5. Clowns: Corpses
So, the good news is that there was no predatory, ancestral clown predating on our forefathers that gave us all a fear of clowns. The bad news is that it's actually because you're scared of corpses. This is all to do with our friend, The Uncanny Valley. The basic principle is that, if something looks like a human,
but not quite, the more unnerving you will find it. We see this in robotics all the time, as man continues in its quest to make human-like machines. The result is that, the harder we try, the further into the uncanny valley we will continue to fall until we can produce something that is actually indistinguishable from the real thing. The reason for this is the cognitive dissonance your brain experiences as it desperately tries to put the thing you're seeing in the "human" category, but can't because something is just a little
off. We get this with
robots,
dolls and, yes, clowns. So where do the corpses come in? Humans are finely tuned to immediately recognise when something is wrong, and when something can harm you - it's why you hate the smell of gone-off milk so much - and a corpse offers the same levels of danger as any other dead/rotting thing, whilst still looking a little-bit-but-not-quite-human.
