If there were a phrase to describe Cosmic Horror to the person who is unfamiliar to the term, it would have to be “unfathomable”. That is the feel of every Lovecraft story, every book written by his contemporaries and every film that attempts to replicate the same slimey, disturbing touch of work done by those who only grasped a pen. To know the cosmic horror is to truly know how much you don’t know. To be less abstract, think of the man preaching of the end of the world. He screams of monsters that are pulling the strings of the government, the reptile people, grey aliens, and tries to get anyone he can to listen. They never do. Now imagine he was completely right. There was something going on behind the scenes, someone pulling strings, but that is only the tip of the horrific iceberg. That is cosmic horror, the idea that the truth is too insane for humanity to imagine, so it stays in the illusion, safe from everything. Much like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave where men and women are tied up in such a way where they only see shadows instead of actual people, we are only seeing a fake image of the world and when one of us slips our bonds, the reality is too much for us to comprehend. Seems like an impossible feeling to create, isn’t it? Yet as we explore you will find that while the thoughts are inconceivable, making a story of that nature is not.
So what features make up a cosmic horror story vs any other type of horror? The biggest thing is that the villain, whatever it is, is so beyond human understanding. If it has motives, we don’t know them and even if we do, it doesn’t care. Humans are nothing to the monster that awaits us, often asleep or just under our collective noses. It is the idea that makes the name cosmic horror: A horror that is on such a bigger scale than you are, that you mean nothing to it. You are a pest at worst and a thing unworthy of notice at best. These are where monsters like Cthulhu come into play, but that creature is still small compared to the Old Ones he serves. The God-creatures you run into in cosmic horror are designed to make the reader feel like they are small nothings in a larger landscape.
Another key feature is the main protagonist in relation to the monster. The key word for them is “investigator” as that is their main role. Through some series of unfortunate events, they are chosen (by themselves or others) to investigate something that will eventually lead them to the right revelations, at the risk of their own sanity and grasp on reality. These are not action heroes or groups of adventurers, these are people who are looking into a mystery that suddenly realize far too late that this is so much bigger than them. They are scientific minds that are curious to a fault, and that fault is what leads them down this path.
As you can tell, these stories tend to very rarely have happy endings. They are tragedies that leave people either dead or unable to speak of what they saw. What we get is their journal entries, a narration up until they say the infamous phrase “It was indescribable horror”. Though, outside of the Cthulhu mythology, these ideas are rarely touched upon in ways that hit me in the same cosmic fashion that Lovecraft can. There are two exceptions that I know of, and both of them come not from the world of western literature, but from animation and graphic novels of Japan. Junji Ito is the name you hear the most when you talk about horror manga, and you can see why if you even take a single look at one page of his graphic novels. The horrific details that come from his pen to the paper hit that phrase of “indescribable horror”, because even trying to describe one of them to me seems like an insane task. His work details towns that are cursed by the shape of a spiral, human shaped holes that compel people to climb into “theirs”, a planet from another dimension that decides that our solar system is a good snack, and a beautiful young woman who cannot die but whose beauty is so strong that she makes men want to destroy her even though each time a part is cut off, more of her are created. This is only a peak of the nightmares that Ito brings and they often leave me in awe of not only the intensity of the horror, but of his imagination.
The other would be more of a writer of both anime and video game stories, Gen “the Butcher” Urobuchi. As you can tell from the name, he is known for horribly torturing his characters and murdering them in gruesome ways. Two works of his stand out to me, Song of Saya, a story that, while a pornographic visual novel, also deals with a young protagonist who can only see the world as demonic visions of gore, guts, and horrific monsters...except for his new girlfriend, Saya. Mixing erotic horror and cosmic horror, the story is not for the faint of heart or those who cannot find a subtitled version as its only available in Japanese. My favorite work of his, which is because it hits my childhood, is Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magicka. It is terribly girly, it has magical girls in frilly costumes fighting monsters of the week, and it also has Faustian bargains with creatures from beyond this world. You have to get past the first two episodes as they are designed to give you a false sense of security but trust me, nothing good can happen from an idea that comes from Urobuchi. He even had to lie to his fans on twitter about how he’s writing happy stories now because everyone smelled something off with his new shiny magical girl anime, it was just too out of character.
What about you guys, got a favorite Lovecraft story or another Cosmic horror story? I have gushed about my favorites, so feel free to put yours in the comments below and again, apologies for the delay on this post, real life had gotten a little too busy this weekend. Either way, hope to see you again this Food Thursday.
