The Cosmic Horror Element; Underrated?

In Defense of Mass Effect 3, True Detective, Final Space, No Country For Old Men, and Marvel's Eternals

Alright then, I think it’s finally time to talk about why H.P. Lovecraft’s writing was better appreciated with time. No it’s not because he was some underappreciated literary genius; he would’ve been a Nazi if he wasn’t half crazy. But it was that same indifferent outlook on the world and the indifference he feared that leads to the genre of Cosmic Horror. That same fear ironically connected him with people who began to dread some unknowable if inevitable tragedies.

So influential, this Lovecraftian take on horror appears in modern media. While some of it is directly inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, others take only the spirit of it all. But with how open ended and subtle the point of a message can be, audiences have a hard time grasping it.

Why Cosmic Horror Is Controversial

Cosmic Horror prides itself on terrors that in appearance and attitude are completely indifferent to humanity. One of the scarier parts about all of this is the fact that regular people are capable of being like this too. Think about how people anthropomorphize or imprint their ideas of another onto others. Sometimes trying to understand the motivations of another person can lead to outright dehumanizing outcomes. At its core Cosmic Horror is about the limitations of humanity.

But that’s also why Cosmic Horror is such a difficult genre to get into. Writers work best when injecting parts of their personalities and quirks into their content. It allows writers to connect with what they create and with the audience. But Cosmic Horror is about how useless it is. Human imagination can reach heights, but seeing something that by all accounts is impossible to understand can be aggravating.

It could just be shorthand for how lazy it is to describe something so alien to the average human. Or how in terms of personality and motives, it’s nothing but shorthand for people like sociopaths or psychopaths just being cruel for cruelty’s sake.

Cosmic Non-Horror

With how dangerous these situations and entities tend to be, they would make great antagonists for stories. A few modern examples of Cosmic Horror elements in different genres include the manga Dr. Stone. In that series, an event caused the human population of Earth to petrify. For a long time people theorized it was an AI that used nanomachines for some purpose like eco-management. Only to turn out that this biomechanical abomination of a hive mind was really just trying to spread its life preservation around. Why? Because it had no concept of anything like society or life outside of its own example.

Other examples are in the show Rick and Morty that take a more comedic look at things. A charming telepathically singing Fart cloud sees the true beauty in the universe, but considers carbon-based lifeforms a disease. Then there’re the giant heads that host an extreme singing competition with people misinterpreting their intentions along the way.

Why Do People Not Like Cosmic Horror Twists?

And now it’s time to get into why we’re here. But allow me to rant a personal finding on the mediums we consume. Cosmic Horror reveled in word form mainly because readers had to interpret and challenge themselves. With only bare and almost nonsensical descriptions, it pushes reader’s imaginations to picture and guess what horrors they are finding. It’s a very good way to engage an audience.

But in more visual mediums, these are more akin to projections than interpretations a lot of the time. One of the reasons the Thing 2011 prequel movie wasn’t so great, it gave the monster a more regular appearance that was just a blob of tentacles instead of relying on its shapeshifting monstrosities. But more than that, audiences tend to think that ideas just burn out without a sense of finality.

Open Ended Doesn’t Mean Lazy!

The show True Detective drew influence on the Cthulhu Mythos. With classical elements like The King In Yellow, audiences were invested to try and solve the mysteries, as if they were working alongside the characters. It lead to theories and a lot of speculation on where it was all going. But the final case didn’t go in a way that paid off for a lot of people who invested in the show.

A similar thing happens in the show Final Space. After much loss, a few small victories, and personal crises in a grand space adventure, the show ended with three seasons on an open note. All with the overarching eldritch villain Invictus released from his prison and nothing seeming to be able to stop him. But after that, the story just stopped. It’s unknown if Invictus went on to kill everything around him and remade the universe. Nothing really seems to have happened. Not until the graphic novel finale of Final Space gets released anyway.

And now for the least cosmic story. No Country For Old Men deals with a sheriff trying to track down a dangerous killer. Only instead of a showdown against an indifferent hitman and a lawman over his head, nothing really happens between them. In fact, nothing actually seems to happen altogether.

Here’s The Point

But that’s all what leads to this whole thing about Cosmic Horror, even as a background element. It’s about characters finding themselves way in over their heads and celebrating what small victories they can have when it comes to their character. True Detective isn’t about a detective redeeming himself by closing a hard case, it’s about his development and personal achievements. Final Space is about coming to terms with loss including the people you love, the places in peoples’ hearts, and accepting that even when you try your hardest, failures are inevitable. And No Country For Old Men, it’s about choosing what path to take including when to just stop. Not everybody’s going to get satisfaction from these, but that’s just what life kind of is.

Behind The Wheel Of Cosmic Horror

And now, let’s talk video games. Video games aren’t just a projection, it allows players a chance to interpret by being an active part of the scenario. But that’s also why Cosmic Horror and video games aren’t always the best combination. Being able to fight abominations kind of defeats the purpose of experiencing Cosmic Horror. It’s why the Call of Cthulhu video games tend to have a lackluster reputation. Unlike say Bloodborne which deals with Lovecraftian elements of tragedy. The player fights an unwinable battle where the best they can hope for is not fall into temptations and choose which tragedy they can shoulder.

But now let’s talk about Mass Effect 3, a game whose ending really set off a lot of fans. In a game where every choice has consequence and some choices can be cut off depending on the player’s actions and morality, the final multiple choice that strips it all away didn’t sit well. In Wisecrack’s words, this is actually because Cosmic Horror was at the center of this final decision.

As this video describes to a complaint my friend made against the Cosmic Horror angle, there are parts of the game where you can’t save anyone or take on a fantasy without mods no matter how well you play. Sometimes people are lucky to have a choice at all in a circumstance like that. Again pretty similar to Bloodborne, getting to choose which tragedy to take.

Then again, trying to make an ending where every choice you make across three total games is a tall order. See this video for more detail:

Remember To Interpret

Now let’s talk about the MCU’s Eternals. People started to argue and debate this flick as the worst to come out of Phase 4. But I’m gonna have to disagree, compared to everyone else who played it safe until Spider-Man: No Way Home this movie tried to be different. Only it had one of the same problems as the others, a lack of a complete Act 1 and 2. Also the initial antagonists the Deviants were reduced to plot elements. Finally there’s the part where we’re going to talk about, the motivations and drives with all characters were all pretty much set in stone.

This is where the Cosmic Horror elements come in. The Eternals are portrayed as being conflicted with a lot of things, but the audience has trouble actually experiencing it. Had it not been for the expressive portrayals of some of the actors in a few key scenes, the audience wouldn’t have been be able to interpret these struggles.

But more than that, the Eternals place in the greater universe takes a more Lovecraftian direction in their interactions with their superiors, the Celestials. The movie was never really about the Eternals trying to be or live alongside humans, except for maybe Sprite. It was about the Eternals role in the overall MCU and how far away these godlike beings actually are from everyone else.

We Can Never Understand Gods

This actually brings me to the attention of a Bad Idea I read called Odinn’s Eye. As admitted by the writer, this comic was never about the quest, it was about how perceptions and projections can turn into bias. Remember, some people don’t even try to understand one another to the point of never acknowledging the presence of anything different from them. The gods of these people manifesting through hysteric fits is just one way of showing how people’s beliefs dominate others. But more than that, there’s an inevitable tragedy that befalls a group in the 5th century. So leaving it open to interpretation is probably for the best.

So the next time you get frustrated that a story doesn’t scratch an itch, remember the last time you got yourself in bad luck. Because the limits of your humanity have ways of showing up.