Perhaps it’s grainy black and white, sometimes sepia feel to them. Or maybe because they’re often torn, crumpled, and look damaged. Or it’s because we know the people in those old-timey photographs are long dead? In the abstract the feeling of “creepiness” is subjective: for example, some dolls have been described as creepy The adjective “creepy”, referring to a feeling of creeping in the flesh, was first used in 1831, but it was Charles Dickens who coined and popularized the term “the creeps” in his 1849 novel David Copperfield The state of creepiness has been associated with “feeling scared, nervous, anxious or worried”, “awkward or uncomfortable”, “vulnerable or violated” in a study conducted by Watt. This state arises in the presence of a creepy element, which can be an individual or an object. Adam Kotsko has compared the modern conception of creepiness to the Freudian concept of unheimlich. The term has also been used to describe paranormal or supernatural phenomena.
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