ABSTRACT

The American cartoon series South Park is not widely known for staging horror, even though such instances are found throughout its more than 20-year run. Approaching the election of Donald Trump – or, in South Park, the former high school teacher Mr. Garrison – however, several scenarios familiar from horror and sci-fi tales were enacted, most of them deriving from our current technology gone haywire. This chapter takes its cue from Sigmund Freud’s text on the uncanny, published a hundred years ago, and observes how South Park staged their latter-day versions of the uncanny which, in this day and age, cannot be separated from the technological sublime. By doing so, they acknowledged that satire and social commentary are no longer possible without paying close attention to the technology permeating every aspect of our current lives. Yet, in failing to bring the loose threads together, they also acknowledge that it is impossible to identify a single cause or reason for Trump’s surprising election or, more generally, that our times still defy the grand narratives that would be able to explain what is going on.