What is disturbing?

[eliasfrost]

I think that what we think as disturbing is maybe that we think as something somewhat uncomfortable. It could be a vestigial remnant from our ancestors.

That sentence had a lot of thinking.
I'm guessing what you meant was:
We think something is disturbing because it makes us uncomfortable?

Yes!

Also, I stumbled on Freud's Uncanny concept.

To quote Wikipedia:
"The uncanny is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to yet repulsed by an object. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize, as in the uncanny valley effect."

This could explain why things can be disturbing. If the object is a doll then we applied it with this concept, the doll is familiar, as in human-like, but it's also uncomfortably strange. The doll looks human, but it's an inanimate object. It can't move, talk, eat, or even interact! It's so odd, yet familiar.

This creates a cognitive dissonance, because you're both attracted and rejected to the doll itself.

This is basically what I've been arguing for the past six or so years. Especially in combination with movies, games and books. There's a reason why there are lots of scenarios in non-horror games that are extremely frightening and disturbing, because the unnatural clashes with the normal in such a way that it can't be reasoned with and thus it becomes uncomfortable. That's why a lot of horror games don't freak me out, because they are tailored to be scary and it makes them predictable.

I thought the story behind/of The Master in Fallout was horrifying, because it was so out of place in the yet unrealistic Fallout universe. Or the Shalebridge Cradle (again), even some of uncanny lore in The Elder Scrolls is unreasonably unsettling, because it clashes with the established normality of the world. It's a slight of hand so skillfully managed that I can't have nothing but great respect for those who successfully pulls it off.