Unspeakable Horrors and Where to Find Them
Over the last several years there has been a steady climb in interest regarding Lovecraftian/Cosmic Horror. You can find Cosmic Horror tropes and references throughout pop culture these days, from The Necronomicon popping up in the Evil Dead series, character skins in Overwatch, and even the release of a Cthulu pop figure. The aesthetic of Cosmic Horror has certainly touched a nerve in popular culture, but while popular culture has started accepting the aesthetic, burgeoning creators in new mediums have started attempting to translate the core themes of Cosmic Horror in ways we haven’t seen before. I’m going to go over what I believe are some of the more successful attempts at this, but before we can talk about that, we need to determine what makes Cosmic Horror effective, and what makes a translation of that genre into a new medium successful?
So what exactly IS Cosmic Horror? For the unaware, Cosmic Horror refers to a specific sub-genre of horror fiction that focuses on the insignificance of humanity in the grand scheme of the universe, usually through heavy use of distracting descriptions: Otherworldly Geometries and Eldritch Abominations may sound ominous and fantastical, but these descriptions don’t really MEAN anything. Terms like these are used to confuse the reader, keeping them from understanding what is actually being described to better instill them with a sense of isolation and morbid curiosity, much like the main characters of the stories. This genre was made famous by H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries, with Lovecraft standing head and shoulders above the rest with his complex mythos, world building, and interconnected stories. Many of these stories tend to deal with two levels of isolation at once, such as Into the Mountains of Madness in which readers slowly uncover references to the Elder Gods over the course of the story, while the characters find information about the last expedition to have discovered these references who had slipped slowly into madness as they uncovered more information. All of this takes place in Antarctica, allowing the author to keep the characters isolated not just from society, but occasionally from each other due to environmental effects.
These themes of insignificance and isolation are core aspects of the general philosophy of Cosmic Horror stories. These concepts can be difficult to iterate on in standard literature and storytelling, but over the lifetime of the genre tricks like the meaningless but occult descriptions of unknowable horrors, isolated locations like the arctic and remote villages, and odd narrative vehicles such as personal journals or discoveries of old messages, have allowed storytellers to instill these themes in every aspect of their stories. Because of this, translating these themes into new mediums seems impossible. As soon as video is involved, it becomes difficult to obscure or obfuscate your eldritch abomination in a way that keeps them mysterious; Once audio is involved, it can become frustrating to listen to descriptions of other character’s discoveries. Many of the tricks that this genre uses to produce that feeling of isolation and insignificance become completely untenable in other mediums as it becomes harder and harder to obscure information. In spite of this, many cunning creators in new mediums have worked out how to replicate those feelings without relying on these common tropes. Through implied narratives, hidden information, and exploitation of the suspension of disbelief, content creators have found new and innovative ways to generate feelings of isolation and curiosity effectively.
Some of these creators use mediums that aren’t quite new, but use them in new and interesting ways. A group called Wham City Comedy is famous in some circles for creating fascinating and disturbing narrative experiences using Alternate Reality Games in combination with traditional television broadcasts, or through their live shows using heavy audience participation. While they have done several pieces of Cosmic Horror and Cosmic Horror Comedy, either as a group or through the members individually, the one I’d like to talk about right now is Cry of Mann. Cry of Mann was an eight day event that occurred on Adult Swim, involving the Main show, Cry of Mann, as well as an attached show called Tanking Mann, which would discuss the events of the show with it’s own interwoven meta-narrative. In the main show, the Mann family is waiting for their Patriarch, Tank Mann, to come home from a long journey, all while they struggle with their individual lives and the ensuing failure of the Mann Corporation from which they attain all of their wealth. While this occurs, two arcane figures are manipulating the family: The first is a small woman placing orange telephones (a device foreign to the characters in the show) around the set, and the second is a disheveled looking man actively looking to bring the family down by disrupting their lives.
Both of these figures have a powerful ally that disrupts the lives of the Mann family: The viewers. Throughout the event, a number was displayed on screen encouraging viewers to call the production during the show, allowing them to directly interact with the characters and change the events that occured. By encouraging audience participation, in concert with the symbolism-laden and labyrinthian narrative, the creators of this event managed to create a multi-layered experience that kept the characters of the show isolated from each other through the curiosity of the unspeakable and godlike interaction of the viewers, who themselves felt isolated as they tried to understand the inscrutable narrative unfolding before them.
While Cry of Mann used an established medium in a new and interesting way, the next show I’d like to discuss uses a combination of Youtube videos and Twitter posts, and everything accessible through them, to tell a much more personal and traditionally horrific story. Daisy Brown, or How to Raise a Monster follows the life of the titular Daisy Brown, a young woman whose father abandons her in their home, after years of convincing her that interaction with the outside world is fatally dangerous, with a small creature that he has created (how is uncertain, but it is heavily implied to have been created through genetic experimentation). While this narrative eschews the addition of some strange otherworldly god-figure, instead opting to have the viewer watch as the horror becomes more and more unknowable, it takes the rest of the tropes found within the genre and runs wild with them. While Daisy is able to interact in a limited capacity with the outside world through Twitter and Youtube, the majority of her personal interactions are with the small monster that she has come to call Alan. Not much is known about Alan in the beginning of the series, except that he is a small blue, blind creature that feeds on sugar.
From this beginning the show slowly reveals Daisy’s past and present through information hidden in general conversation (both in the youtube series and over Twitter), set design, shot composition, and even the closed captioning for the videos. The closed captioning is especially interesting, as the descriptions used to narrate the world often say more about Daisy than what’s being observed… except for when it stops describing what’s happening all together and instead recounts things from Daisy’s past, such as her mother’s death and her father’s building obsession to create life. This slow drip feed of information keeps the viewer interested in the overarching story as Alan grows at an alarming rate and Daisy begins to feel more and more isolated from the world. Watching all this unfold is genuinely heart-breaking, as the author uses the common themes of isolation and morbid curiosity to tell a story of Motherhood and Domestic Abuse, leaving the viewer hungry to watch more, even as they give futile advice to Daisy over Twitter.
While Daisy Brown and Cry of Mann have limited audience participation in the form of Daisy’s Twitter Account and Cry of Mann’s phone calls, the next piece I’d like to talk about goes all in on interactivity: Bloodborne, a Playstation 4 game created by the studio From Software opens the experience with the confusion and isolation inherent in Cosmic Horror, placing your player-made avatar into an empty hospital room with no information about why they are there. You’re quickly introduced to the main mechanics of the game (combat, exploration, and REGULAR deaths), and then set loose into the victorian inspired city of Yharnam. As you progress, the only information you can find comes from interactions with enemies and item descriptions, with what few sane people you can find knowing less about what’s happening than you do. This lack of information creates the same morbid curiosity in the player-character that Cosmic Horror usually does, with the added benefit of the increased viewer interaction and the blurring of the distinction between player and character. Meanwhile, the lack of people to talk to, as well as the constant and repeated death of the player-character, leaves the player feeling alone, unable to interact with the world outside of constantly moving forward.
Where Daisy Brown and Cry of Mann are upfront with their cosmic horror inspirations, Bloodborne attempts to obfuscate it’s connections to cosmic horror early on, seeming instead to be a gothic horror piece with it’s many allusions to werewolves, hunchbacks, vampires, and zombies. It’s only half way through the game, after defeating one of the bosses and seeing a curiously gruesome cutscene, that the player-character is finally shown the Lovecraftian horrors that have been invisibly observing them throughout the game. Upon witnessing this shift, many players will attempt to interact with the few non-player characters that have become available, only to find them all crippled with some sort of illness that prevents them from holding a conversation. In a moment when the player-character needs someone to know what’s going on, needs anyone to help make sense of what’s happening, there is no one to turn to: Where Daisy Brown, Cry of Mann, and even the original works of the Cosmic Horror genre have made readers feel a sympathetic isolation for their characters, the medium of gaming has allowed the creators of Bloodborne to force the player to feel the same isolation, confusion, and curiosity that their in-game avatar would feel.
A key component of each of these pieces has been a level of interactivity that allows the viewer to experience some direct amount of the feelings that the cosmic horror genre attempts to elicit: feelings of insignificance as the narrative of Daisy Brown unfolds regardless of their ability to interact with the story, feelings of morbid curiosity as the members of the Mann family gibber madness at the callers, and feelings of complete and utter isolation as the player-character of Bloodborne desperately marches forward in a ghost town bereft of comforts. It turns these narratives into more than just a story, but an active experience that the viewers are a vital part of. Without viewer interaction (whether through the literal interactions, or the passive interaction of putting the puzzling narrative together), these stories become far less compelling and leaving the audience feeling dissatisfied. Luckily, this is not the case, as the authors of these stories plumbed the depths of what their mediums were capable of, creating wildly engaging narratives that take the core themes of Cosmic Horror and empower to be much more effective.
BONUS ROUND
Welcome to Nightvale: Podcast created by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor. Tells the story of Nightvale, a small town in which strange and eldritch occurrences are commonplace, all through the charming reporting of Cecil Baldwin, radio reporter for the local news station. Succeeds in translating the genre (at least initially) through seemingly unconnected narratives that begin to slowly come together.
The Sun Vanished: A twitter narrative with an unknown author. Tells the story of a young man after the sun mysteriously vanishes, told entirely over twitter, with occasional video shot from a phone camera. Succeeds in translating the genre by fulling leaning into the medium, telling its exclusively through interactions with the viewers.
