How about that "Cats" trailer, huh?

If you found the "feline homunculi" (as one Tumblr user dubbed them) more monstrous than Pennywise in "IT: Chapter 2," you're not alone.

And there's a catchy phrase that encapsulates why the character designs are so disturbing: the Uncanny Valley.

In layman's terms, the Uncanny Valley is when your eyes tell you something should be human but your mind goes, "Nope. NOPE. That's wrong. That's an unholy abomination that no merciful god would allow to exist," while alley-ooping backwards through the closest window to escape as quickly as possible.

In the real world, the Uncanny Valley applies to robots designed to mimic humans but whose movements, voices or facial expressions are a little too stiff or weird to be truly convincing. In media, the Uncanny Valley almost always involves atrocious CGI.

Sometimes, weird CGI can work — in "Alita: Battle Angel" the title character's eyes are far larger than a human's should be, but it works because 1) the source material is a manga/anime and 2) Alita is supposed to stand out from the human characters.

But with "Cats"...

We can accept humans dressed as cats. We can accept cats speaking with human voices. But when you slap a clearly human face onto an anthropomorphized cat body, it just doesn't work. Especially when the result is supposed to be a "sexy" cat person.

*Shudders*

It would be so easy to fix this, too: put more fur on those too-flat faces. Change the noses to look more cat-like. Move the ears lower on the head and make them more proportional.

Or, you know, just use the practical make-up of the play. Or borrow some sweet cat-human prosthetics from the "Doctor Who" prop room.

Want even more Uncanny Valley shivers? Then check out:

4. "TRON: LEGACY" (2010). I actually love this sequel, which has a banging soundtrack from Daft Punk, a stellar turn by Michael Sheen as a flamboyant computer program and some super sweet Light Cycle action sequences.

But the character Clu — a younger version of Jeff Bridges achieved through digital masking — falls squarely in the Uncanny Valley. It's not so bad when he's still, but the moment he moves or talks... He's a little too smooth in the face; there's always something subtly off in the way his mouth and eyes move. It's a distracting flaw in an otherwise enjoyable sci-fi adventure.

3. "SONIC THE HEDGEHOG" (2020). When Paramount released the first images for the big-budget adaptation of this classic video game, the internet lost its collective mind. In trying to make Sonic more humanoid, the designers butchered the character in the creepiest way possible, giving him spindly limbs, eyes spaced too far apart and HUMAN TEETH. WHY????

Thankfully, when the outcry led to a plethora of scathing memes and superior fan-created mockups — which took Sonic closer to his original design — the studio back-tracked quickly. The film's release has been pushed back by several months while the animators tweak the titular hero, to everyone's relief.

2. "ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY" (2016). The first standalone film separate from the Skywalker Saga is a solid, if incredibly depressing, tale of rebels, fascism and war. The special effects are as impressive as we expected, except for two notable exceptions.

"Rogue One" features two characters originally portrayed by actors Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) and Carrie "Space Mom" Fisher (Leia Organa) — and rather than cast lookalikes (as they did with Mon Mothma), the studio brought them back to life via CGI.

Beyond the ethical questions re: reviving the dead with technology and using the likenesses of actors when they can no longer give consent, the digital recreations of Tarkin and Leia were both unsettling. Like Clu, they were too smooth (Leia), too robotic (Tarkin), too obviously manmade.

1. "THE POLAR EXPRESS" (2004). That time America's Sweetheart Tom Hanks gave us all nightmares. Truly, every computer animated movie Robert Zemeckis has been involved with — "Beowulf," "A Christmas Carol," "Mars Needs Moms" — should come with Uncanny Valley warning labels.

There's an argument to be made that Zemeckis helped pioneer motion-capture (where actors perform, then are recreated by digital mockups), and that naturally there'd be an improvement curve.

Unfortunately, Zemeckis' characters have never attained the level of sophistication of, say, Gollum in "Lord of the Rings" (one of the gold standards/earliest examples of mo-cap). No, his characters all look like plastic action figures that have come to life through some nefarious black magic ritual.

In the case of "The Polar Express," it doesn't help that HALF of the cast is Tom Hanks (he plays Hero Boy, Father, Conductor, Hobo, Scrooge AND Santa Claus), which just adds an extra dose of eeriness, seeing the same person recreated with significant (plastic/rubbery) variations a half dozen times. End result: this unsettling movie is more suited for Halloween than Christmas.

• ANGIE BARRY is a page designer and columnist for The Times. To suggest future topics for The B-List, which covers pop culture, history and literature, contact her at abarry@shawmedia.com.