Cosmic Horror is a sliver of a genre I've discussed here before. It comes with its own goals and history and a lot of that history is less romantic than that of the more historic "horror" genre of fiction.
Cosmic horror has a specific goal, though. It wishes to fill you with dread.
As with all good horror, it starts with empathy. [ link here]. It starts with reminding you how small we are. How little is humanity?
We who are so advanced, technological, and intelligent, what are we?
We have so much knowledge on how to save lives compared to even a decade ago, yet we still cut into bodies to see the work we do within them. We still don't know how aspirin works.
We have networked computers to communicate across space instantly, but we still cannot communicate as one.
We have all the diets and routines to work our bodies into peak fitness conditions impossible to all but the most genetically lucky of our ancestors, but we are still simply mammals. We are small. We are soft. Our bodies control us more than we hope to know until those last moments before it takes full control and we succumb to illness or weakness or death.
The world round us is already so much bigger than us. We should be nothing but terrified at the prospect. But we aren’t.
That's human too.
Cosmic horror works to show us this, though. It shows us that we are human, and it shows us how very small that is.
I often think about what makes a story good or bad, a movie or a novel. I enjoy most things and will cut a lot of slack for a story’s detriment to find the part that I enjoyed. But some stories make you uncomfortable. They make you squirm and they make you sick with disgust. Are these stories good? If they elicit the feelings they want to elicit within you, are they anything other than good?
Alien Covenant is not touted as the best in the series or genre. It’s an interesting take by Ridley Scott and his team at both continuing the Alien franchise he started so perfectly in 1979, and the Prometheus film he made to very mixed acclaim in 2012. The story is somewhat of a mess. Some scenes dwell far too long on plot points that are only relevant to the scheme tying the multiple other stories together, and some seem to exist for no reason at all.
Though I don't really care for the lore revealed about the Xenomorph or the Engineers, and I don't care about many of the xeno-fodder characters. I still feel what the movie wants me to.
I felt dread through the entire runtime.
It set in shortly after the opening credits and only grew as the film went on. Even my favorite films in the franchise don't do that. The story is not a happy one, and the ending is not one of a positive note, but that is not all that caused the dread. Humans feel small in Alien Covenant. They feel smaller than they did in Alien or Aliens, and they feel smaller than Prometheus wanted them to feel.
We're all just blue-collar workers thrown onto a planet that we want to make our home, but are too small to realize how little control we actually have in the matter.
We're people with a dream and with hope, who do not know how impossible the dream is. How impossible hope is.
This is what the great stories by Lovecraft that helped create the genre show. The Color Out of Space, The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow over Innsmouth. These marvelous stories work in different ways to show us how powerless humanity is. How small a person truly is.
The Color Out of Space shows how little control we have as the world happens to us.
The Call of Cthulhu dares ask what we wish to find as we explore this world around us.
The Shadow over Innsmouth is an action tale filled with the consequences of staying another day and asking another question.
Alien Covenant.
Lightning in a bottle, each of them. Because cosmic horror is hard.
It’s challenging to beat down your audience with bad feelings. It’s hard to show a person they are small, let alone with words on a page, without telling them outright. Asking them to see what you see in your words and see the scale of the dark universe before them. Asking an audience to look into the abyss you create.
That's the balance a lot of stories don't hit. Some of the best in the genre: Lovecraft, Bairon, Langan, all have stories that very much do not land with me. They have some of the best cosmic horror I’ve read, the kind that makes me feel small, lost, and dreading existence. All of them have also written stories that overstay their welcome or that hit you over the head with the horror in such a way that it is anything but scary. They, like all of us, write stories that miss. But I don't say this to disparage the authors, none of them. Rather, I say this to point out the challenge in the horror of the cosmic scale. It’s difficult to make your reader enjoy a story that makes them steep in dread through its entire duration, that makes them feel small and impotent, that scares them with not a shock but with a sense of fear at what truly does or doesn't exist in our universe.
It is a worthy challenge to attempt, though.
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Thanks for giving that a read! Cosmic horror is such an interesting genre with tons of room to play around in. I’ve enjoyed dabbling in writing it over the past few months, I hope you enjoy the reading the stories I wrote as much as I enjoyed writing them. I’m looking forward to playing around with this form more in the future.
Love ya!
Max