Subgenres of the Damned: Cosmic Horror

The Horror genre is the best genre, it turns out, and one of the best things about is how many different types of movies fall under the umbrella. There’s ghosts, monsters, vampires, any number of creatures, really, and all these movies have their own rules, but then there’s religious horror, found footage, slasher films, torture porn, evil cult movies, evil child movies and more. The list is long, and Subgenres of the Damned will be a deep dive into one specific branch of the Horror tree.

Cosmic Horror as a recognized subgenre begins with one man, Howard Philips Lovecraft, and the profoundly influential horror fiction he wrote in the early twentieth century. If you google Cosmic Horror, the first thing that comes up is the Wikipedia page for ‘Lovecraftian Horror’, and indeed, the two are either interchangeable, or so similar that any distinction is basically academic. So, it can mean the existential dread of insignificance in the face of the crushing enormity of the cosmos or it can mean a monster that has tentacles. And while that may seem dumb, there is some mad logic behind it. Lovecraft lived an unhappy life, by all accounts, spending his childhood as witness to his father’s deteriorating sanity and eventual commitment, and struggled his whole life with an all-consuming depression. He is, of course, famous for his pronounced-even-for-the-time racism (with ample reason; a fair number of his stories are quite hateful). And that racism is linked to a bone deep misanthropy and nihilistic worldview. Simply put, Lovecraft hated everyone, especially anyone different from himself. So, why did his mad, hateful scribblings withstand the test of time, and influence virtually every Horror author of the last hundred years? Simply put, the ideas are that original, and that compelling.

ORIGINS

So, how does one define Cosmicism? The most effective explanation I’ve ever heard is a metaphor. If you’ve ever been swimming in open water (a deep lake, or even worse, an ocean) and happen to look beneath you, all you can see is a void. An opaque, endless expanse, which could contain anything at all, from unimaginable nightmare creatures to absolutely nothing, and that nothingness might even be worse. It summons feelings of isolation and loneliness, an empty world we don’t understand, that we lack the cognitive ability to understand. In the simplest of terms, Cosmic Horror is the fear of the unknown. But that is a bit like calling the Taj Mahal a large building.

The problem isn’t so much that the information is beyond us, but rather that it should remain that way. Knowledge is cursed, in Lovecraft, and understanding the true nature of the Universe, all chaos and eternity and untold eons of time and space, is enough to drive a mortal mind to madness (it’s no mistake that most of his protagonists are academics). Indeed, one could argue that anywhere Science Fiction and Horror intersect, from aliens to mad scientists, that’s Cosmicism. Which is to say nothing of the Elder Gods, Lovecraft’s pantheon of immortal monsters living in the massive void of the stars, beings so old that humanity and all its accomplishments are but a speck of dust, as beneath their comprehension as a colony of gnats are to us. To Lovecraft, all our belief systems and pretenses to legacy are nothing but a facade, palliatives to give humanity a false sense of meaning. If one of the Elder Gods were to so much as belch in their sleep, the entirety of our small existence could be wiped from existence, and the Universe would continue on as if we were never here. These eldritch creatures are such compelling creations that a large number of people wonder if Lovecraft actually believed in them. But in truth, the monsters are simply metaphors, symbols of the cruel meaninglessness of existence, an externalization of his debilitating depression.

EARLY EFFORTS

Film is not a natural medium for Lovecraft; it’s primarily visual, where the creatures of the Cthulhu Mythos (Lovecraft’s canon of various eternal monsters) are rarely described in any detail. They’re unspeakable, and often enough, just looking upon them is enough to drive the beholder mad. This presents a real problem for visual adaptation, and perhaps that’s why it took a little while for Cosmic Horror to appear in movies. Some ideas always trickle through, that’s the nature of influence, but for our purposes, the earliest films to dabble in this esoteric brand of terror both showed up in 1963, courtesy of horror maestro Roger Corman. One is a straight adaptation of Lovecraft, The Haunted Palace. This is part of the Corman Poe Cycle (a series of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations), starring Vincent Price as the descendent of a devil worshipper, returning to his ancestral home and finding that the old family ghosts are never really gone. It’s a version of Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, with a title stolen from a Poe poem, and it’s more than a bit bracing to hear the names of Mythos beasts like Yog Soggoth referenced in a swinging sixties production like this. The movie’s alright, but nothing special, and probably one of the lesser Poe Cycle entries.

The better of 1963’s offerings is X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes, starring Ray Milland as a mad scientist who develops eye drops that allow him to see through everything. It starts in the lurid ways one might expect, checking out hot girls and cheating at cards. However, the final third drives straight into mind-shattering Cosmic Horror, when Milland’s eyes start to see too much, up to and including the entirety of the Universe and the all-seeing Eye of God, sitting at its center. Forbidden knowledge, the doom of many Lovecraft protagonists. This film is probably only remembered now because of Stephen King, who discussed it at length in his nonfiction work on Horror, Danse Macabre. He even spreads a false rumor about a darker, more nihilistic finale! The film ends with Milland gouging out his eyes, but King posits a longer version, where the poor eyeless scientist shrieks ‘I can still see!’ Corman, sadly, has debunked this, though he acknowledges King’s ending is kind of better.

More adaptations started to trickle out afterwards, such as Die, Monster, Die, a Boris Karloff-starring reworking of Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, and The Dunwich Horror, one of Lovecraft’s seminal tales, starring a very mod Dean Stockwell as a New England warlock. These have their charms, as do some other smaller adaptations and Night Gallery episodes from the era, but they’re fairly surface level when it comes to their creatures. Monstrous, to be sure, and weird, but ultimately palette swaps on Satan, or aliens, or any more familiar version of The Adversary. A film that got much closer to the mark is Planet of the Vampires, an Italian SciFi adventure from splatter pioneer Mario Bava. The signature sequence of this picture, wherein astronauts explore the centuries-dead spaceship on an alien world (and discover the giant corpses of its former crew) channels several familiar hallmarks of the subgenre, especially the notion of blasphemous revelation. Funnily enough, it was released in America as a double feature with Die, Monster Die, making for quite the night of cosmic dread in 1965. But what makes Planet of the Vampires so significant is less the film itself and more the film it clearly inspired.

THE GREATS

Ridley Scott’s Alien is one of the all time scariest films ever made, and also served as an introduction of Cosmic Horror to the mainstream. I’d say its reputation as such is perhaps a bit overstated at this point, as it’s more of a fancy Monster movie crossed with a Haunted House movie, in space. The Xenomorph is no eldritch abomination, it’s an animal with an understandable lifecycle, etc. But it does have a tonality that fits the bill, and beneath the surface level thrills, there’s a core misanthropic philosophy. Human beings, as portrayed in both the faceless evil conglomerate pulling the strings and in the financial concerns of the below the line crew member of the Nostromo, are small, ego-driven, and above all, ignorant. Nothing but infants, waking from birthing pods/cryogenic chambers. Oblivious to the vastness and the cruelty of the Universe, and as such, doomed. This ignorance goes hand in hand with any kind of exploration, as once you leave Earth, any frame of reference goes right out the window. Movies as diverse as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Event Horizon have been deeply informed by that unknowable quality, the inconceivable amount of dread at the implications of infinite possibility. And of course, the great alien imagery of Alien, the Space Jockey corpse and adjacent field of egg pods, has the grandeur of ageless eons behind it, and with no explanation offered, suggests a greater realm of existence beyond human comprehension. Naturally, our first contact (and all subsequent contacts) with it result in destruction.

You might be saying this is all undone by Prometheus, Scott’s decades-later return to the world of Alien, and in a sense, sure. The mysteries of what the Space Jockey is and where the Xenomorph came from are answered, and those answers end up being perhaps smaller and less satisfying than not knowing. But that is, ultimately, the whole point. Prometheus, and its follow-up Alien: Covenant, end up being much more Lovecraftian in their themes, as ultimately, knowledge leads only to despair (and almost incidentally, horrific death). The scientists exploring the far reaches of space are trying to discover the origin of existence, and the origin ends up being, well, some assholes created us in a lab, mostly just because they could. There’s nothing special about us, no philosophical purpose to our being, and none for our makers either. They’re just as small and as clueless as we are. The whole of existence, in these sequels, amounts to nothing but a cascade of Frankenstein stories playing themselves out over countless eons, likely to be winked out by chance occurance, or not. Beyond the infinitely small scope of our own perspective, it doesn’t matter either way. Cosmicism!

Another Monster movie occasionally called Cosmic Horror is John Carpenter’s The Thing. This is a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but on the other hand, what is genre but a collection of signifiers? And The Thing has a fair amount of those. The titular monster is alien in every sense of the word, inexplicable, and capable of destroying all human life in a matter of weeks. And there’s some overlap simply in the setting, which is reminiscent of At the Mountains of Madness (Lovecraft’s polar-set novella), and the Thing itself has the protean, shifting quality of the shoggoths, the monsters of that particular tale. But where Cosmicism is most represented in The Thing is in the character of Blair, played by the late Wilford Brimley. As the ill-fated expedition’s scientist, Blair is the first to fully grasp the implications of this lifeform, and the weight of this (forbidden) knowledge drives him to paranoia and madness. Could you draw a line from Lovecraft’s (racially motivated) dread of impurity and blood defilement to the Thing’s cellular devouring of its victims (very much including good old Blair)? It’s certainly in the same ballpark.

Carpenter would go on to make a number of films with a Lovecraft bent, with hints of his inspiration in everything from the naming conventions in The Fog to Ghosts of Mars, which feels like a Lovecraft story had a child with Nu-Metal video and that child got dropped on its head. But the prime entries are his loose ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’, comprised of The Thing, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness. Prince is an odd duck, a somewhat sloppy mash up of zombies, Christianity, and science fiction, jam-packed with big weird cosmic ideas. In the opening moments, a professor played by Victor Wong explains that mankind’s idea of an ordered universe is a faulty assumption, and that could be a thesis for the Cosmicism. The plot concerns a large cylinder of evil green goo, held in the basement of a church, which ends up being a malevolent demonic force, referred to as both Satan and the Anti-God, a long-slumbering abomination straight out of the Cthulhu mythos, and Jesus Christ might also be an alien who visited Earth to warn us about it. Prince of Darkness is pretty nuts. In the Mouth of Madness, while not an adaptation of Lovecraft, may well be the single most Lovecraftian film ever made. It follows Sam Neill as an claims investigator trying to hunt down famed horror novelist Sutter Cane (essentially Lovecraft with Stephen King’s stranglehold on the culture), and every single plot point, thematic idea and world-building detail is pure Lovecraft. We’ve got ornate language, tentacled beasties, debased rural New England locales, ancient creatures of massive power, hopelessness, insanity and most of all, an abandonment of objective reality. This becomes the very text of the film, with the characters trying to parse troubling ideas about the nature of existence This film was my pre-teen Lovecraft gateway drug, and introduction to most of the themes we’ve been discussing here. All in all, as strong a primer on Lovecraft as you could want.

Carpenter isn’t the only cult director with a trilogy of Lovecraft movies. The late Stuart Gordon’s career has been largely defined by his contributions to Cosmic Horror, having adapted Lovecraft’s stories into three bizarre films that, to this date, represent the most success virtually anyone’s had bringing the notoriously literary prose to the screen. The classic of the bunch is Re-Animator, a grotesquerie full of profane science, green goo and decapitated zombie cunnilingus, and featuring a ‘star’-making performance by delightful weirdo Jeffrey Combs. And while it’s certainly full of forbidden knowledge and crazy SciFi, there’s a distinctly hilarious quality to Re-Animator, making it more akin to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films than what we’d normally recognize as Cosmic Horror. His follow-ups play it far straighter. There’s From Beyond, another Lovecraft science fiction tale, about a parallel dimension populated by flying snakes and the mad science that brings them into our world. This one’s pretty great, featuring Combs and fellow Re-Animator alum, scream queen Barbara Crampton (in full dominatrix gear), as well as some more grody practical effects. And then there’s Dagon, Gordon’s only foray into the Cthulhu mythos, and a reworking of several oceanic Lovecraft tales, especially The Shadow Over Innsmouth. This is the least of Gordon’s trilogy, with some severe budget limitations and questionably cast actors, but it’s also the most ambitious attempt to adapt the gelid, seaborn monstrosities one typically associates with Cosmic Horror to film. This has all the Elder Gods, tentacles and degradation due to inbreeding with sea creatures you could hope for. Gordon didn’t stop there, adapting Dreams in the Witch House for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series (not bad, it’s got a rat with a human face that you’ll probably not forget anytime soon) and crediting Lovecraft’s The Outsider as a major influence on one of his more successful films, Castle Freak (it’s certainly not an adaptation, but pretty good anyway).

Also worth a mention is the output of the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, a bit of, I guess you’d call it an artist’s collective, creating content based on the man’s work. They do some fun stuff, really getting into it, and the website is fun to explore. For our purposes, I wanted to mention a pair of films they have produced, adaptations of two of the more famous stories, The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness. Cthulhu, of course, is likely Lovecraft’s most culturally famous creation, most likely because he’s probably the one that gets the most concrete description (a giant behemoth with an octopus head). If Lovecraft were Walt Disney, Cthulhu would be Mickey Mouse. The HPLHS filmed version is pretty ambitious, presented as a Black & White silent film (using all film techniques from that era), and it does a pretty terrific job of capturing the aesthetics, of both Lovecraft and of German Expressionism (as seen in silent era Horror like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari). At a scant 45 minutes, it’s well worth a look for the curious. I haven’t seen Whisperer in Darkness (it appears to be only available for purchase as a DVD from their website), but the story it’s adapting is one of Lovecraft’s absolute best, and the trailers promise a similarly classy production.

LOVECRAFT’S INFLUENCE

Cosmic Horror occasionally got much closer to the mainstream, though much more in the form of influence. And even if these movies aren’t generally considered proper Cosmic Horror – a happy ending is pretty antithetical to the concept – the inspiration is unmistakable. The biggest bit of mainstream sampling would have to be none other than Ghostbusters, that beloved 80s comedy about a multi-dimensional destruction God, summoned to Earth by a cult of mad worshippers, who, in the film’s parlance, lands on Central Park West and starts tearing up the city. It seems unlikely everyone involved knew they were channeling a long dead racist misanthrope’s bleak worldview while making that film, but writer Dan Aykroyd certainly did. The elaborate backstory for Gozer the Gozerian extends to such Lovecraft hallmarks as books of esoteric lore and harbinger entities arriving in advance to herald the coming of the Great Old One (that this wacky film works at all is as miraculous as it is undeniable). The Ghostbusters would go one to battle more cosmic entities in their expanded universe, even facing off against Cthulhu himself, in cartoon form.

Sometimes the inspiration extends only to a namedrop. Raimi’s Evil Dead films center on the Necronomicon Ex Mortis, an evil book lifted directly from Lovecraft (though without its canonical author, the ‘Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred’ is not named). Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods turns on a race of Elder Gods living beneath the Earth, placated only by the ritual sacrifice of teenage archetypes, and in this case, they’re actually metaphorical stand-ins for the film’s audience! Special distinction should be given to the works of Guillermo del Toro, whose monster features have been circling around the Lovecraft mythos pretty much since the start. And while it’s a shame he never got to make his dream adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness (produced by James Cameron and starring Tom Cruise!), the film’s he’s made have plenty of influence, right out in the open, from the Ogdru Jahad, the tentacled, slumbering creatures in deep space from his Hellboy films (themselves taken from the original comics) to his creature romance The Shape of Water, a compassionate subversion of Lovecraft’s dread of cross species romance.

Another interesting wrinkle to the spread of Cosmic Horror is seeing what other cultures might do with it. It shows up quite a bit in Japanese horror, longtime proponents of mind-destroying horribleness (with a side order of sea monster), especially in mangas and animes. One particularly strange entry is Nyaruko: Crawling With Love, which presents creatures from the Mythos, such as Nyarlothotep the Crawling Chaos, but asks ‘what if they were hot teenage girls?’ I can’t speak to the quality of that one, but I can recommend Uzumaki, an unsettling, yet strangely comic, film about a doomed town, infected with inexplicable spiral patterns. These spirals demand obsession from everyone caught in their orbit, and there’s a lot of upsetting snail and insect stuff too. All in all, it’s got exactly what you’d hope to find in a Venn Diagram J-Horror and Cosmic Horror, and despite the goofier moments, there’s images here that’ll be hard to shake. If you’re more interested in the psychological end of things, Kairo is a pretty bone-chilling entry about the internet opening a doorway to ‘the other side’, which is pretty nebulously defined (or perhaps, is simply unknowable to our limited mortal understanding!). Regardless, it’s an effective cautionary tale about the way an interconnected world can paradoxically make us all feel more isolated than ever.

And of course, Stephen King, that most prolific of scary story-tellers, has frequently referenced Lovecraft’s works in his novels and short stories (Crouch End, from the Nightmares and Dreamscapes collection, is as apt and playful a pastiche as you could wish for). Of the films that bear his imprimatur, there’s more than a few that qualify, such as the King-starring (!) segment of George Romero’s Creepshow, a country-fried retelling of The Colour Out of Space. That one is especially notable for King’s performance, which begs the question, is this character supposed to be mentally challenged? And if so, God, why? As amusing as that is, the better King offering is Frank Darabont’s The Mist, which combines King’s deft touch for relatable characters in a familiar setting with Lovecraft’s vision of nightmarish other worlds intruding on our own and infecting it with monsters and cult-like insanity. The result is a monstrous phantasmagoria, full of such composite images as a sassy old lady battling an alien spider with a blowtorch. And in the end, Darabont offers a conclusion that interrogates Lovecraft’s famed hopelessness in a pretty novel (and aggressively bleak) way.

RECENT WORKS

At some point, the sheer amount of movies and TV referencing Cthulhu became extensive enough to make this subgenre, long a nerds-only segment of the larger Horror tapestry, something approaching mainstream. If I were to try and put a date on that, it would be 2008’s Cloverfield. This film was advertised (expertly) using the JJ Abrams ‘Mystery Box’ technique, wherein the kaiju-sized monstrosity rampaging through New York was never shown in the ads. Soon enough, the online rumor mill seized on the notion that this giant creature was, in fact, Cthulhu, and all of a sudden, the whole internet wanted it to be the case. And they were right, it should have been Cthulhu, instead of some big spider/crab thing. But the significant part was that all of a sudden, this squid-headed God monster had name recognition. And in short order, you began to see more directors take on the famously unfilmable Cosmic Horrors of Lovecraft, whether to slake that apparent thirst or just through the accumulation of decades of inspired work. You’ve got the aforementioned efforts from del Toro and Ridley Scott, and a whole cavalcade of creative efforts, both high and low budget.

Making up the third of a trilogy of directors who have made a trilogy of Lovecraft-inspired films (after Carpenter and Gordon), indie cinema auteurs Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead have crafted a terrific triptych of low budget Cosmic Horrors in Resolution, Spring and The Endless. And while all three have directly attributable links to Lovecraft, they foreground characters and relationships in a way he never bothered to. Spring is one of the tremendously rare Lovecraftian romances out there, sort of a more mature Twilight with tentacles, and keeps you guessing until the final shot which discordant tone will achieve primacy. But The Endless is the exceptional one, an exploration of cults, eternity and familial bonds, and though it’s more of a supernatural drama than it is a horror film, it’s got a sequence in the middle that’s got about as terrifying a depiction of Hell as I’d ever care to see.

One of Lovecraft’s most filmable stories is The Colour Out of Space, a yarn about a meteorite landing on Earth and causing the nearby flora and fauna to morph into something completely alien, and as such, it tends to get made a bit more than the other stories. Two recent films have tackled it pretty well. The bigger release was Annihilation, a wild SciFi thriller with Natalie Portman, Oscar Isaac, skull-faced bears that absorb and regurgitate the death screams of their victims, and characters vomiting up solar systems. That one’s got visual imagination to spare. There’s also a direct adaptation in Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space (no U), starring a resurgent Nicholas Cage. That’s an amusingly grim descent into madness and some repulsive Body Horror, which begins feeling like a slow burn but really steps on the gas in the second hour. Stanley is reportedly set to adapt more Lovecraft, sooner rather than later, and as he’s one of our premiere insane directors, this is very good news.

There’s quite a bit out there. The recent low budget picture The Void goes all in on the tropes of Cosmicism, offering unspeakable creatures (rendered with great off-putting practical designs), mad cults, bleak hopelessness and doorways to other dimensions. It’s not really my cup of tea, but it’s got its defenders. Life is a riff on Alien that features an ending so grim it’s practically dark comedy, and you get to see some celebrities go out pretty hard in it, so that’s fun. The first season of HBO’s True Detective was, ultimately, a philosophical police show, but it constructed such a compellingly bleak and mythological worldview (heavily informed by The King in Yellow, a Cosmic Horror novella from Lovecraft’s contemporary Robert W Chambers) that some audience members were disappointed it didn’t end with an eldritch abomination showing up in the finale. There’s Border, a film about having mixed blood with inhuman creatures (trolls in this case) that plays with similar ideas as The Shape of Water and Spring (that’s from the author of Let the Right One In, and deserves a wider audience). Netflix recently put out Bird Box, a strange little film about a world overrun by something that makes anyone who beholds it commit suicide. One of my personal favorites is The Lighthouse, last year’s atmospheric oddity about two men losing their minds in isolation, featuring such hallmarks of the genre as the abject horror of the ocean and an undefined yet all-consuming enchantment of indistinct nature. The Kristen Stewart sea monster movie Underwater, released last January, finally followed through on Cloverfield’s missed potential and delivered a surprise guest appearance by Cthulhu in the film’s finale (and it totally makes the film). And later this week, HBO will debut its well-reviewed new Horror series Lovecraft Country, based on the novel of the same name. That’s a direct attempt to square Lovecraft’s fertile imagination with his well-documented virulent racism, and if you’ve read this far, you’re certainly in the target audience for that.

This, of course, is to say nothing of the wider array of other media. Novels and short stories emulating Lovecraft are their own cottage industry, and video games have frequently delved into Cosmicism, either as direct adaptation of Lovecraft or simply within the Survival Horror genre as a whole. And that’s to say nothing of tabletop gaming, either as board games or D&D style role-playing, a medium which Cosmic Horror has somehow claimed total dominion over. Seriously, Lovecraftian monster games are basically the Marvel Cinematic Universe of tabletop gaming. All that could sustain its own long article.