Creating a horror face by looking at the morror

Strange Face in the mirror illusion



There’s this well-known, generic jumpscare cliché you get in horror films where the main character is staring into a mirror and they, for a split second, see some sort of horrific apparition.

This is that - but in reality. It’s called the ‘strange-face-in-the-mirror’ illusion (bit of a mouthful, I know).

You turn off all the lights in your room except for a dimly lit candle or lamp. Then, you pull up a chair and sit in front of a large mirror.

The visual illusion is easy. All you have to do is stare at yourself for around ten minutes, without removing your gaze from the mirror, and ensuring you pick a point to focus on. You can see the effects taking place even after about a minute or so of doing this.

What starts to happen is that your face distorts and morphs, and after a while, a lot of people start to see unpleasant, disturbing, and often frightening images.

The results, to say the least, are simultaenously intriguing and terrifying.

The initial experiment involved fifty people, who all did exactly as what is outlined above.

After doing so, the participants began to see strange distortions in their reflection:

  • 66% saw their own face but deformed;
  • 18% saw a parent’s face with altered traits;
  • 18% saw the face of an animal;
  • 48% saw ‘fantastical and monstrous beings’.
    [1]

(These don’t add up to 100% given that these patients are able to see multiple different things - the distortion is ongoing.)

The study in general noted that:

‘Apparition of monstrous beings produced fear or disturbance. Dynamic deformations of new faces (like pulsations or shrinking, smiling or grinding) produced an overall sense of inquietude for things out of control.’[2]

So for what reason does this potentially frightening experience occur?

A few articles have stated it’s because of the Troxler effect, which basically is where the brain selects important information and influences our perception. Take this pretty famous example, the Lilac Chaser:

If you stare at the cross in the centre for a few seconds, the pink dots will start to disappear.

This is because brain classifies them as irrelevant. But the green dot (which does not exist, but is rather another illusion of colour created by the brain) however, is moving, and thus important - so you can still see it, even though you can’t see the others.[3]

To supposedly lessen the processing burden on itself, the brain removes its attention from the less important information - from the feeling of our tongue resting on our mouth to the way our clothes feel on our skin.[4]

According to these articles, the same thing happens when you’re staring into the mirror. Your brain supposedly gets ‘bored’ because of a lack of stimuli.

A participant commented:

At one point it looked like something black slithered across the floor behind me (I can’t explain that one).

The creepiest moment however, was when my eye (and I swear this happened), looked away and then looked back at me.[5]

It appears to be quite a scary phenomenon, although again, the results vary greatly from person to person - although it’s safe to say it leaves most feeling extremely uncomfortable.

Regardless of its explanations, it’s something anyone can do - although I really wouldn’t recommend it. It can be a very disturbing experience and I’d advise against it.

It’s honestly quite frightening what the brain can get up to when it’s got nothing better to do.

If there’s something to take away from this, it’s that it’s probably best to avoid staring into the bathroom mirror at 3am chanting ‘Bloody Mary’.

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