[fromthestart]

I think there's also the uncanny valley creepiness of Thomas's face, particularly within the context of an actual horror game. Hilarious to think that something so genuinely terrifying could come out of a children's show.

[Cheyana]

Terrifying for you but my two and a half year old has absolutely loved Thomas for almost half her life. She has Thomas toys, clothes, books, dvds, had a ride-on electric Thomas complete with circular track that took up most of the living room, and we took her on the life-size Thomas train in Pennsylvania twice. Thomas is absolutely her jam, followed by Lightning McQueen and then Elmo. Her nostalgia will obviously be different than our nostalgia, but it's nice to see the joy it brings her.

[lloeki]

The RE2 mod footage makes me think about and feel like Silent Hill. Things make no sense in a nightmarish way because wetware tries to process them into something that almost individually makes sense yet violently conflicts with other elements that also almost make sense, but combine into an overarching distressing cognitive dissonance which causes unsettlement and terror.

I think this causes much less distress during youth because you've not been exposed to so many complex things with such regularity and over such a long period as you have later on, so you don't really unconsciously think "this is a face; no, wait, a train. wait, the bars on the wheels, they're kinda like where arms should be. are they arms? no this is a train. no ears, no hair, this is not really a head. Of course it's a train, but it's smiling. so it has a mouth, but no limbs, how does it eat? is someone and feeding it with charcoal by entering it from the back where the butt should be? WHERE ARE THE VISCERAS?"

Just regarding the face, it's kind of like the comment says in this video[0], somehow at 3:19 they're ok because they're abstract enough, at 4:02 they're fully entering the unsettling uncanny valley, but at 5:55 they look fine. And here you can fully extrapolate a matching body in your mind, but not with that hellish train, where the extrapolation projects such a body onto the train thing (and the other way around).

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBv5z0Y2odE

[throwaway2048]

https://i.imgur.com/0cqb0kz.png is pretty self explanatory

[coliveira]

This is not new. Clowns are genuinely terrifying, even before they made novels and movies like "it"