The Role of Creepy Characters in Popular Culture

Given the frequency with which we see creepiness around us in everyday real life, it would be surprising if it were not also part of the popular culture air that we breathe in advertising, TV, and the movies.

Not to worry—it is!

The most complete exploration of creepiness in our popular culture can be found in a book by Adam Kotsko bearing the simple title Creepiness. In his book, Kotsko describes a wide range of creepy characters from popular culture and analyzes our fascination with them from a Freudian perspective.

I am no Freudian, but Kotsko and I are on the same page when it comes to identifying who the creepy characters are.

Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

For example, Kotsko identifies the “Burger King” (whom he refers to an “archetype of creepiness”) as the creepiest advertising mascot of all time. The ambiguity swirling around who he is, where he came from, and what it is, exactly, that he wants from the people he ambushes in the ads make him very creepy. Also, the oversized head with the unchanging facial expression painted on it makes his emotions and intentions completely unreadable.

The Burger King mascot quickly became known as the “Creepy King.” One ad campaign featured a man waking up in his own bed only to find the King lying next to him and staring at him. The King also appears creepily in bedrooms in other ads, and home and office invasions by the King are among the most common themes in Burger King advertising. I still do not quite know what to make of it all, and The Burger King has possibly helped to make Ronald McDonald appear less creepy than he probably should. The Burger King mascot was taken out of circulation from 2011 to 2015, as a senior Burger King official admitted that the mascot was believed to be scaring women and children away from the chain.

Kotsko also pokes a bit of fun at the nonchalant creepiness inherent in many American sitcoms from the 1970s through the early 1990s. For example, the character of “The Fonz” on the immensely popular 1970s sitcom Happy Days was considered the epitome of cool at the time. In hindsight, this seems weird because, in the words of Kotsko (p. 25), The Fonz was “a grown man who spends all of his time with teenagers, and repeatedly refers to a public restroom as his office.” Kotsko also brings 21st-century sensibilities to bear on popular TV show Full House. In this show, a widowed father of three girls invites two other grown men to live with him in order to “help out.” The plots became more sexualized and contrived as the years went on, making the show appear quite creepy in retrospect.

For most of us, however, the mention of creepiness in conjunction with popular culture automatically conjures up the images of some of the terrifyingly creepy characters from the movies. Norman Bates in Psycho (played by Anthony Perkins), Hannibal Lecter (played by Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs), and Anton Chigurh (played by Javier Bardem) in No Country for Old Men send shivers down our spines at the mere mention of their names. Other characters such as Seymour “Sy” Parrish (played by Robin Williams) in One Hour Photo are perhaps less terrifying but even creepier. For those of you not familiar with this creeper of a movie, Robin Williams plays a drugstore photo technician who becomes quietly obsessed with a family after repeatedly developing family photos of them. What begins as a benign interest in the life of this family eventually takes a dark and troubling turn.

Why we are fascinated by these characters and why we spend money to watch people we would avoid like the plague in real life is an interesting question—but I think that there may be a rational explanation for it.

We have been programmed through evolution to learn from the experiences of others and to be fascinated by things that are important for our survival. Watching disturbing people onscreen in the safety of a movie theater or in our living room provides an opportunity for learning vicariously from the mistakes of others. It allows us to mentally rehearse strategies for dealing with dangerous individuals and to thus be better prepared to make wise choices of action if we were to encounter similar creepers in some future situation.