What is 'The Uncanny'?

The theme we have to use for our film is the Uncanny, which is a term that describes an instance where something is both familiar and foreign which results in a feeling of discomfort, and was studied by Sigmund Freud in his essay 'Das Unheimliche'. Freud believed that the things we find the most terrifying appear that way because they once seemed familiar, he described his theory as such, 'This class is frightening things would then constitute the uncanny; and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect... for this uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something that is familiar and old fashioned in the mind and which has become alienated from it through process of repression' 

(http://students.english.ilstu.edu/rrjohns/hypertext/repurposing/uncanny.html)

What is being said is that when something we are familiar with undergoes change and takes a different form from it's original meaning or context, we become afraid or wary of it. Freud was not the first person to discuss this theory of the uncanny as his essay was a response to Ernest Jentsch account on the subject. However both Jentsch and Freud relate to E.T.A Hoffman's short story 'The Sandman' as an example of the uncanny. Ernest Jentsch, in his 1906 essay 'On the Psychology of the Uncanny'  defines the uncanny as "intellectual uncertainty". Whereas Freud see's the uncanny as something that lies in the realm of the frightening and evokes both fear and dread, and though the term isn't clearly definable as it relies on a persons personal experience, Freud outlined several circumstances that would be considered uncanny. These are; animism, magic, sorcery, the omnipotence of thought, unintended repetition, the double or Doppelganger, the castration complex and instantaneous wish - fulfillment. 

(https://whitecubediaries.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/the-uncanny-where-psychology-meets-art/)