Have you ever found yourself looking up at the night sky, staring at the countless stars
sprinkled over the black emptiness of space...? As you kept looking, its vastness grew and
invaded your mind. Making you realize the scale of the expanding
universe and how small you are in comparison? Filling you with a dreadful emotion
that can be hard to describe. As if you inadvertently peaked at something beyond yourself?
That is what cosmic horror is about. Beyond the monsters, violence, and danger;
this horror is about the awareness of the limits of your own humanity.
Early 20th Century writer H. P. Lovecraft wrote extensively on the subject, which is
why the genre is also referred to as Lovecraftian Horror. His stories often dealt with characters
coming face to face with something beyond their understanding.
As much as Lovecraft's works have inspired well known writers such as Stephen King or
Neil Gaiman, or even Junji Ito's manga's, his brand of horror has not often been successfully
adapted to a visual medium. Unlike slasher movies, possession horror,
sci-fi horror or monster movies, cosmic horror isn't as prevalent on the screen. So why is
that? Why is cosmic horror harder to make?
- Can you describe it's form?
-No...
Let's take a look at an excerpt from H. P. Lovecraft's the The Unnamable that clearly
shows one of the biggest issues of adapting cosmic horror to the visual medium:
"Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars-was it like that?"
And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected-
"No-it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere-a gelatin-a slime-yet it had shapes, a thousand
shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes-and a blemish. It was the pit-the
maelstrom-the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!"
As you were hearing the description of the unnamable entity, you must have gone through
a certain amount of mental gymnastics to try and form a clear picture of it in your head.
The writer starts by explaining its recognizable forms, but then it shifts beyond comprehension
until it becomes less tangible and finally transforms into a concept.
So, how do you represent an unknowable or unnamable horror visually? It's hard to think
or imagine something greater and bigger than yourself, let alone, represent it for all
to see. If you give it a shape and put it on screen, it's not unknowable anymore and
therefore, you take away its power. A movie that maneuvers around the visual aspect
is Bird Box. In it, we know that there are monsters so frightening that they cause people
to go mad and commit suicide and at the same time, they are attractive to people that are
already mad. At no point in the movie are we shown what the creatures look like. We
only see what they cause. The biggest hints we get are the drawings. They are vague yet
ominous and do not take away from the mystery. Omitting the entity all together because of
its visual complexity is a good route but we can also find a good example of the opposite
being done. The Thing is a movie that does a good job
at showing us the creature and yet, by the end, we still don't know what the true form
is, only its transitional phases as it makes itself look like people or animals. The visual
effects, which were all practical and groundbreaking at the time, show us nightmarish and misshapen
horrors that often lack the safety of an anthropomorphic figure. The creature constantly changes, we
can't define it. We are presented with an entity that we can't understand or whose goals
we can't comprehend, even as it tries to look and sound like one of us.
The Thing succeeds in representing cosmic horror not because of the use tentacles (a
calling card of the genre) but because it honors the changing characteristics of the
literary style - Just like the description of the Unnamable it can't be pinned down to
one thing... it's several.
Cosmic horror resides deeply in the abstract. If you recall the excerpt from earlier, the
Unnamable being's descriptions are deliberately elusive, the only anchor in the sea of the
intangible is what the descriptions evokes in the characters or in us.
The reaction of being faced with the incomprehensible leads the character to look inwards to make
sense of the complex puzzle of emotions they are left with.
"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."
Imagine trying to portray the emotions in the previous passage onto film.
Existential dread is an emotion that is difficult to explain, it's a feeling that we rarely
experience in comparison to happiness, fear or anger. On top of its rarity, not everyone
can verbalize it or express it in a way that others can understand it. It is often misunderstood
or interpreted as something else. Therein lies the hard task of representing
those emotions on film and making the audience share those feelings as well.
The emotions born of cosmic horror are similar to the genre's monsters: abstract, not fully
formed, hard to harness, hard to describe. It's difficult to show the introspection of
a character coming to terms with the fragility of their own humanity. This type of inner
monologue is usually best explored in literature. But an intimate inwards realization can be
done without having the character say anything like in the scene in Annihilation, when the
main character is face to face with a being that is emulating her. She slowly begins to
understand it without the use of dialogue. Sometimes the best thing to do is to let the
visuals speak for themselves. If showing a monster can handicap your movie...so can explaining it
- So it was alien...
It's like assigning a shape to something that doesn't have any.
It's all about balance. Some movies might get the visuals right, but
they lack a cohesive or poignant story and are missing a sense of foreboding or dread.
In other cases, the setting is perfect, the mood is just right but the effects are laughable
and far from frightening. If you want to explore cosmic horror but don't
have a big budget, the Bird Box's example is one to replicate. Don't show the creatures
and let peoples' imaginations do the work. If you're lucky enough to have a bigger budget
and have a lot of creativity, practical effects like those in The Thing or The Void can do
the trick. Just don't forget the second and equally important
half of the equation when creating the story. Good cosmic horror balances the external aesthetic
of a sci-fi movie but with the internal feel of an existential film.
People are so hung up with the aesthetics, the tentacles and the monster that they fail
to explore the bigger questions, because that's even more complex: they themselves don't understand
it. Not enough movies go into the abstract of
the themes they stay at the surface level with the visuals.
And it's completely understandable. What is the limit of our humanity? what happens
when we go beyond it? If something is hard to think about then it's
hard to verbalize, and if it's hard to verbalize
then it's near impossible to show.
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if you haven't done so yet. Until next time.