Cosmic Horror Without Cthulhu

Cosmic horror has a really bad rap these days, and frankly…with pretty good reason. In a lot of cases, stories that claim the title of “cosmic horror” use a lot of the trappings without digging into the actual cosmic bit. Tentacles, weird geometry, and people running around screaming gibberish are used to say “this is cosmic horror.” And that approach, pardon my language, gets absolutely fuck-all done with actual horror.

The “cosmos” referred to in cosmic horror isn’t just the stars and planets, but an orderly and harmonious universe. In a cosmic horror story, something opens a protagonist’s eyes to some truth about the cosmos. The harmony of the universe is revealed to be a lie hiding chaos, or the order is revealed to be nothing like what the protagonist believed it to be. The result is existential dread, a sense of the threat to a person’s identity–or maybe to the identity of all humankind, or even to the nature of all life as we know it.

In this list, I want us to take a glimpse of chaos. Consider a different order of the universe. Maybe even question our own reality a little. And we won’t see a single amoeba, space sea anemone, or fish person while we’re at it.

• 1408: The closest to a conventional cosmic horror movie on this list, 1408′s subject is a hotel room. Not a haunted room, not a cursed room, just–as Samuel L. Jackson memorably tells us–an evil fucking room. Whatever the hell is going on in that room with time and space is completely incomprehensible. It might well be a sentient entity. It might be an architectural pitcher plant. No one knows, but by spending the night in the room, a person gets a look into a world that works by incomprehensible, inhuman rules. For all that the action is contained to a single hotel suite, the implications of the room are cosmic in scale.
• Come True: Dreams are mysterious. The worlds that wait for us in our sleeping minds abide by different laws than the waking world. They help us to analyze our memories and rehearse our lives, but they also expose us to wonders and terrors that defy reality. Dreams have been used around the world to predict the future, to interpret the will of gods, and more. Even though dreams serve a concrete purpose for our brains, it’s still easy to perceive them as connecting us to something else. Come True asks us to imagine if that something else was hostile–and significantly more powerful, when given a full conduit to the waking world, than we could have predicted.
• Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County: By their very nature, the idea of Little Grey Men is a cause for existential dread. Alien abduction stories are terrifying. Aliens with incredible technology that descend from the stars, perform seemingly purposeless experiments on hapless livestock and confused humans, leave behind indecipherable patterns in cornfields, and vanish without a trace are an alarming concept. If they exist (which they most likely don’t), then they call into question so many things we know about biological life, evolution, physics, time, and more. The universal order is overturned. This movie brings all of that home to a rural family and forces them to confront the incomprehensible as it invades their home.
• Jurassic Park: I’m sure the soaring John Williams score, the size and scale of the dinosaurs, and the resoundingly triumphant ending have you convinced this can’t be a cosmic horror movie. But consider this: what’s more terrifying and hard to conceptualize than Earth’s deep time? In order to conceive of the history of our planet, we have to pack 4.5 billion years of the planet’s existence into a 24-hour clock where the earliest humans appeared less than two seconds to midnight. On that scale of time, entire continents move, whole branches of the tree of life grow and die, and our species is a drop in the bucket. Jurassic Park brings us face to face with animals which died sixty-five million years ago on the impact of an asteroid the size of a mountain. The kicker: in order to bring them forward to live in the park, the scientists at work have to mix the ancient DNA with the DNA of modern birds and amphibians. The dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, as majestic and wonderful as they are, still leave the real dinosaurs as much a mystery as they are when they’re only the mineralized remains of bones. Talk about dealing with an unfathomable cosmos.
• Halloween (1978): A well-ordered, calm, ordinary suburban neighborhood in idyllic Midwestern America is thrown into chaos by the arrival of an unstoppable, remorseless killer. Violence breaks out in a place where even the very idea of danger seems too remote to believe. It happens on the night of America’s great–maybe its only–inversion ritual: Halloween. During inversion rituals, the social order is overturned, allowing for behavior that would never be acceptable on a typical day. Still, there are some things that even an inversion ritual can’t countenance. Like mass murder. Even the rules of the inversion ritual are overthrown. The impact of Halloween, though, might hit a viewer in 21st century America a bit harder. When reports of senseless violence regularly make the news, the existential question of whether the world really is a safe place after all comes to mind. While fictional, Halloween is asking us a very real question about the order of our very real universe.

Some questions for thought: Do you disagree that any of these belong on this list? Why? How would you personally define cosmic horror, if it’s different than my definition? With that definition, what movies would you want to see on this list? For the sake of argument, let’s count Jurassic Park and Halloween as cosmic horror stories. So what does it mean for our sense of order and identity that both of these movies were followed by a host of increasingly actionized sequels which downplayed or even removed the horror elements of the originals? Do we want to think about the insignificance of our place in the universe, or is that pushing even the bounds of horror a little too far?

News Reporters

For this round of recs, we’re looking at horror movies that focus on news reporters or incorporate them as a major part of the story. Not researchers, not documentary makers, not writers. Just about news reporters. People who actually work for newspapers or news broadcasting, who might even appear live on TV, and find themselves caught up in the events of a horror movie.

• The Bay: In this found-footage film, one of the main characters is a young news reporter whose first time on live TV turned from coverage of a local 4th of July celebration to live reporting of an unfolding environmental crisis. Many segments of the movie are from her cameraman’s work. One of the movie’s most haunting moments comes from her.
• V/H/S 94: Storm Drain: A news reporter reports on a local cryptid supposedly living in the sewers of her town. Descending into the sewers reveals a much darker truth than she was expecting. And some of the consequences of what she finds come out live on air.
• Scream (1990): During a series of attacks by a serial killer, a journalist provides live coverage of the events and actually gets in on the action during the climax. She also has a personal tie to the story, since these aren’t the first murders she’s covered in the area. As a very important footnote here, her on-air fashion sense is amazing.
• The Night Flier: This time, it’s tabloid journalists on the hunt for a story, chasing down a murderer who apparently drains his victims of blood. The ethics of tabloid journalism and true crime are a running theme throughout. Also, the murderer travels by plane and that is exactly as surreal as you might expect.
• The Tunnel: Investigative reporters delve into defunct sewer tunnels and bunkers under Sydney, Australia to try to discover the truth behind a government cover-up. They find it–or, more accurately, it finds them. This one’s very special because the guy manning the camera in the movie is actually a cameraman in real life, so there’s a fair bit less shakycam than your standard found footage and very well-handled camerawork.

Some questions for thought: What separates stories about news reporters from stories about people making documentaries or researching books? A news reporter’s job is to narrate the action and explain the background–what effect does that have on horror? Does it provide an anchor for the story, or does it take away from the dread? Why was it so hard for me to find horror movies that focus on journalists? Do you have any more that you can add to this list?

Double Features

Presenting five pairs of horror movies which share something that I think makes them worth watching together. Get your snacks and drinks ready, because you’ll be here for a while.

• Hellraiser (1987) and Martyrs (2008): Okay, maybe skip the snacks and drinks here. Two movies that focus on torture and the transcendent potential of pain, this will be heavy. Food for thought: Would the Cenobites approve of the cult in Martyrs? Why or why not? (Combined runtime 3h 17m.)
• The Red Shoes and Black Swan: Get ready for some fine art! Two movies about ballerinas who get caught up in maybe-magic-maybe-mundane terror, thanks to their devotion to their art. Their teachers don’t exactly help the situation in either case. Food for thought: What is it about ballet that lends itself so well to surreal horror? (Combined runtime 4h 3m.)
• The Boogeyman (1980) and Oculus: Both of these movies focus on siblings who return home as adults to deal with family trauma and find themselves dealing with evil mirrors while they do. Food for thought: Why do mirrors freak us out so much? Will you ever look at your bathroom mirror the same way? (Combined runtime 3h 7m.)
• Leptirica and Lifeforce: Two completely different takes on vampires that are probably nothing you’ve ever seen before. One draws on classical Serbian vampire legends; the other is a science-fiction twist on the concept you’ll have to see to believe. Food for thought: Why do most popular depictions of vampires follow a stereotypical Dracula, instead of vampires like these? (Combined runtime 2h 44m.)
• Die Farbe and The Color Out of Space: These are two different adaptations of the same H.P. Lovecraft story. One takes place in post-WWII Germany. The other has Nic Cage. Both of them use magenta as the Evil Space Color. Food for thought: How effective are each of these movies at adapting the same story? Why? (Combined runtime 3h 17m.)