Cosmic Horror, Part One: Ground Rules

First of a 4 part set of posts looking at Cosmic Horror.

“I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now till kingdom come, the only thing you can count on in your existence is never understanding why.”  - Gabriel, The Prophecy (1995)

In this series on Cosmic Horror in Fiction and Gaming, I’ll make an attempt at quantifying the genre in such a way as to help anyone who may want to take a crack at Cosmic Horror get started. In this part, we’ll try to establish some rough ground rules. In the next part we’ll look at cosmic horror in fiction through a few film examples. After that, we’ll move on to the same in gaming (both video games and RPG’s), then end by trying to tie it all together for our theoretical aspiring writer/designer/storyteller. Full disclosure, I’m neither an author nor involved in game/film design. I’m just a nerd entertaining hypotheticals.

First up then, how do we define Cosmic Horror as distinct from other horror-sub genres? Generally speaking, Cosmic Horror tends to be described as invoking a sense of existential dread. That everything you knew about the universe and your place in it is wrong. That true revelation brings only pain and madness. That such stories mast be vast in scope and great in consequence. It’s not a bad place to start, but it’s not also the sum of it either.

Consider this question: How vast is your own reality?

You could argue that humanity has had an awareness of the concept of cosmic horror ever since the first people looked up at the stars and wondered if something was watching them, or when they first looked at the ocean and wondered if something was going to eat them if they stepped into it. What matters is that within the bounds of your reality, you have cause to question it or fear the Great Unknown. The Great Unknown could be as small as a cave outside your village – but once you crawl into it, for the time you’re there, it is your reality. Within this reality, we can find wonder or dread, and tapping into that dread is what helps us reach into cosmic horror.

That’s really just a fancy way of saying “the sandbox can be as big or as small as it needs to be”. Within the boundaries of the box, if you can evoke a sense that the box itself is wrong, you’re probably already knocking on the door of cosmic horror.  To take the step through it (and into good cosmic horror), there’s 2 more elements we need – a sense of mystery to match the dread, and a broad understanding of The Rules.

I’ll deal with The Rules first. I don’t mean The Rules in this sense to be some kind of list somewhere of hard and fast rules for writing horror/fiction in general. I’m talking about the rules of the story – The Rules that get parodied in every other horror movie that’s been trying to be self-aware since Scream. The Rules in this context essentially just means the framework that governs how the threat in the story works – whether it’s a serial killer who kills according to specific patterns, a supernatural threat that obeys certain mythical laws or even a new type of creature whose habits and physiology need to be observed. If you were doing a slasher film, for example, we’d be establishing a pattern for the killer, in terms of both victim and methodology that allows the audience to get drawn into a scene when they see those elements start to come into play, and perhaps even figure out who the killer is if it’s a mystery movie. In doing so, you keep the audience engaged with the promise of an answer to the mystery.

In cosmic horror though, we don’t want to go that far. We want a continued sense of dread and mystery, offering the promise of answers and only finding more questions. But we also don’t want complete confusion. If there’s no rules at all, the audience can’t get engaged, because from their perspective all they’re seeing is nonsense.

So how do we manage that for the audience? Essentially, we need to lay down some observable facts, but never actually complete the mystery. Ideally, we want both the characters in the story and the audience (or just the players if doing an RPG) to be continually digging deeper, feeling like they’re just one revelation away from unravelling the mystery, without ever actually solving it or giving up on trying to solve it. But, if you cross the line from that to “there are no rules, nothing makes sense and nothing matters”, then you’re probably going to lose the audience. And if you complete the mystery, you’ve dropped out of Cosmic and back into another horror sub-genre.

That mystery is how we keep ourselves within the realm of Cosmic Horror – by the end of the story, no one should have all the answers. They should have some, and an ever expanding list of theories, but never true revelation. You can observe something in action, maybe even discover some way to fight that thing, but you should never fully understand why it does what it does, or why you ended up here in the first place. You should also be questioning your own reality, be it as vast as considering your place in the universe or as small as wondering if anything happening in this cave is actually real.

 

Confused? Good. The line between unending but engaging mystery, perfect sense and nonsense is a difficult one to walk, but navigating it properly is where we’ll find the art of good cosmic horror. In the next part, we’ll take a look at a few works of fiction that all aimed for cosmic horror (and one that didn’t, but arguably was knocking on the door) with varying degrees of success, and tie that back to what we’ve started here.