The unit uses as main resource the short story ‘The landlady’, by the Welsh
fiction writer Roald Dahl, first published in 1959 in The New Yorker. In this story, as
in some other of his writings, Dahl uses techniques and resources that can be
directly related to the psychoanalytic concept of das Unheimliche (the uncanny). An
uncanny thing—following Sigmund Freud’s conceptualisation—belongs to the class
of frightening things that take us back to what is familiar and old-known (cf. Peel
1980), and thus the English etymological equivalent of ‘unhomely’: the natural that
becomes horrific. In ‘The landlady’, a seemingly innocent situation (namely, a
young man taking a room in a boarding house) is progressively perceived by the
readers as utterly disquieting, and at the end mapped with a horror story.