Cosmic Horror Part 2 - Film Examples

Now that we’ve established some rough ground rules for reaching into Cosmic Horror, let’s have a look at a few works of film that managed it with varying degrees of success, and one that perhaps knocks on the door of Cosmic Horror (certainly by sharing a few traits with another example), but doesn’t actually cross it.

Note: Spoilers for Oculus (2010), The Thing (1982), Mandy (2018), and Alien (1979).

“You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” – Ash, Alien (1979)

1)      Oculus (2010) – The Failure

Oculus is a movie about a haunted mirror that fucks with peoples' perception until they go homicidally bonkers. The trick with the mirror is that unless you've gone completely off the deep end, it can only affect you if you're looking at it. And even then, it’s not clear if the people acting on their crazier impulses are actually under the influence of the mirror, or have just had their minds shattered by it. So 2/3 of the movie is basically spent with the characters trying to suss out the mirrors' powers, and work around it to reach a possible solution.

At this point the rug gets pulled out from under them - the mirror can completely control the perception of anyone who's ever looked into it, anywhere, anytime. It was supposed to be the big "gotcha, look how fucked you are!" reveal. For me, the movie stopped being interesting at that point. Because if anything at all can be what the mirror wants it to be, and there's no grounding at all, then there's nothing to actually be worried about as a viewer - at any point anything can be justified by "mirror did it", so why bother engaging anymore?

This movie essentially is a perfect example of how you can reach the genre (What is real? What isn’t?), but still fuck it up by tossing The Rules out the window and instead just going for nonsense dressed up as horror. It’s still in the realm of Cosmic Horror, since it can make both the audience and the characters question their reality, it’s just terrible as an example of such because the only question you can ask is “how does the mirror choose to win?”

2)      The Thing (1982) – The Good One

And I mean that in the sense of both being a good example of Cosmic Horror and in the sense of it being the good version of The Thing. Zing!

The Thing was about a small group of men at an Antarctic Research Station who check out a massacre at a Norwegian research base, and unknowingly bring back a hostile, shapeshifting organism. Over the course of the movie it kills its’ way through the American base, taking on the form of several animals and men in its attempts to blend in. Is this still Cosmic Horror though?

I would argue yes. It has just about the same ability to make us doubt what we and the characters see that the god-mirror does. By the end of the movie, we still have no idea what the fuck it was, why it does what it does, where it came from, anything. Hell, we're not even sure the two remaining characters are actually human

But, we know:

-The creature hates fire
-It can be hurt
-It's predatory
-It can't replicate man-made material
-It can replicate people, but it's not fantastic at actually being them without a good amount of time in their skin

Even though we're looking at an unknowable creature with unknowable motivations beyond fucking up everyone around it, we still have grounding. We can make just enough sense of it to convince ourselves we're making progress in understanding it, and, since it's a threat, killing it. But, we never actually get there. This gives us actual stakes and tension to play with. And being an alien creature, it raises questions beyond the sandbox about our place in the universe, and the fate of humanity should it get into the general population.

3)      Mandy (2018) – WTF?!

I probably should have called this “The Personal One”, but holy shit this movie is crazy. For such a minimalist, personal story, it still manages to be such a crazy assault on the viewers’ senses and on the world of Red Miller (Nic Cage) that it serves as an example of how even a tiny sandbox can still produce an example of Cosmic Horror. Quick aside – if you can, watch this movie with surround sound. It’s still awesome with normal TV sound, but goddamn it is so much better with all the audio effects booming around you.

Ok, plug over. Mandy is a really simple story – Guy and Girl love each other, hippie murder-cult turns up and murders Girl, Guy fucking annihilates the cult in return. There are 2 elements that to me make this story cross over from revenge fantasy and into Cosmic Horror though.

The first is the Black Skulls. A biker gang that serves the hippie murder-cult, they’re framed in a lot of ways as being supernatural. They’re feared by everyone who knows of them, the cult leader can summon them by means of blowing a “mystical” horn, they appear out of the darkness to drag people off, and their pain tolerance is off the charts. But at the same time, Red tears them all to pieces over the course of the film. Additionally, it could be argued that they’re not “summoned” by the horn in a magical sense – they might just be riding close enough whenever the cult moves to hear it and come running. But we never know for certain. And finally, one of the stories floating around about them is that they’re just a regular biker gang who took a really, really bad batch of acid and just went off the deep end.

The second is Red’s drug trip. After he murders a couple of the bikers and gets through their hideout, Red slams his face into a huge pile of cocaine in a way only Nic Cage could pull off, and also takes some of their tainted acid. From this point on, the visual and audio style of the movie gets ever more intense and messed up, but at the same time, Red is verifiably interacting with real people (mostly by chopping them up but hey) and moving about the world. By the end of the movie though, the world itself has started to look like a heavy metal album cover, and Red appears to have gone completely off his rocker. The only thing we can really be certain of is that Red has just been anointed as a Champion of Khorne.

The sandbox here is tiny – most of the movie is focused just on Red and his travels. But within that sandbox, we as viewers still have to question a lot of just what the hell is going on, even as we feel we have certainty at least about Red’s rampage. But outside that, who knows? We’re not even sure if God or Gods or Daemons or whatever exist alongside everything else, just that Red’s world is soaked in blood and madness.

4)      Alien (1979) – Not Actually Cosmic Horror

Alien I find is a good example of something that knocks on the door of Cosmic Horror, but doesn’t quite cross over. Especially when served in contrast to The Thing. There’s quite a few similarities in the questions posed by each creature, but overall I’d say Alien is just back from the line of Cosmic Horror and into Sci-Fi Horror instead.

Let’s look at the similarities in what we know between the Xenomorph and The Thing. For the purpose of this piece, I’m only using information drawn from Alien itself, not any of the sequels:

-The Xenomorph hates fire

-It can be hurt

 -It’s predatory

-We know a good chunk of its’ reproductive cycle

And at the end of the day, we don’t know where it came from or why it does what it does. We don’t know if it has any way to communicate beyond claws and extendo-jaws. We don’t understand what we’re dealing with, but we do have a few answers, so why not classify Alien into Cosmic Horror?

Firstly, there’s no reason for either the characters or the viewer to question reality. The Xenomorph is incredibly stealthy and dangerous, but what we see on screen is what we get. A hilariously dangerous creature, but not something that makes you question your own senses and whether or not something or someone is real in the way that the Thing does.

Secondly, in Alien humanity is already travelling around the stars and tooling around on other worlds. Sure, the Xenomoprh might be something new, but humanity is out in the stars now. In that context of exploration and spacefaring sci-fi, the Xenomorph is no more an insult to our reality than a tiger is to the first people to encounter one. Dangerous, sure, but simple danger doesn’t get you over the line into Cosmic Horror.

Before we finish this part I just want to note that I am generally focusing on writing in this series. The use of visual effects alone could take up many more pages at least (per film!), and what I want to do here is try to give you a framework for writing. In general though, you can safely assume I come down on the side of writing trumps effects in film, especially in horror. A film with bad effects but good writing can still be salvaged. A film with bad writing and good effects can never be more than spectacle.

Hopefully these examples help provide some workable examples of what I was getting at in part 1. In part 3 we’ll be looking at video games and RPG’s, and in doing so we’ll introduce a new element to the medium that makes cosmic horror (and horror in general) even harder to reach: Player Agency.