- cross-posted to:
- cosmichorror@lemm.ee
- cross-posted to:
- cosmichorror@lemm.ee
cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16332964
Cosmic horror has been established as one of the most chilling sub-genres in horror cinema. With a focus on the unknown, isolation, and the human mind, cosmic horror plays on the imaginations of audiences rather than going all out on gore and jump scares. Instead of ghosts, serial killers, or vampires, these stories focus on the endless possibilities of the universe’s fictional horrors.
Early 20th-century author H.P. Lovecraft gave Cosmic horror prominence through stories like At the Mountain of Madness, The Hound, and The Call of Cthulhu. The genre can be challenging to pull off in cinema, but plenty of films have tried to capture the terror of the unknown and unimaginable. Everything from stories of paranoia to questions about reality itself has made up cosmic horror in cinema.
They are:
- The Thing
- In the Mouth of Madness
- Event Horizon
- The Lighthouse
- Phantoms
- The Void
- The Mist
- Bird Box
- Color Out of Space
I include it on my list of Lovecraftian films as it’s an edge case - Giger’s designs definitely have a Lovecraftian feel to them, there’s overtones of At the Mountains of Madness (it gets a paragraph on the story’s Wikipedia entry) and there’s a pervading aura of cosmic indifference.
I also found a paper that touches on it: The Hunter in the Dark: A Formal Analysis of Lovecraftian Horror and Surrealist Style in Alien (1979)