Cosmic horror, I think, is predicated on imagining a sort of “anti-human” universe. All horror is probably anti-human to some degree. Monsters and slashers want to kill or hurt humans, or violate their desires in some way. But cosmic horror goes several steps further. It imagines that the fundamental makeup of reality is intractable to human analysis. This is why Lovecraft’s protagonists often go insane. The universe is under no obligation to make sense; in fact, trying to make sense of it might be poisonous.
I was talking to my partner recently and realized that folk horror actually posits something similar. Folk horror is a big, nebulous term (much like cosmic horror, I suppose). Right now I mean the aspects of folk horror that emphasize the scariness of nature and ancient “pagan” rituals that were somehow more in tune with nature than modern civilization. These stories agree that reality isn’t human-centric, but brings the idea closer to home. Instead of encouraging us to imagine abstract physical laws or the vacuum of deep space, it invites us to imagine a forest. We don’t need to travel billions of years before we leave the familiar behind- one or two thousand will do the trick nicely.
And in thinking about this, it also brings to mind the stories of Franz Kafka, especially his hand-wringing about dehumanizing bureaucracies. Cosmic horror suggests that the universe, writ large, is incomprehensible and noxious to humans. Folk horror (at least some folk horror) says even the nature close at hand is antithetical to humans, though this effect is probably exacerbated by modern life1. And Kafka confirms the folk horror thesis by showing how modern society breeds neuroses and alienation.
All this sort of makes me think of a telescoping taxonomy, sort of like how physics contains chemistry, which in turn contains biology. But it also makes me think about how humans are pretty good at imagining themselves as separate from things. The universe isn’t for us, and nature isn’t for us, and society isn’t for us. Oh no, where to turn! But I think these impressions only hold if your starting point is to imagine the world as highly anthropomorphic and deliberate and good, with humans holding dominion over it all. In other words, these ideas are scary in the context of a a particular kind of Christian worldview. There’s a reason cosmic horror has a strong anti-Christian subtext, and it’s the same reason folk horror often pits Christianity against paganism. (I don’t remember Christianity being a strong theme in Kafka’s works, but it’s been a while since I’ve read him.)
Actually, in all of the above cases, the “thing” that isn’t for us is just stuff that we’re already part of. How could the universe not be for us when we’re clearly part of the universe? It’s like imagining the ocean isn’t “for” fish because fish can still die in the ocean. The same goes for our place in nature2 and society. Anti-human horror is great at blowing up a sort of western, Christian, Victorian worldview, but it’s not so good at replacing that worldview. For that, we need to understand continuousness between ourselves and the systems with exist inside.
- For example, think about the commune in Midsommar (2019). They still have to deal with tragedy and death like everyone else, but the have found an older way of living that mitigates some of the suffering that comes with the territory. ↩︎
- One of my pet peeves is the way people talk about nature as some concept with a tortuous boundary that excludes everything humans do, but includes all activities of all other animals. Defining nature as “stuff that doesn’t have to do with humans” is useful in some contexts, but it reinforces this concept that humans are somehow separate from the world around them. ↩︎
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