My Favorite Depictions of Cosmic Horror

Comments · 347

• VE

  @Venom_Snek · 1 year ago (edited)

  I think I can answer the connections between lighthouses and cosmic horror. Historically, lighthouses have been linked with real world cases of madness, stretching back as far as lighthouses have been a thing. Think about it, in order to tend to one you have to live in a highly isolated area where you&apos;re tasked with a very important job of warning passing ships of land, these areas are often so isolated that the people that live there only come into contact with other humans once a year, and if that moment doesn&apos;t come because of a bad storm or a supply ship sinking, then they could die from starvation due to a lack of supplies, and if anything goes wrong, it&apos;s pretty much guaranteed that no help will come. It&apos;s a very stressful and isolating job that a lot of people simply can&apos;t handle.<br><br>As such, you can see why there&apos;s countless cases from throughout history of lighthouse attendees going mad, disappearing without a trace, attacking and killing the people they live with, etc, etc, but there is one more contributing factor that I think is worth mentioning. For centuries, early lighthouses needed a way for the light to rotate freely without a way to externally power it, and the chosen method until around the industrial revolution was to have the light simply float on something, that way there&apos;s little friction and it can just be spun every once in a while. The only substance that such a large object could realistically float upon was actually mercury, which has such a high density that even steel can easily float on top of it. So for ages every lighthouse beacon was floating on top of a giant pool of mercury, which would over time fill the closed space with mercury vapors, which would contribute heavily to the mental decline of lighthouse attendees over long periods of time.<br><br>I would assume that that&apos;s where the connection comes from, madness is a key component of cosmic horror, lighthouses are linked with madness, makes for a great cosmic horror setting as well as a visual metaphor for madness. It also fits well with the nautical themes of Lovecraftian horror, with them being an isolated location out in the ocean and all.<br><br>tl;dr Lighthouse attendees were commonly afflicted with madness due to stress, physical isolation and mercury vapors, over the centuries people began to associate lighthouses with madness, cosmic horror authors began using that association to craft new forms of horror often using lighthouses as both a setting and an allegory for madness.

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• RE

  @rebel1717 · 1 year ago

  I love the Love+Death+Robots animation where soldiers enter a mysterious cave, whereupon they encounter several perils that kill the soldiers one by one. And at the center of this cave is a temple containing what’s basically Cthulhu. One of the final two soldiers gets mind controlled by the monster to break its chains and set it free, so it can bring apocalypse to Earth. The other soldier manages to resist the monster’s mental attacks long enough to kill her corrupted comrade. <br><br>The short ends with the sole surviving soldier escaping the cave and stumbling through the desert…with her eyes spooned out, and ears stabbed.

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• FR

  @FredBloggs919 · 1 year ago

  The bear in the shimmer has got to be one of the best movie monsters in recent history

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• AR

  @artboy57 · 1 year ago

  &quot;Twin Peaks-The Return&quot; digs much deeper into the horror. Every time I rewatch it I pull out some new story bits . It&apos;s an amazing piece of work.

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• RA

  @Rawkwilder · 1 year ago

  Nothing a bolter and some righteous fury couldn&apos;t handle.

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• MR

  @MrMasterKaio · 1 year ago

  Maybe the thing about lighthouses is, that they divide the known from the unknown world (the incomprehensibly vast oceans) and therefore represent the human mind peering into the cosmic.<br>But maybe not. Just a thought.

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• KH

  @KhasAdun1990 · 1 year ago

  One of my favorite depictions of Cosmic Horror is 1408, which I believe I saw a comment saying that Stephen King said that the room is located near a tear in our reality, and on the other side is an Eldritch creatures which manipulates people into killing themselves and feeding on their life force.

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• MI

  @mikkoleinonen9846 · 1 year ago

  My favorite cosmic horror is Laird Barron&apos;s Old Leech and his children. Something that is completely incomprehensible and alien to us is already terrifying, but that same alien force actively being gleefully malicious to us is even scarier.

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• SI

  @simonarpin2311 · 1 year ago

  Alien is my favorite example. Before Ridley Scott found it necessary to explain everything in that universe, the story was perfect cosmic horror. A dead planet, with a dead spaceship, with a dead pilot, but a very much alive monster.

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• FL

  @FlowMichael · 1 year ago

  Stephen King, whole certainly not an underrated author overall, is actually very adept at writing cosmic horror that not a lot of people read. The novel Revival and the short stories The Jaunt and N. are extremely chilling and some of the premier examples of cosmic horror I&apos;ve read. My favorite thing about cosmic horror is how it often covers topics that one could consider infohazards (I believe the above are good examples of this) where the horror is not just confined to the page, but can creep out and insidiously affect the thoughts of the reader. So much more haunting than regular horror!

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• WA

  @WardenDios · 1 year ago

  Cosmic Horror isn&apos;t just the fear of the unknown. &nbsp;It is the fear of the Unknowable. &nbsp;A lot of things fall under the blanket, catch-all purview of &apos;fear of the unknown&apos; that have absolutely nothing to do with Cosmic Horror. &nbsp;Cosmic Horror deals more specifically with Eldritch Beings that have agendas and motivations and even a nature to them that is simply impossible for our minds to comprehend. &nbsp;H.P. Lovecraft often had characters that, even peripherally, encountered objects or scripture related to these creatures, driven insane because their minds just gave up the blue screen of death.

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• RJ

  @RJMacReady1 · 1 year ago

  Event horizon is another one of my personal favorites. Sci fi and lovecraft go together amazingly well.

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