Thin Pale Man

So I tend to enjoy using Eco's categories of the grotesque. They just fit somehow. If one thinks of them as a point system, a particular subject could potentially be more grotesque than another. So while you might say a floating lamp is uncanny, a floating deformity would not just be uncanny, but it would be an uncanny fright, you get what I mean? So if we continue to think of it as a point system, Guillermo's pale man, from his film, "Pan's Labyrinth", is a high scorer, spanning several categories. If you haven't seen "Pan's Labirynth", see it. Anyway, there are so many things about this creature that legitimately unravels one's nerves. His head is devoid of definition, expression and eyes. Still humanoid though - we can't classify it as a person, but bearing a similar form, the creature puts his foot in the door that would close it to humanity, so we are forced to think of it as one of our kind. That his eyes are in his hands and his frame rests on bone legs which defy physics are factors makes him more of an impossibility to our rationalizing minds. His occupation is a classic case of any true monster, he eats children. Period. There remains one more detail that assaults another category of our senses, his utterly pallid, hanging flesh. At this point, I will leave it up to Melville to illustrate the significance of the pale man's hue as he did the white wale in his "Moby Dick"... there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood. This elusive quality, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness (bold mine), even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.

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