I'll start this off by pointing out the total opposite: Cosmic Horror is predicated on the notion that the most horrifying thing is something so alien and beyond our understanding that we cannot really grasp its true form, and our attempts to understand it only lead to a kind of psychic dissonance that leads to madness and despair.
But I think the absence of sense within cosmic horror leaves a void for us to fill in the gap.
Happy Halloween, folks! It seems appropriate tonight (less than an hour left, but midnight's kind of the main event, isn't it?) to talk about horror.
The story I'm writing is what I'm describing as Weird Gothic Fantasy - the New Weird, and perhaps weird fiction in general, cannot help but influence my writing, and while at its core I'm writing a fantasy story, the main character is a dhampir living in a world that is like if fairy tales (the spooky, Irish kind) had given way to Gothic horror (having read Dracula, it's clear that the Irish author Bram Stoker was channeling a lot of the scarier aspects of Irish fairy tales, with the Count coming off almost as a kind of Fae creature when he's introduced). But, me being me, I can't leave well enough alone and have introduced elements involving other universes that practically run on different genre rules, including a lot more modern elements like parapsychology and Jungian theory and the sort of psionic stuff you might find in some of Stephen King's fiction or Stranger Things (which is of course heavily inspired by the former).
Gothic Horror is the subgenre of horror that most focuses on the Shadow. Its key monsters - vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and other forms of undead - are all former humans. Often the terror of these monsters is not only that one might die if they attack you, but also that you might become the monster.
While Cosmic Horror's emphasis on the outer threat - often something alien, though the tropes of the "alien" as we usually think of it today wouldn't fully arise for a few decades after Lovecraft's works (though honestly if you imagine some of his creations like the Great Race of Yith or the Elder Things being made with 1950s special effects, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine them fitting into that B-Movie mold) - would seem to remove it from this idea of the Shadow, there's often an element in these stories of a more terrestrial threat. The Shadow Over Innsmouth has a protagonist who realizes, in the twist ending (spoilers, I guess? I feel like we're past the statute of limitations on this one) that he is a descendant of the bizarre hybrid fish-people of the town, and that as he approaches his 30s, he's starting to undergo his own transformation into an inhuman monster and will have to journey beneath the waves. Likewise, the actual threat of the Call of Cthulhu is not really the giant monstrous ancient being, but the living human cultists who are trying to keep their activities secret and murdering anyone who discovers them (this actually required me to read the story twice to understand that was what was happening).
Even stepping outside of horror - consider one of the most iconic villains in cinema history, Darth Vader. More or less the science-fantasy equivalent of a Death Knight (complete with a skeletal mask,) we discover in the second film (and again, spoilers... I guess?) that Vader is actually Anakin Skywalker, the protagonist Luke's father.
There's foreshadowing for this: in his training with Yoda, Luke descends into a kind of root-cavern in a place that Yoda says is strong with the Dark Side of the Force, and he has a confrontation with what he thinks is Vader, but is actually a kind of vision. When he cuts off the phantom Vader's head, the mask bursts open and reveals Luke's own face staring back at him - the potential for darkness is there within him. Vader is literally what happens when a Skywalker falls to the Dark Side, and Luke can see that as a potential path that he might walk down, even if it's a path he's determined not to walk.
We see this with Gollum as well, in Lord of the Rings. Frodo is a good person - and when we first meet him, he's living the kind of carefree, innocent life that is kind of the hobbit birthright. But as he is forced to carry the Ring - the object that holds an embodiment of darkness, reckless ambition, and hatred, he feels that weight bearing down on him. In Gollum, he sees the dark future of what he could become if he doesn't succeed in his mission - a broken, monstrous version of a hobbit (or technically a proto-hobbit if I'm remembering my Tolkien lore right). Indeed, the Ring seems to make Shadows of all who possess it. Isildur was a noble prince who became a conceited, cruel king once he took the ring. Galadriel would go from being a graceful, wise ruler to a tempestuous tyrant. Though we never see what Gandalf might be like with the ring, we get a hint at it from the depravities of Saruman, an angelic and wise being who was twisted into the vicious conqueror he is only because of his lapse in faith that the Ring could be opposed.
Returning to horror, and indeed cosmic horror, in strong contention for scariest movie ever made is John Carpenter's The Thing. Full disclosure: I haven't watched this movie in its entirety because I like being able to sleep. But while on paper the threat here is something utterly alien and incomprehensible, the form it takes is precisely those that are most familiar to the people around it. It both infects and mimics its prey, and there's even an implication that the people infected by it are not even aware that they are The Thing until their body twists into some horrific mockery of human anatomy.
To a certain extent, I think that humans have a unique source of fear: while plenty of other animals kill amongst themselves, most humans have other humans as the animals they have the most reason to fear. From interpersonal violence to wars between nations, it's humans who have the greatest capacity to destroy humans.
But internally, there are other factors at play.
While we generally experience our consciousness as a singular entity, there are some neurological and psychological theories that there are kind of multiple "thinking" systems within our own brains and nervous systems. This can range from the rather uncontroversial ideas like the idea that the complex nerve cluster in our stomachs has a fairly sophisticated capability to process information, or the idea that we have a subconsciousness that processes things in a way we aren't aware of, to more radical idea like that we have a kind of silent passenger mind that serves in direct subordination to the dominant mind - perhaps in the right or left brain split.
There's also the idea of an illusory Shadow.
One of the most fascinating hypotheses I've heard of is an attempt to explain the terrifying sensation of, well, a kind of form of death wish.
People will sometimes report, when they are near a precipice, that they have the strangest urge to jump, even knowing that doing so would be fatal. They don't do this, of course (at least the ones that report having the urge) but there's that kind of terrifying notion that a part of you wanted to jump. The hypothesis, though, is that it's a kind of miscommunication within the brain.
Essentially, standing near a ledge, some part of the mind says "whoa, step back, you don't want to fall off that ledge," and then another part of the mind says "well, of course I don't want to fall off that ledge. But then why would I need to receive that warning? Is there a part of me that actually wants to jump off that ledge?" In this case, any actual desire to jump is a pure phantom, but the notion is introduced as if there is some dark, self-destructive part somewhere, exerting an influence on one's behavior.
Could this little mental blip lead to an actual journey into real darkness, somewhat like a traffic jam that starts for no more significant reason that someone breaking a little too hard miles ahead of the jam?
In Ancient Greece, the idea of free will was kind of a foreign concept. Thoughts that occurred within one's own mind were said to come from the gods. An act of artistic creation was when you allowed the Muses to speak or work through you. But you could imagine a corollary that if you allowed, say, Ares to work through you, you might commit acts of wanton violence and cruelty.
I think this reflects the multifaceted nature of human psychology - our conscious mind feels monolithic, but there are a number of elements beneath that surface that are always active, even if we aren't fully aware of them (and, well, in a sense by definition we aren't aware of them).
The Shadow, the dark side of us that might be externalized as a monster in a horror story, is what we fear might be at work there.
In my story, what a vampire is (and not necessarily only vampires, but that's the most important example) is when that Shadow replaces the person that once existed. As a dhampir (a half-vampire,) the protagonist's vampiric father is a twisted darkened version of the heroic figure he had been in life. The protagonist must not only grapple with the monster his father is, but also with the darkness that literally makes up a part of him.
In most stories, the Shadow is vanquished by slaying the externalized monster. That's the simplest way of dealing with it.
But psychologically, it's not really something we can do for the Shadow within.
So, while this is not my video game blog, I feel I need to bring up the game Alan Wake II, which came out on Friday and which I spent the past weekend playing through to its conclusion. The game is mainly psychological horror, with myriad genre influences, but at the core of it, the eponymous character is a writer who is trapped (after the events of the first game) in a nightmare-world known as the Dark Place. His greatest fear is that the entity that lives there, known as the Dark Presence, will escape and transform the real world into the same twisted shadow that is the Dark Place. And the avatar that the Dark Presence has chosen is a figure named Mr. Scratch, who is Alan's exact double, only in this case he's a deranged, sadistic, egomaniacal killer.
While I don't want to get into the specifics, as it's a new game that many likely haven't beaten or even played yet, it becomes very clear that simply killing Mr. Scratch is never going to actually get rid of him. It's not even clear if he can be defeated entirely.
The game's studio, Remedy, has embarked on creating a shared universe for its various games, and 2019's Control (which is probably my favorite of their titles I've played, even if I think Alan Wake II is a triumph) introduces the Federal Bureau of Control, which is aware of the Dark Presence, but refers to it as The Shadow - and given that the FBC more or less investigates and contains phenomena that are better explained by Jungian psychology than so-called "hard" sciences, that choice of name is, I'm sure, no accident.
The thing is, shutting the Shadow out doesn't really work. If we deny the darkness that dwells with us, we often let it work away at us. True, as Nietzsche says, (I may be paraphrasing here,) if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares into you. And obsessing over darkness can sometimes allow it to grow an outsized influence on you. But at the same time, acknowledging it, recognizing it, and even engaging with it can be an important tool in maintaining control over it.
And honestly, I think that's why horror is such a compelling genre of fiction. We are practicing our ability to confront the darkness within ourselves. Put the Shadow in front of you, and perhaps you can learn not to fear what hides within it.
