 1: stray observations. I thought this was kind of interesting. The
Speaker 1: authors point out that older participants seem to be a
Speaker 1: little bit less concerned about creepy people and less likely
Speaker 1: to perceive sex fual threat or an intent to harm,
Speaker 1: which is interesting. I don't know if I would have
Speaker 1: predicted that that older people are less creeped out. Huh,
Speaker 1: that is interesting, Like to what maybe do you know,
Speaker 1: basically like they just don't see themselves as being threatened
Speaker 1: that much by the creeps in their midst or does
Speaker 1: that mean there maybe even more open to their own
Speaker 1: creepiness and the creepiness of others. It could be or
Speaker 1: maybe I don't know, maybe over time. I mean, as
Speaker 1: we've discussed discussed, you encounter a lot of creeps in
Speaker 1: the world. Creepiness is a common everyday experience. And the
Speaker 1: more you experience creepiness and it does no harm to you,
Speaker 1: maybably become desensitized to it. Or Yeah, one or two
Speaker 1: things is going to happen, right, Either you're gonna you're
Speaker 1: gonna be desensitized to it or you are gonna just
Speaker 1: really go down the well of fearing the creep all
Speaker 1: around you. Right. Yeah, so uh, we we should move
Speaker 1: on from this study. But one thing I do want
Speaker 1: to mention at the end is the authors acknowledge some
Speaker 1: limitations of their study. Like we talked about, this is
Speaker 1: you know, this is an online survey. So this is
Speaker 1: very preliminary. It's more sort of like establishing uh leads
Speaker 1: for other research in the future. Because with an online
Speaker 1: survey like this, one possibility that you have is a
Speaker 1: problem with self selection bias of the participants. Right, So,
Speaker 1: since it's an online volunteer survey, we're not necessarily hearing
Speaker 1: from a truly random sample of people, but from the
Speaker 1: kind of people who would click on a Facebook link
Speaker 1: to fill out an online psychological psychological survey about creepiness.
Speaker 1: That that is presumably a type of person indeed, um
Speaker 1: and they might be giving different types of answers than
Speaker 1: a truly random sampling of the population would. Also we
Speaker 1: already pointed out, for example, the lack of data and
Speaker 1: country of origin. This would be very interesting to look into,
Speaker 1: and it's probably, you know, if somebody's going to study this.
Speaker 1: Moving ahead from this point, I think this would be
Speaker 1: one of the most interesting things to look at. What
Speaker 1: in what ways are these creepy behaviors culturally variable and
Speaker 1: which ones are more universal? One thing I would say,
Speaker 1: it's well known, for example, that some cultures have very
Speaker 1: different feelings about things like eye contact yes than other
Speaker 1: cultures do, like sometimes making prolonged eye contact with somebody.
Speaker 1: In one place that might be totally normal and nice
Speaker 1: thing to do, and in other places it might be
Speaker 1: considered very creepy, right, or staring in general, like is
Speaker 1: it okay to stare at somebody who stands out a
Speaker 1: little bit? Yeah? Yeah, it's going to vary from culture
Speaker 1: to culture. All right, let's take a quick break and
Speaker 1: we come back. We'll look at a few more aspects
Speaker 1: of creepiness. Hi, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, a host of the
Speaker 1: new House to works Now podcast. Every week, I'll be
Speaker 1: bringing you three stories from our team about the weird
Speaker 1: and wondrous developments we've seen in science, technology, and culture.
Speaker 1: Fresh episodes will be out every Monday on iTunes, Spotify,
Speaker 1: Google Play Music, and everywhere else that find podcasts are found.
Speaker 1: So one of the big takeaways from this study we
Speaker 1: looked at and from some of the discussion we've had
Speaker 1: so far, is the idea of the threat ambiguity right
Speaker 1: in creepiness. That creepiness is different from scariness because when
Speaker 1: you are scared, you're scared of something that is overt
Speaker 1: or that being scared might be a part of creepiness,
Speaker 1: but it's okay to openly display fear and revulsion from
Speaker 1: something that is overtly threatening. Like we said, guy running
Speaker 1: at you with a chainsaw, it's okay to scream and
Speaker 1: run away from that. If there's a guy who's just
Speaker 1: being a little bit creepy and you scream and run
Speaker 1: away from him, we sort of have this conflict, right,
Speaker 1: like we're feeling, Am I just being rude? Right? If
Speaker 1: I do that? Um and the one of the authors
Speaker 1: of the study of Frank McAndrew. In another essay, he
Speaker 1: terms this the conflict between self preservation and self presentation,
Speaker 1: and I think that's a good way of putting it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're all walking this web of social expectations and societal norms,
Speaker 1: and there's an individual up ahead. It's kind of shaking
Speaker 1: the web a little bit, and we don't want to
Speaker 1: plumb it off the web with them. Don't want something
Speaker 1: bad to happen. But we also don't want to shake
Speaker 1: the web ourselves exactly so, So in that sense, creepiness
Speaker 1: is uncomfortable, not just because it entails anxiety, but also
Speaker 1: because it's inherently awkward. It's uncertain, you don't know what
Speaker 1: the best thing to do, is, so you're stuck in
Speaker 1: this state of I'm not comfortable, I don't know what
Speaker 1: to do, and that itself is a source of distress.
Speaker 1: One more thing I want to mention real quickly is
Speaker 1: that mc andrew of the Creepiness Study is also interested
Speaker 1: in the creepiness of places. Were primarily focused on creepy
Speaker 1: people today, but he has an essay at the Conversation
Speaker 1: you can check out about the evolutionary psychology of haunted houses. Interested. So,
Speaker 1: I know, I know what a number of you are
Speaker 1: probably thinking out there. Well, this is all great, but
Speaker 1: what did Freud have to say about it? Right? He's
Speaker 1: the final authority today? Well, uh, Sigmund Freud did not
Speaker 1: discuss the creep specifically, but in nineteen nineteens the uncanny
Speaker 1: he did have this to say, and you know is
Speaker 1: it will discuss This involves translation of the terms, but
Speaker 1: he said, the subject of the uncanny is a province
Speaker 1: of this kind. It undoubtedly belongs to all that is terrible,
Speaker 1: to all that arouses dread and creeping horror. It is
Speaker 1: equally certain, too, that the word is not always used
Speaker 1: in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to
Speaker 1: coincide with whatever excites dread. Yet we may expect that
Speaker 1: it implies some intrinsic quality which justifies the use of
Speaker 1: a special name. One is curious to know what this
Speaker 1: peculiar quality is, which allows us to distinguish as uncanny
Speaker 1: certain things within the boundaries of what is fearful. So
Speaker 1: he's start of playing the same game that we've been doing,
Speaker 1: trying to find a distinction. He's got this term uncanny
Speaker 1: literally in the German, I think it's das unheimlich, right,
Speaker 1: das unheimlich translated as the uncanny, this sort of creepiness feeling.
Speaker 1: But I think there's an important distinction to make between
Speaker 1: what we mean when we say creepiness and what Freud
Speaker 1: meant by the uncanny or dassunheimlich and um. But but
Speaker 1: he's playing the same kind of tight rope walk of Okay,
Speaker 1: it's not exactly just fear, right, it's something else. And
Speaker 1: Freud quotes Ernst Ginch to find a He's trying to
Speaker 1: find a perfect example of what encapsulates his idea of
Speaker 1: the uncanny experience. He writes, quote doubts whether and apparently
Speaker 1: inanimate being is really alive or conversely whether a lifeless
Speaker 1: object might not be in fact animate. Okay, so I
Speaker 1: guess I can can see that like that can be creepy.
Speaker 1: People often refer to things in the uncanny valleys creepy, right,
Speaker 1: something that's a little close to being similar to human
Speaker 1: but not close enough that it's real, and so it
Speaker 1: gives you the willie's uh. And they give the example
Speaker 1: of waxwork figures, artificial dolls or automatons. Freud gives that, yeah,
Speaker 1: I would agree that, yet wax models of individuals life
Speaker 1: wax models are are uncanny and are perhaps a little creepy.
Speaker 1: Have you ever been to a wax museum? I have,
Speaker 1: It's been a while, but yeah, I've I've been to
Speaker 1: a really have been to, like a small one that
Speaker 1: had a few different exhibits. They should be illegal. But
Speaker 1: but a writer we talked about earlier, Kotsko, he talks
Speaker 1: about Freud's concepts, right, yeah, and he he makes the
Speaker 1: argument essentially that that that the uncannying is here, the
Speaker 1: Lunheimlich essentially boils down, to quote, the inherent creepiness of
Speaker 1: human desire. Okay, well, if it's Freud, obviously desires coming
Speaker 1: in right, and and Yeah, I think human desires maybe
Speaker 1: inherently creepy if you look at it in the right light. Uh. Now.
Speaker 1: He also points out there on Freud's list of suggested
Speaker 1: translations for unheimlich um, there is uncomfortable, uneasy, gloomy, dismal, uncanny,
Speaker 1: ghastly haunted in reference to a house, and of a
Speaker 1: in reference to a man, quote a repulsive fellow. Uh.
Speaker 1: Some of those get it better than others. I mean,
Speaker 1: creepiness is inherently uncomfortable and uneasy. I think those are good.
Speaker 1: Ghastly gloomy. Nah, that's not really right. And you know,
Speaker 1: I actually I end up kind of waffling on this
Speaker 1: interpretation of of all this when Freud says the following
Speaker 1: in the same work, dismembered limbs, a severed head, a
Speaker 1: hand cut off at the wrist, feet which danced by themselves.
Speaker 1: All these have something peculiarly uncanny about them, especially when,
Speaker 1: as in the last instance, they prove able to move
Speaker 1: of themselves. In addition, what, yeah, I would say, that
Speaker 1: is not creepy like that is that is the realm
Speaker 1: of like straight up maddening terror. Yeah, that's the person
Speaker 1: in the casket opens her eyes and starts screaming yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you can't compare a weird character played by Steve V.
Speaker 1: Simmy in a film to two disembodied parts like flopping
Speaker 1: around or a or a or or or a human
Speaker 1: head rolling around and moaning or totally yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: completely agree. I think Freud's and Heimlich is something different
Speaker 1: from creepiness. Uh. The the overlap is kind of interesting
Speaker 1: because it seems in some senses to kind of capture creepiness.
Speaker 1: One of the things that Freud goes on to talk
Speaker 1: about is this idea of you know, of course, the
Speaker 1: familiarity aspect, like Heimlich is a word in German that
Speaker 1: so it has a lot of range of meaning. It
Speaker 1: sort of means hidden or private sort of, but it
Speaker 1: also encapsulates the idea of something feeling at home like homeie,
Speaker 1: homely or familiar um, and so it can take on
Speaker 1: all these different kinds of meanings, bringing lots of connotations.
Speaker 1: And I think that's that's where a lot of this
Speaker 1: ambiguity comes from. It's this huge, loaded, big word in German,
Speaker 1: and creepiness is not the same way in English. Creepiness
Speaker 1: in English, I think is a much more uh specific word.
Speaker 1: If that makes any sense. Yeah, and it's certainly. Certainly
Speaker 1: if any listeners out there have have other ex amples
Speaker 1: of linguistic models for creepiness, other translations of it that
Speaker 1: have that carry slightly different weight within a given culture,
Speaker 1: I would love to hear about that. What one quote
Speaker 1: that I do think might be a little bit useful
Speaker 1: is that Freud quotes Shelling in his essay on on
Speaker 1: the Uncanny and says that Shelling defined the uncanny is
Speaker 1: everything that ought to have remained hidden and secret and
Speaker 1: yet comes to light. Okay, that now sounds like they're
Speaker 1: that he's talking about creepiness again. Sort of, Yeah, because
Speaker 1: you can kind of see that like something some a
Speaker 1: person who's behaving creepy, there's there is like a pressure
Speaker 1: building in them. Often, you know, there's like something that
Speaker 1: is a behavior that you are worried they may express
Speaker 1: but they're not yet expressing or something like that. Alright,
Speaker 1: So we've we've pretty much we've pretty much covered what
Speaker 1: we currently know about creepiness, and we've discussed some examples
Speaker 1: of creepiness, uh and and try to to you know,
Speaker 1: dismantle uh, the notion itself. One thing this is I
Speaker 1: want to bring up something that I kept thinking about
Speaker 1: as as we're discussing these these various creepy factors on
Speaker 1: the creepy checklists, the various creepy characters that come to mind,
Speaker 1: and that is, you know, to to what extent is
Speaker 1: uh is the perception of a creep like inherently racist?
Speaker 1: Like like how much ethnic fear and ethnic anxiety is
Speaker 1: is wound up in our perception of the creep. You know,
Speaker 1: I can honestly say that when you said this, I
Speaker 1: hadn't encountered anything to make me think this, because there's
Speaker 1: obviously plenty of you know, racism and bias in the
Speaker 1: way people assess potentially threatening or negative characteristics of other people.
Speaker 1: You know, we we all have implicit biases, um, and
Speaker 1: and we make judgments about people that are unfair based
Speaker 1: on you know, superficial external character sticks. But as I've
Speaker 1: always interpreted interpreted it to me, creep is a fairly
Speaker 1: like a race or ethno neutral concept. When when I
Speaker 1: think of a creep, I I certainly don't think of
Speaker 1: a person of a of a different race or different culture, right, um.
Speaker 1: But I can see how it certainly could be interpreted
Speaker 1: that way because as we've talked about the creep in
Speaker 1: many ways, is in the eye of the beholder. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are some activities that are probably going
Speaker 1: to be pretty universally considered creepy. But then there are
Speaker 1: other things that are just basically reflecting the prejudices of
Speaker 1: the of the creepy. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we're definitely
Speaker 1: not at the point where if you call someone or creep,
Speaker 1: they're gonna come back and call you a racist for it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I'm pondering here, I guess is that there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot in the stereotypical creep that lines up
Speaker 1: not only with character ambiguity, but also racial ambiguity. So
Speaker 1: the other the you know, one whose physical characteristics diverge
Speaker 1: from the norm, whose fashion sense diverges from the norm,
Speaker 1: who's social graces, grasp of language, and perhaps even expectations
Speaker 1: of relationship interactions is different or is believed to differ
Speaker 1: from the status quo. Uh And so, as as I
Speaker 1: looked at some of the stereotypical mainstream examples, I kept
Speaker 1: asking myself, Wait, is this person considered creepy because of
Speaker 1: at least implicit racism or xenophobia? Uh? So I have
Speaker 1: an example here all right, So, and I present this
Speaker 1: as an open question. I'm not pretending to have this
Speaker 1: all figured out. But The Big Lebowski one of my
Speaker 1: favorite movies, and I am I am not in any
Speaker 1: way of uh, you know, criticizing the film or or
Speaker 1: you know, criticizing the Cohen Brothers. But it's probably freshen
Speaker 1: my mind because I saw it last week. So we
Speaker 1: have a number of fabulous creepy characters played by very
Speaker 1: talented actors. H And they're creepy for multiple reasons. So
Speaker 1: let's first of all, this Jesus and Jesus Jesus and
Speaker 1: overtly we can say Jesus is cre because he's an
Speaker 1: alleged sex offender. It's loud, he invokes threats of sexual violence. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then there's a Lulie nukel n uncle. Yes, the nihilist
Speaker 1: Peter Stormaer. Yes, fabulous, fabulous actor plays a great creep
Speaker 1: especially in this. So he's a nihilist, he's a pornographic actor,
Speaker 1: he's a musician and a criminal. It's plenty to be
Speaker 1: to find creepy there or so, I don't know if
Speaker 1: I find really creepy really maybe, well, I don't know. Again,
Speaker 1: perspective plays a key here, but he's at least soft creepy, okay.
Speaker 1: Uh Knox Harrington, the video artist, pencil thin mustache, he's
Speaker 1: kind of an observer in the background. He has a
Speaker 1: strange laugh. It's David Fuellis, yea, who plays him. It's
Speaker 1: a very bit part. But he's also he's the guy
Speaker 1: who plays the werewolf in the Harry Potter movies. Right,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, he was also in uh, the the
Speaker 1: Island of Dr Moreau movie that we've discussed here before.
Speaker 1: He is creepy. Knox Harrington is creepy. Yeah. And then
Speaker 1: and then of course there's Jackie Treehorn, the pornographer Loan Shark.
Speaker 1: He's fascinated with the erotic. He comes off very suave
Speaker 1: in the movie. But you can certainly make a case
Speaker 1: based on the criteria we're discussing earlier that he's a
Speaker 1: creepy dude and he does drug the dude. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. For some reason, the main two I would
Speaker 1: think of as creepy or the Jesus and Knox Harrington.
Speaker 1: So but also whoa, whoa, whoa, there are other creeps
Speaker 1: in The Big Lebowski. Uh. Philip Seymour Hoffman's brand is
Speaker 1: absolutely creepy. He is definitely creepy. And I think he's
Speaker 1: a good example that yes, there's a there, here's a
Speaker 1: very white creep character because he's just such a lackey
Speaker 1: to to the Big Lebowski Jeffrey Lebowski. So we have
Speaker 1: all these reasons to find these individuals creepy, but for
Speaker 1: the first four that I mentioned, on top of these
Speaker 1: create these these these avert reasons. It's also worth noting
Speaker 1: that the characters are respectively Sto Rican, German, English, and
Speaker 1: possibly Italian American. The actors are respectively Italian American, Swedish English,
Speaker 1: and Italian Americans. So there's there is a certain ethnic
Speaker 1: otherness in all of these characters. And so I have
Speaker 1: that to to wonder, like to what extent is that
Speaker 1: weighing it? Like, yeah, it could be like certainly the
Speaker 1: Jesus would be creepy if he were white. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying he wouldn't be. But do we do we end
Speaker 1: up pulling in certain uh fears of the ethnic other
Speaker 1: into these creepy stereotypes. Huh, Well, I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: happens in the Big Lebowski, but I can definitely see
Speaker 1: how that would happen. Um and m M. I guess though.
Speaker 1: I mean this is probably one of the most innocuous
Speaker 1: because it's englishness. Knox Harrington's englishness, his English accent is
Speaker 1: maybe one of the creepiest things about him. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: comes off Yeah indeed, Um, he's also got that mustache.
Speaker 1: I mean, certainly we can think of various movies, whether
Speaker 1: it's like an ethnic heavy shows up, like the the
Speaker 1: Odd Job situation, where you know, or out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: there's this uh this this Asian uh thug character who's
Speaker 1: working for the supervillain and uh yeah, and there's a
Speaker 1: certain ethnic otherness that's that's wrapped up in their persona. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's definitely there. In James Bond, I mean
Speaker 1: there we get back into times when it was I
Speaker 1: think more okay to just overtly make your creeps somebody
Speaker 1: who's you know, vaguely foreign. Um. And And it's there
Speaker 1: because a lot of times in in James Bond, you'll
Speaker 1: have a creep who is some kind of vaguely foreign
Speaker 1: or overtly foreign creep who also just watches the watching.
Speaker 1: You know, he doesn't talk much like Odd Job he
Speaker 1: just stares at you. He doesn't say anything. That that
Speaker 1: is I think pretty standard creepy behavior watching without talking.
Speaker 1: But it can also it's equally can be described as
Speaker 1: someone who simply does not speak your language and and
Speaker 1: that a loss to interact. Yeah, there you go. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, there are plenty of other I think characters
Speaker 1: that come to mind of like creepy foreigner stereotypes. Um,
Speaker 1: there's Ortega. Remember Ortega from one of the ms T
Speaker 1: s Oh Yeah, from the Incredibly Strange Creatures who stopped
Speaker 1: living and became mixed up zombies. Yeah, there was kind
Speaker 1: of this weird uh like racist Latin American kind of concoction. Uh.
Speaker 1: Peppy Lapew the that the French skunk from the cartoons. No,
Speaker 1: Peppy Lapew goes definitely beyond any ambiguity of threat, Like
Speaker 1: Peppy Lapeuw is a rapist. Yeah, yeah, yeah he is.
Speaker 1: He's he is actively chasing down the Was it a
Speaker 1: dog or her cat? It's a cat? Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: Bruno and Burrat are both strong examples of this. You
Speaker 1: can make a case for Hannibal Lector as we see
Speaker 1: him in the TV show, is having certain ethnic otherness
Speaker 1: to him. M Hmmm, I don't know. Is Hannibal creepy?
Speaker 1: Is Hannibal Lecture creepy? He should be? Should he's in
Speaker 1: that don dre promote exactly. I think where we we
Speaker 1: kind of waffle back and forth between finding him just
Speaker 1: endlessly um, almost seductive. You know, he's like a vampire,
Speaker 1: but then he you know, he's also creepy. There's almost
Speaker 1: a certain level of confidence in one's behavior that pre empts, uh,
Speaker 1: some amount of creepy characterization. Like one of the things
Speaker 1: we were reading about, and you mentioned earlier that New
Speaker 1: Yorker article which talks about the inherent self consciousness of creepiness,
Speaker 1: which is again in opposition to one of the things
Speaker 1: that was found in the study we talked about, you know,
Speaker 1: where people don't think that creeps No, they're creepy. But
Speaker 1: in that New Yorker article, uh, there was a section
Speaker 1: about how, you know, the constant self consciousness we have
Speaker 1: is is itself kind of creepy? Like being very self
Speaker 1: conscious about your behavior can lead to creepiness. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean to bring it back to Hannibal. Hannibal Lecter is
Speaker 1: less creepy than than Buffalo Bill, right, because Buffalo Bill
Speaker 1: acts less sure of himself and less in control of
Speaker 1: his his his persona. Yeah, though I guess hannibals probably
Speaker 1: creepy once he well, no, I was gonna say he's
Speaker 1: creepy once he starts eating you, but then he's just
Speaker 1: outright terrifying. Yeah, yeah, there's so maybe there's less less
Speaker 1: twilight there. Yeah. Well, there you have it, some some
Speaker 1: food for thought there at the end, uh cannibalistic or
Speaker 1: otherwise about the creep, about how we perceived the creep,
Speaker 1: why we perceived the creep, and what the creep means.
Speaker 1: We gotta come back sometime and actually do an episode
Speaker 1: about clowns. Yes, yeah, I would totally be game for that.
Speaker 1: I think there's there's some good resources out there, and
Speaker 1: I have I have a lot of personal thoughts on
Speaker 1: the meatic. We're gonna shut down your creepy clown names
Speaker 1: all right. In the meantime, head on over to stuff
Speaker 1: to bow your mind dot com. That's where you will
Speaker 1: find all the podcast episodes. You'll find videos, you'll find
Speaker 1: blog posts, and you will find links out to our
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