Cosmic Horror and Literary and Cinematic Existential Dread
An Essay by Lothar Tuppan
Horror, as a genre, is all about different qualities of fear: terror, dread, horror, anxiety, repulsion, etc. Different subgenres of horror often focus on a specific source of fear. Freaked out over depictions of biological mutations or violations of a person’s physical form? You’re probably reading or watching body horror. Feeling disturbed by extreme or dark emotional and mental states, states that might be all too familiar? You’re in the realm of psychological horror. Terrified of aspects of sexuality and unbridled eroticism? You’re perhaps consuming erotic horror? Disgusted by an extreme and probably over-the-top depiction of gore? You’re watching or reading something in the various splatter arenas. You get the idea. There are too many subgenres of horror to list them all here. Some are more easily defined than others (slasher movies for example are pretty easy to identify as are creature features, ghost stories, or haunted house tales).
Cosmic horror is a subgenre that on one level is very easy to identify but in other ways is mercurial and tricky. Often this is because fiction that only has a surface gloss of the subgenre is miscategorized as cosmic horror. For example, I’ve heard or read many times over the years that anything with tentacles is cosmic horror (no, that could be a maritime tale or some Japanese Hentai anime) or that writing in 1st person is a defining quality of literary cosmic horror (no, the author is just writing horror in 1st person which was the primary point of view in a majority of pre-WWII western literature). In many ways, this is similar to how some people use the term noir for anything “hard boiled” when that label might be completely inappropriate. (Take a deep dive with my essay on noir here.) Both noir and cosmic horror have a similar relationship to Existentialism and the post-Darwinian world and time period that they were born within. And, in some ways they are more closely related philosophically than many might realize. In several ways cosmic horror reflects the same bleakness of noir, only on a cosmic scale instead of just within the human heart.
One thing to be aware of is that the term cosmic, (with the –ic suffix) just means “pertaining to the cosmos.” The term cosmos doesn’t just mean the way the planets and everything out in space move around each other, it is derived from the Greek κόσμος (kosmos) which means “order” or “arrangement.” Kosmos was the opposite of χάος (Kaos or “chaos”—an “emptiness and immeasurable void”) So, while the understanding of what planets and other celestial bodies are, how they move, etc. is an aspect of cosmology (the “study of the cosmos”) and the cosmos as we understand it, the larger cosmos encompasses all that we conceive of as ordered. Anything we assume has an arrangement that makes sense is, at some level, a part of the understanding of our cosmos. Chaos on the other hand, is more than just disorder or confusion. In a neutral and philosophical (and even metaphysical) sense it is all potential without actualization. That’s pretty cool. But if we go back even further etymologically, and look at it through the lens of horror and existentialism, it is emptiness. A gaping void of nothingness. This applies to the gaping nothingness within ourselves when our order, our cosmos, is torn to shreds. Proven to be utterly illusory and meaningless.
With that in mind, the simplest definition of cosmic horror is horror where everything we consider true about ourselves, our universe, and everything good or evil in all of that turns out to be not only a lie but truly non-existent. All of our cosmology—our meaningful notions of religion, morality, civilization, the purpose of being human, the belief in human goodness and moral progress, and pretty much everything that we value and desperately hold to be true—turns out to be mere fictions we’ve told ourselves. And like children who are holding their breaths until the world conforms to the way they think it “should be,” we inevitably will have to face the reality of that cosmic insignificance and meaninglessness. The problem, to continue the analogy, is that “growing up” within cosmic horror means leaving what most consider to be “sanity” behind. For when we see the alien, threatening, “impossible” truths that are beyond those existential truths of meaninglessness, the horror of that realization will, inevitably, drive us insane. Or, as more elegantly put by author China Miéville in his introduction to the 2005 Modern Library Classics edition of At the Mountains of Madness, by H.P. Lovecraft (the author who really formed what we think of as cosmic horror), “Lovecraft’s horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact.” That is the core essence of cosmic horror.
H.P. Lovecraft looms, like one of his Great Old Ones themselves, over cosmic horror. Most people consider him the true progenitor of cosmic horror but he wasn’t the first and many of his influences, which he praised in his letters and in his extended essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” were early explorers into a frightening cosmos. Here are some notable examples.
Arthur Machen’s work, especially the 1894 novella, The Great God Pan and the 1904 The White People, take traditional folklore and mythologies and show them in a darker light. One where those things are alien, unknowable, and where something ancient no longer represents old tradition but something so old it is inimical to human life.
Robert W. Chambers’ King in Yellow stories published in 1895 (which also might be considered an early form of “reality horror” Ah, subgenres within subgenres) reveal how our internal worlds intersect with the external world, and both are subject to invasion from an objective alien and frightening reality—a reality that might be more real than ours. Have you found the Yellow Sign?
M.R. James is mostly known for his traditional ghost stories (which are really great) but some critics have pointed out that several of his tales like the 1904, “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” demonstrates how insignificant we humans are when we encounter the supernatural.
Algernon Blackwood was a master at making a geographic region, nature, or history of place a nexus of horror in tales like the 1907 “The Willows” (yes trees can be terrifying, even before Sam Raimi made The Evil Dead) and the 1910 novella The Wendigo (to a lesser extent the 1899 “A Haunted Island” as well).
In William Hope Hodgson’s really strange (for its time) 1908 novel The House on the Borderlands we learn of a weird, circular, perhaps haunted house that transports people (maybe physically, maybe astrally) to a strange world in a different solar system with strange idols of frightening gods and weird pig/boar/swine-like people. These pig people show up on Earth and then things get weird. His novel The Night Land was a foundational tale in the “Dying Earth” genre of fantasy which brought front-and-center how inevitably our species will die out as if all of our history will mean nothing in the end.
1908 is also the year that a young, 18-year-old, H.P. Lovecraft wrote his first published story “The Alchemist” (although it wouldn’t be published until 1916 in the United Amateur Press Association journal, United Amateur). There was no real evidence of his later cosmicism in this tale but it does mark H.P. Lovecraft’s entrance into the world of published weird fiction.
Due to Lovecraft’s importance to cosmic horror, more than a brief summary of his work is necessary. People only superficially familiar with Lovecraft and his work might think that his work is just about tentacled, amorphous, or otherwise indescribable monsters. But all of that is just surface manifestations of a philosophy that defines what cosmic horror is really about.
Lovecraft was a firm materialist and (despite him being portrayed sometimes as frail) quite a courageous one to be able to hold these beliefs while still finding goodness in life and in his relationships.
Two quotes from Lovecraft, one within his fiction and one in a letter that better reflects his real-life beliefs, encapsulate his materialist-like philosophy of cosmicism. The first one is the opening paragraph to “The Call of Cthulhu”:
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” (1)
And a quote from his letter accompanying the resubmission of “The Call of Cthulhu” to Weird Tales:
“Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catchpenny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.” (2)
Lovecraft’s cosmicism has much in common with the nihilism and existentialism of noir but is distinct in a few important ways. Cosmicism and cosmic horror focus on our powerlessness and insignificance more so than our meaninglessness and, from a certain point of view, there might be meaning in cosmicism, it’s just not our meaning. That meaning might be so alien and incomprehensible to us that we would have to cease to be human to apprehend such a meaning—even if we could bridge the distance in order to begin an attempt. We might have to, as Castro says in “The Call of Cthulhu,” “. . . become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.” (3) in order to understand the true meaning that lies outside of our insignificant human existence.
That shift in humanity’s consciousness and essence is one of the things that is truly scary about cosmic horror. With existentialism, absurdism, and nihilism, when we ask, “so what?” a valid answer might be, “There is no meaning but you can try and forge your own, or not. It doesn’t really matter in the end. But it’s all up to you how to get through this life. Have at it!” With cosmicism and cosmic horror the answer to that question would be, “We are insignificant and meaningless, but there are unspeakably enormous forces and entities that are not insignificant and whose meaning is… well, look through that odd angle and see if your sanity can withstand seeing what that meaning might be. Wait, why are you screaming and clawing your eyes out?” (4)
Not all of Lovecraft’s fiction should be defined as cosmic horror. His tales fall into three generally agreed upon categories: 1) his early Poe-influenced gothic tales; 2) his “Dreamlands” tales inspired by Lord Dunsany; and 3) the tales in his own voice and philosophical views which many call the “Cthulhu Mythos” tales (some of which are cosmic horror and some are playing primarily with other themes, although even those have more than a dash of cosmic horror in the mix). Sometimes there is overlap between the categories (like in “The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath” where the Dreamland tale has the cosmic horror herald of Nyarlathotep and the absolutely terrifying Azathoth playing major roles) but that classification is generally accurate. Near the end of his life, Lovecraft’s voice and thematic thrust was strong and unified. His Dreamlands tales and Cthulhu mythos tales seem both firmly ensconced in a single fictional world with a consistent world view. His death at the age of 47 in 1937 is a tragedy as not only was his fiction evolving, so was his often-criticized socio-political views.
Contemporaries of Lovecraft who contributed to cosmic horror as a subgenre include many who were friends of his and considered part of the “Lovecraft Circle.”
Frank Belknap Long was a long-time friend of Lovecraft and is considered the first person to write a non-Lovecraft written Cthulhu Mythos tale, namely the truly disturbing and mind-blowing “The Hounds of Tindalos.” Long also introduced Chaugnar Faugn into the pantheon of Great Old Ones. All of his Mythos tales are worth reading.
Clark Ashton Smith who gave us the eldritch gods Tsathoggua and Atlach-Nacha created his own mythologies that Lovecraft loved incorporating into his own tales (and Lovecraft’s favorite poem by Smith, “The Hashish-Eater” is a masterful poem of cosmic horror). Smith is highly underappreciated and was an early master of the aforementioned “Dying Earth” subgenre of fantasy (his Zothique stories are exquisite).
Robert E. Howard added to the mythos as well but his heroic fiction approach and similar philosophy never quite reaches true cosmic horror (although his horror and Cthulhu adjacent tales are fantastic in their own action-packed right). Howard deserves utmost respect and admiration, and deserves an essay of his own, but one can never escape the reality of his tales where if a person just has the proper strength and indominable will, those unspeakable horrors can be fought off. Howard’s tales are the film gris to Lovecraft’s film noir—similar but with much happier endings and heroic implications.
A young Robert Bloch started writing Lovecraft pastiches and corresponded with HPL. They had the fun of killing each other off in two of their tales: the Bloch-penned “The Shambler From the Stars” and Lovecraft’s last tale before his death, “The Haunter of the Dark.”
We have to mention August Derleth for two main reasons. One, we wouldn’t have any Lovecraft available to us if it wasn’t for Derleth and Donald Wandrei creating the publishing company “Arkham House” which kept Lovecraft in print. The other reason is that Derleth’s own Cthulhu Mythos tales (which are quite extensive) are the polar opposite of cosmic horror. In Derleth’s tales, there is cosmic good and evil with the benign Elder Gods who favor humanity fighting against the evil Great Old Ones. His work is “cosmic” in the sense of being big and “out there” but it’s really just good-old Good vs. Evil gods fighting. Demons are now Great Old Ones and Angels are now Elder Gods. Here we get our real first example of that non-cosmic horror seeming to be cosmic horror due to a surface resemblance. Also, as Derleth wrote his Cthulhu Mythos tales in a bad pastiche way, many followers aped this approach trying to write in Lovecraft’s prose style instead of later writers who would find their own voices. The list of almost satirical or parodic imitations of Lovecraft’s prose style is painful and, frankly, insulting.
After Lovecraft’s generation the number of writers who have written within Lovecraft’s world (from bad pastiches to pretty great horror literature) is beyond the scope of this essay. A list of some important post-Lovecraftian cosmic horror writers might include: Ramsey Campbell, T.E.D. Klein, Don Webb, Michael Shea, John Langam, Caitlín R. Kiernan (who is as much “Literary Fiction” as she is genre fiction. She rejects the idea that she writes “horror” and I agree), Laird Barron, and Thomas Ligotti.
Ligotti is actually one of the more important post-Lovecraft authors of cosmic horror. His nihilistic vision and unique style have made him as important to the genre as Lovecraft was. And people unfamiliar with his fiction, are probably familiar with his non-fiction philosophy of nihilism and anti-natalism. Nic Pizzolatto, the writer and creator of the TV show True Detective, it seems was either inspired by or “borrowed” large swaths of Ligotti’s non-fiction book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, for the character Rust Cohle’s anti-natalist monologues in the show’s first season. (5) I recommend all of Ligotti’s fiction and The Conspiracy Against the Human Race actually has quite a bit of dry humor in it.
As we just looked at TV, let’s shift over to other media (but mostly film) to see how they approach cosmic horror. Literature is a natural home for the best horror. It can be as nasty, nihilistic, internal, psychological, and brutal as it wants to be without the same market concerns that studio films or TV require (TV and the earlier Radio dramas had to also deal with sponsors who could pull advertising dollars away if horror went too far for their tastes).
How much real cosmic horror has been done in film?
From the 1960s to the 1980s there were a number of H.P. Lovecraft adaptations but, mostly, these were disappointing and not really very horrific.
(Although, the Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell led The Dunwich Horror directed by Daniel Haller is a strange entry in that it has its own spooky occult lore that has built up around it; infecting and being infected by the LA occult scene of the mid-20th Century. It’s fun in a cheesy way, but it’s a poor adaptation of the original story).
During those same years the TV show The Outer Limits had some very nihilistic themes and plots that were surprisingly hard-hitting. The Ray Milland led X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes ends with the protagonist’s vision expanding more and more into the center of the universe until he claws his own eyes out after seeing a great eye. Azathoth? God? Elvis? Whatever it was it was cosmically horrible.
In the 1980s there were a number of films that covered the cosmic horror medicine with a candy coating of humor. The Evil Dead series by Sam Raimi and the Stuart Gordon films Re-Animator and From Beyond stand out in this area (I happen to love all those films but they are undeniably intentionally humorous, over-the-top, and fun). The only non-humorous entries into ‘80s cosmic horror were John Carpenter’s The Thing and Prince of Darkness. And his 1994 homage to Lovecraft, In the Mouth of Madness completes what many fans call his “Apocalypse Trilogy.”
The 1990s saw some more serious fare come out, mostly premiering at the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival (started in 1995) which focused on amateur and professional Lovecraftian and cosmic horror films (6). Even Hollywood, perhaps seeing how Carpenter could do it, produced more serious attempts with 1992’s The Resurrected (an adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) and 1997’s Event Horizon (and that movie deserves a lot more respect than most people give it. I believe because it should have been marketed as a horror film, not a science fiction film).
The 2000s brought a wide-range of cosmic horror films including:
- 2000’s Cthulhu (a good but weird mixture of Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”).
- A new Stuart Gordon adaptation Dagon (an adaptation of Lovecraft’s “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”) in 2001.
- The faithful and excellent The Call of Cthulhu (2005) by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.
- 2005 also saw the Masters of Horror adaptation of “Dreams in the Witch House” by Stuart Gordon (with his trademark addition of slightly bizarre sexual content).
- In 2007 there was the adaptation of Stephen King’s cosmic horror story The Mist, and another film titled Cthulhu which is another adaptation of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” which brings social commentary and LGBTQ+ rights into the cosmic horror realm.
If you are wondering why there were so many adaptations of “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” it’s because it is the Lovecraft tale with the most action and external plot elements in it which makes it far more filmable than some of his other tales—and it’s an awesome story with Deep Ones in it.
The 2010s is an interesting decade for filmic cosmic horror as we start getting some post-modern, non-Lovecraftian cosmic horror, fusing with other genres and storytelling styles.
- Science Fiction (which admittedly was a large aspect of Lovecraft’s work) comes front-and-center with the films Prometheus in 2012 (which in some ways is an unofficial adaptation of Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness”) and Annihilation in 2018. And, in a weird sort of way, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 Interstellar and Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 Arrival have some cosmic horror-ish implications.
- Folk horror meets cosmic horror in 2017’s The Ritual where the jötun are as outside, terrifying, and inimical to humanity as anything Lovecraft conceived of.
- Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is equal parts Poe and Lovecraft as, while ostensibly psychological horror, it feels strongly transpersonal in its evil (which shows Eggers’ mastery of his medium).
- Panos Cosmatos is a highly stylistic filmmaker that most either love or hate (I fall into the love category myself). His 2010 film Beyond the Black Rainbow mixes cosmic horror with new age psychedelia in a lavish love-letter to ‘70s sci-fi aesthetics (viewing tip: approach this film more like a visual concept album instead of a straightforward narrative and you might not be frustrated by it). His 2018 Mandy is a revenge-o-matic (to use Quentin Tarantino’s term) that mixes weird Manson like cults, extreme violence, and possibly a pulpy alternate world in a way that comes out as cosmic horror (and his 2022 entry into Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, “The Viewing” is perfect post-Lovecraftian cosmic horror).
- The Void from 2016 is straight-up Lovecraftian with the serial numbers filed off. It has some truly creepy moments and does well for a low-budget film (and it has pretty good practical effects for those who value such things).
There were a couple of really good Lovecraftian adaptations that decade as well with The H.P. Lovecraft Society’s The Whisperer in Darkness in 2011 and Richard Stanley’s Colour Out of Space in 2019 (and the aforementioned Mandy and Colour would make for a fun Nicholas Cage double-feature).
We’re only half-way through the 2020s but a few notable Lovecraftian and non-Lovecraftian cosmic horror films have come out (and the very forgettable and disappointing Underwater from 2020. Sure it’s got Cthulhu in it… sort of. But that still doesn’t make it an enjoyable film).
- The very creepy The Block Island Sound from 2020 is cosmic horror done in a way that defies easy genre classification which adds to the sense of dread and our confusion as audience members increases the themes of powerlessness and insignificance.
- 2022’s Glorious is a strange tale of one of Lin Carter’s additions to the Cthulhu Mythos told in a dark comedic and slightly bizzarro style.
- While Jordan Peele’s NOPE isn’t avoids being “pure” cosmic horror with a more heroic vibe, the sense of immense dread, incomprehensible alien motives, and genre twisting alien biology, is cosmic horror enough to be included in this list.
Because H.P. Lovecraft’s work was so influential it is hard to get out from under the shadows his immense Outer Gods and Great Old Ones cast. But, similar to noir, Lovecraftian and non-Lovecraftian cosmic horror isn’t about (or just about at least) tentacles, gods with unpronounceable names, or forbidden tomes of lore which drive readers mad. It’s about a deeper philosophical and ontological supposition. In my previous essay on Noir I listed some core philosophical concepts that, in my opinion, comprise the core essence of noir. The fact I could list six core concepts shows that noir actually has more meaning and order than cosmic horror which really boils down to only one as everything else is just human illusion.
Again, China Miéville’s definition puts it best but let’s think “Cosmic horror” where he names Lovecraft as this is true of all cosmic horror, “Lovecraft’s horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact.”
Humans in general, and genre fans especially (of whatever kind), love their categories and definitions. Arguing and debating such things are great fun for a lot of people (although some take those debates far more seriously than is probably warranted) but ultimately, horror, in whatever labels you want them to wear, is about fear—and fear doesn’t give a damn about your categories.
As films and literature became more post-modern and open to both superficial “genre mash-ups” and more thoughtful syntheses of different approaches to themes, style, plot, and character (you know, all those things that make up what we call “story”) that cosmic fear began to spread its tendrils outside of their earlier boxes.
Although the idea of big things from space can sometimes be mitigated by aspirational science fiction placebo treatments (I’m sure if a Paramount production ever had a Star Trek captain meet Azathoth at the center of the universe, the writers would create some clever way for the plucky crew to outsmart it, saving the day by good old American human grit, know-how, and technical achievement), true cosmic horror is branching out into other areas.
Reality horror for example (whether one considers that to be a separate artificial category or a subgenre of cosmic horror) where we can’t trust the way we experience reality is on the rise.
Which makes sense as no matter what side of any ideological, religious, or political aisle you have chosen, the “reality” portrayed by the media and the people on the “other side” are fundamentally different than yours. And the people in the middle have it even worse as their reality is under attack by multiple competing realities.
Cosmic horror was born of a time when we, in a western, Christianized society, suddenly didn’t know who we were in an increasingly large universe. Everything we thought we knew about ourselves on that level was shaken up.
People have learned in varying ways to deal with that and to reconcile their personal needs for meaning with the progression of scientific facts.
But the creeping fear that maybe what we hold to be solid is an illusion will always lurk in our areas of doubt. Maybe what we’ve carved out for ourselves in that post-Existentialist mindscape of ideas and beliefs are failing delusions. Maybe what we thought to be true today will be “misinformation” or lies tomorrow. Maybe that meaning we forged for ourselves, crumbles to dust in our hands.
Cosmic horror, in the sense of horror about beliefs, meanings, order, is going to continue to metastasize and grow in indescribable ways as long as there are humans.
Humans who in times of doubt and pain and turmoil might ask, “What if? What if everything I believe to be true and good is a lie?” Humans, who when waking up at 3 a.m., and see their life darker than in the daylight, think briefly, “Maybe Castro was right. Maybe it would just be easier to become as the Great Old Ones” before putting those thoughts aside and get up and to face the day again. Perhaps both praying and dreading the day when the stars become right and all of this is swept aside in that holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
Notes
- Lovecraft, H.P., “The Call of Cthulhu,” The Dunwich Horror and Others, Arkham House, p.125.
- Lovecraft, H.P. Selected Letters (2.150)
- Lovecraft, H.P., “The Call of Cthulhu,” The Dunwich Horror and Others, Arkham House, p.141
- For a good compare and contrast between Existentialism, Absurdism, Nihilism, and Lovecraft’s Cosmicism see:
- For more on Pizzolatto’s use of Ligotti’s work see:
- https://movieweb.com/true-detective-plagiarism-best-moments/
- https://lovecraftzine.com/2014/08/04/did-the-writer-of-true-detective-plagiarize-thomas-ligotti-and-others/
- https://lovecraftzine.com/2014/08/05/nic-pizzolattos-homage-to-ligotti-right-and-wrong-vs-the-law-and-the-courts/
- http://journaldialogue.org/issues/v4-issue-1/more-than-simple-plagiarism-ligotti-pizzolatto-and-true-detectives-terrestrial-horror/
- https://www.avclub.com/true-detective-creator-accused-of-plagiarism-in-this-c-1798270960
- https://hplfilmfestival.com/
- H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness perhaps epitomizes, quite explicitly, perhaps the darkest view of the “Ancient Astronaut” concept.
