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Popularized by the writer, HP Lovecraft (1890-1937), and sometimes called Lovecraftian horror in honor of him, Cosmic Horror has its appeal in its obsession with ‘the noumena’ and the insignificance of human existence, speaking to our personal fears and fascination with things greater than we are and the threat they pose to us.
Lovecraftian horror is about what we cannot escape… our worst selves, instincts, ailments, and fears, reflected back to us in a cosmic mirror. The other is out there but also in us. We are the cosmos, susceptible to its iteration and alienness, its shakes and quakes, and even its unknown variables. We may think we know who we are and what we are and what is out there, but we can never know.
Consider Lovecraft’s short story, Facts Concerning The Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, in which a man sets himself on fire after discovering that his grandmother was a ‘white ape’ from the Congo (an example of Lovecraft’s real life bigotry), or The Beast in the Cave, in which a man kills a wild beast in a cave, only to discover it had once been a man like himself who’d gotten lost in the cave years earlier, or The Outsider, in which a man living in isolation in a decrepit castle is tormented by a monster as he tries to rejoin society. Arriving at a party, he discovers the beast followed him, causing the revelers to flee for their lives. Seeking to save himself as well, he runs away only to find he cannot outrun the beast. Then he realizes the truth, horrified—“I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame…stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.”
Lovecraft himself died of throat cancer, a monster that grew out of him and took over his body, cutting his life short. We all fear that which we have no control over and cannot comprehend. In the film, The Thing (1982), based on John W. Campbell’s novella, Who Goes There? (1938)—a Lovecraftian twist on the First Red Scare (c.1917), a parasitic, shapeshifting alien mimics organic life at the cellular level, leading to paranoia and distrust among an isolated group of scientists in the Arctic, who find themselves at its mercy. We never learn a thing about the, well, thing, only that if it reaches the civilian population, the human race is screwed.
At the heart of human fear is the unknown (entity or other). Cosmic Horror stories take place in isolated places—space, the Arctic, Antarctica, a pristine wilderness, outside of our comfort zones—bringing us face-to-face with the unknown, the other, the alien. It is both horrifying and terrifying and visceral and existential. The protagonist is the unsuspecting human that unlocks or somehow gets an unpleasant taste of the forbidden cosmos.
A well-known author once wrote that it’s better to horrify than terrify, but you cannot horrify, then terrify. Slasher flicks are terrifying, but not horrifying—there’s no inner turmoil or dread that you cannot escape. The threat can be nullified, and the protagonist can escape.
With cosmic horror, once it has us, it has us. It penetrates our minds, cells, and bodies. It causes us to rip our flesh off, lose our minds (In the Mouth of Madness, 1994), deprives us of sleep (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978), makes us distrust each other (The Thing, 1982), question reality (Event Horizon, 1997), question who we are (This Thing Between Us, 2021), and realize that in the grander scheme of things, we are nothing (Annihilation novel, 2014).
The protagonist doesn’t win in Cosmic Horror. This is true, even if the protagonist survives. It’s always too much. It destroys us, in mind if not in body, both. Our perception of reality, truth, and ourselves is shattered.
“I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.”- ― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
The point and purpose of Cosmic Horror is to humble us and remind us that the universe is older, more complex, and bigger than us. Cosmic Horror is about the nihilism, the dread, and the burden and despondence of human existence echoing back to us as cosmic entities we can never understand. What greater horror exists than realizing that we may never know ourselves and purpose and that it may amount to nothing in the end?