Quite There?

 Eye contact is a very important of communication, not only in humans, but in many social species. The lighting effects in Blade Runner being used to make the eyes appear... "robotic." There is, at times, a glaring, emotionless and hyper-focused expression in the eyes of the replicants, which especially pronounced when lighting effects cause them to have a orange-red glow. It's very interesting how one nonverbal queue being altered slightly can have such a profound effect. Because we associate machines with being unfeeling and separate from living things, we associate AI with also having these characteristics. It would be interesting to see how much this will actually be the case if social cognitive processes can be replicated in AI.


Haraway's descriptions of automatons seem to er further into the uncanny valley. Blade Runner's robots generally look like perfect humans, save for those found the workshop which do fall more deeply into the uncanny valley. Most replicants seen in Blade Runner are indistinguishable from humans, with the occasional exception of one strange behavior or characteristic, such as the eye-related characteristics mentioned earlier. 
It is actually fairly common to create images that invoke fear when discussing topics that forewarn about any particular subject. It actually relates very deeply to the nature of this class, considering that in our society, instead of fabricating stories and trying to convince people that certain monsters are real, we generally just use monsters in the media to create a caricature of something we fear, dislike or disagree with. The uncanny non-quite-human characteristics seen in robots often reflects this fear, an addition to likely being inspired by failed, eerie attempts at human likeness, such as wooden puppets, masks and animatronics.