I recently gave a rather scattered talk about Cosmic Horror to my local chapter of the HWA. Due to illness and the fact that life is an unforgiving bitcharoo, I wasn’t able to properly prep or organize that talk, so I thought maybe I could do it here in a more coherent fashion.
To start us off, a definition. Per Wikipedia: “Cosmic horror, also called eldritch horror […] emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than elements of gore or other elements of shock.”
Personally, I hate this definition.
It’s not that it’s wrong, per se, but I think it is actually too broad of a stroke to encapsulate true Cosmic Horror. And I think it misses an important point of the genre. Cosmic Horror isn’t about not knowing or not comprehending, it is the opposite; it’s a genre of discovery and understanding. It is not the horror of not knowing what is out there, it’s the horror of learning that something is out there, something that defies everything we know and believe, and worse—it doesn’t give a fuck about us.
A common misconception about the genre is the idea that things are too hideous for our minds to handle. Dread Cthulhu rises from the see and dear Godzilla, it’s too horrible to look at, my mind is shattered by the sheer vomit inducing horridness of its visage! First, of all, rude, Cthulhu just woke up, he clearly has bed head. Not all of us can wake up looking like Taylor Swift. Second of all, this is reductive. We aren’t driven to madness because Cthulhu is ugly, we’re driven to madness because holy shit everything we’ve spent our lives believing has been shattered! How can there be God or Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster if CTHULHU is real?! Not to mention the absolute defiance of the square cube law.
And if Cthulhu exists…what else is out there…?
Cosmic Horror is not the fear of the unknown, it’s the fear that comes from the discovery of something that shatters the very foundations of our human reality. If Cthulhu exists, and we never know, it’s not that scary. If Cthulhu exists and is revealed to us, that’s terrifying. It’s a minute distinction, I know, maybe even a pedantic one, but it matters.
Oddly enough, Wikipedia goes on later to give a better definition: The "fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance."
Mary SanGiovanni, an author known informally as “The Queen of Cosmic Horror” once provided three (or four) rules as to what makes something Cosmic Horror. So, let’s look at those:
The scope of the horror must be beyond the realm of human, or really even mortal, constraints.
There must be an “invasion” or bleed into our world. This infinitely large horror must affect our reality in some way, shape, or form.
There must be something worse than death, be it Hell, an agonized immortality, or so on. Death cannot be an escape!
Those affected must change. This change can be physical, mental, belief-based, or so on. One does not walk away from the discovery unchanged…unscarred.
Note: I am paraphrasing here because these were mentioned in a discussion and I cannot remember the exact wording because taking notes is anathema to me. Cheers!
I think we can probably boil these four points down into a pretty decent and precise definition: “Cosmic Horror is a genre of horror in which the protagonists struggle against the transmutational effects of impossibly large forces bleeding into their lives in ways that not even death can save them from.”
There has been an interesting shift in the modern era of flipping Cosmic Horror on its head, that is to say using the “unknowable other” in the genre to explore the existential dread marginalized groups experience simply by existing.
I love to see this! Hell, I write this.
But I’m not sure it’s fully fair to classify it as Cosmic Horror—or at least not traditional Cosmic Horror. Obviously genre is ultimately a marketing tool, but this is a post about genre damn it, so bear with me.
I think these stories use Cosmic Horror as a vehicle to arrive at something broader. Personally I use the term Existential Horror, which I think already exists, so no cool naming points for me. And I do this because when I look at these stories, the horror that I see highlighted is the “Fear of Being Known”.
To refresh, we now have: Fear of the Unknown vs. The Fear of Knowing vs. The Fear of Being Known
Not “vs” as in fighting, but just comparatively.
In Cosmic Horror, to me, the fear must originate from an external force. An invasion of “the other” into our realm as mortals…as humans. In this new interpretation, the horror actually lies within the self, and what that self means in our world; what doom it brings upon us. And often the reason for that fear, is just people.
Everyday fucking people.
People who won’t accept—or worse, hate—others for who they are, and seek to push them out of their own personal realities. Or out of existence entirely. This creates a division now between what is considered “normal” and “the other” within humanity itself. Often times in these stories, the protagonist who is The Other ends up siding with, or willing choosing the Cosmic Horror as an escape from the existential dread of their existence. This places Cosmic Horror as a mode of acceptance, a way of saying “they will always see me as strange and different and scary, thus I will be strange and different and scary” and deciding simply to be, without fear.
Cosmic Horror as a vehicle.
But that’s the rub with me. In these stories, the Cosmic thing is there, but it isn’t the horror, or at least not the focal horror. And that is what genre is based on: the foci. You wouldn’t call something a Creature Feature if the focus wasn’t on featuring the creature, now would you? Or if your story takes place in a Cyberpunk world, but hey there’s a fucking sword…would that be fantasy? No.
So if the Cosmic Horror is the trappings for your story, but not the point, is it Cosmic Horror?
But Vaughn, all genre is just a vehicle for the plot! It’s never the point!
Yes. Genre is a made up delineation. Call shit what you want, I’m not your boss. But we use genre all the time and we care about how things are classified. Look at the scientific classifications of animals—details, details, detail! I mean, John Gardner once said:
"There are only two plots in all of literature: 1) A man goes on a journey, and 2) A stranger comes to town”
Imagine if that was how we classified books!
Anyway.
Existential Horror is a blood sibling to Cosmic Horror. They are inversions of one another, flipping the spot light from the macrocosm to the microcosm, if you will.
Is a genre by any other name just as sweet? Or is reality itself a Cosmic Horror? I don’t have all the answers, I’m just musing.
What do you think?
I want to end off by providing some suggestions/examples of Cosmic Horror across different forms of media. YMMV with these, and I’m not saying that all of them are phenomenal, but they meet the criteria and are worth checking out if you are so inclined.
Books
Thrall by MarySanGiovanni
The Worm and His Kings by Hailey Piper
The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
The Fisherman by John Langan
*cough* Touched by Shadows by Vaughn A. Jackson *cough*
One Last Gasp by Andrew C. Piazza
Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
The Dreamer’s Canvas by Caleb R. Marsh
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
At The Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft
Movies
The Empty Man
Underwater
Resolution
YellowBrickRoad
The Color Out of Space
Prometheus
John Carpenter’s The Thing
Hellraiser
Pontypool
Graphic Novels/Manga
Uzumaki by Junji Ito
Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham
Nameless by Grant Morrison
The Wake by Scott Snyder
Batman: City of Madness by Christian Ward
The Nice House on the Lake by James Tynion IV
Remina by Junji Ito
Podcasts
The Magnus Archives
Welcome to Nightvale
Old Gods of Appalachia
Call of the Void