Cosmic Horror

yag-kosha is a good guy though

>And stygia is probably the most lovecraftian thing in the conan stories.
Anon Howard read a ton of mythology and history that influenced his stories.
I can assure you stygia is not lovecraftian by Howard standards. Stories like the tower of the elephant, the fire of ashurbanipal, and the black stone are actual lovecraftian Howard stories. The hour of the dragon is not

>he went back to sleep because of the star alignment/ritual bullshit. also the guy even said not to bring up this non-point, how dumb are you?
didn't you just argue (like a woman) that you shouldn't be able to explain any of this or else it doesn't count?

>I'm the other guy
so am I
>he called you a
lmao moron

>I'm not that other guy I'm just replying to posts quoting him, don't just assume that
>but also you must be this specific 1 of the 5 people that replied to him
you're moronic

you replied to some post saying some gay ass homosexualy shit and despite claiming you aren't the initial gay homosexual, you apparently made sure to keep track of the specific insults used by that initial, purportedly separate homosexual
you're the same person, don't embarrass yourself like this by making it so obvious and then also accusing others of samegayging

alien is not cosmic horror in the slightest...do people think cosmic = space therefore space horror = cosmic horror? Alien is just a mere monster movie, you might as well say the blob is cosmic horror.

a pooinloo the foremost lovecraft scholar lmao. bet he turned over in his grave at that. why dont you try to define the themes instead of making weak ass appeals to authority

the xenomorph is literally just a parasitoid wasp made large. it's completely mundane, it goes against lovecraft's either grounded scientific or reality bending (often fusing both) tendencies

>S.T. Joshi: Lovecraft's monsters are the most purely nonhuman of any entities I've encountered in fiction. I think the closest we've come to capturing the atmosphere of Lovecraft is Alien, especially given H.R.Giger's sets. The movie captures the nebulosity if Lovecraft's monsters up to a point, but then it descends into a woman being chased by a man in a rubber suit
not exactly high praise. he sounds like a brainlet from the other quotes too

>You're trying to "explain" the alien in terms of human knowledge
that is all the film presents. you obviously have autism btw

so you're saying, to be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Alien?

Would you say the themes are extremely subtle and without a solid cultural grasp and educated audience they will go over your head?

If you watch Alien without the sequels I can see it. Not just the creature, but the space jockey, the isolation, the original script with the pyramid, etc.

>I'd say the mysteriousness of both the space jockey and the planet it's found on reek of Lovecraft.
this is fair and mountains was the direct inspiration and giger says he was inspired (ie took lsd while reading lovecraft and meditating on his troony orgy or whatever) all that amounts to is homage some atmosphere and tone for a short while anyway. The themes simply aren't there.

fear of the unknown is the most basic and fundamental horror theme, as for disturbing dormant life (or shall we say awakening ancient evil) I think you're being reductive and even so I wouldn't say it's that common a theme or trope/cliche rather. Alien doesn't do fear of the unknown well in any case. The big fear it gives you is that there could be a big scary animal out in space, well we have those on earth too not exactly a terrifying concept.

It does a bit of body horror and a bit of tone, but the real excellence in alien is the production design, it doesnt have any thematic depth hence my earlier comparison to the blob.

this is a bot post isn't it?
>yet often indifferent threat
so not that one
>and cosmic in origin
extraterrestrial yes but not cosmic so not that one either
>is to ignore half of the film
if half the film consists of the alien spaceship scene's atmosphere and dropped script elements I guess?
>Lovecraft's unknown is typically a distinctly real yet alien unknown
really more fear of the unknown through the horror of what could be known, breaking your worldview and leaving you with the burden of esoteric knowledge while being completely helpless to do anything about it

>I can't possibly understand how you can't see parallels to the film with At the Mountains of Madness.
the parallels are weaker than in the thing. in both they are surface level plot elements of finding the creature and atmospheric at best. I was using cosmic in the lovecraftian sense.
>the anxiety over the disastrous results that would occur should the creature
which is absurd because in the film it presents it as a purely mundane creature, it's no more dangerous to earth than an invasive species of space bear, arguably much less so because a bear could at least reproduce at a faster rate. All you have to go on is the atmosphere

yeah a bear would mop the floor with a xenomorph, maybe a gorilla would stand a chance though

I can grant you that elements of the xenomorph's development require you to suspend your disbelief but it's very clear that the film presents its spread as a real threat to Earth and to compare it to a bear is completely ludicrous and asinine. The film goes out of its way to make you understand it is anything but a mundane creature.
I really don't understand your judgment or why you think The Thing is a closer comparison to At the Mountains of Madness. Do you only feel that way because the setting is Antarctica and the thing in question is thawed out of the ice? I've already admitted that Alien evolves into primarily a creature feature (something Joshi echoes in the blog post the other anon posted), but you're chalking the rest of the film up to atmosphere as if Lovecraft's stories aren't heavily reliant on atmosphere themselves and as if this atmospheric component doesn't play an integral role in the plot.
The xenomorph, when fully developed, is simply (I use that word reluctantly, because the creatuer is anything but simple) a particularly dangerous animal. I conceed that absolutely. But its discovery and mysterious origins absolutely recall to mind At the Mountains of Madness (and this was certainly in O'Bannon's mind when he wrote the script), and I think that overall structure is largely Lovecraftian in essence. It's not a perfect Lovecraft film and other films have portrayed other aspects of Lovecraft's work that Alien did not, but to compare it to The Blob and ignore any relation to Lovecraft is ridiculous.

>The xenomorph, when fully developed, is simply (I use that word reluctantly, because the creatuer is anything but simple) a particularly dangerous animal.
I should say, for the purposes of the film itself this is essentially what it is.

>a particularly dangerous animal
the xenomorph has metal teeth and blood so corrosive it melts through space-age metals
it's "particularly" un-animalistic in the first movie wherein most if not all of the scenes were unchanged from the original ending where it was going to imitate human speech and sit in a chair in the final shot

oh you sure got me there, how animalistic of you to use factory-made chemical agents as a weapon

[...]
>a particularly dangerous animal
the xenomorph has metal teeth and blood so corrosive it melts through space-age metals
it's "particularly" un-animalistic in the first movie wherein most if not all of the scenes were unchanged from the original ending where it was going to imitate human speech and sit in a chair in the final shot

>The film goes out of its way to make you understand it is anything but a mundane creature.
there are a few throwaway lines by the android about it being a perfect organism or we can take that as him thereafter referring to it's lack of morality etc both are moronic statements the film fails to show any depth to it only this cheap attempt at 'telling'.

Both the thing (who goes there was inspired on a surface level by mountains iirc and carpenter too) and alien have only superficial similarities I rank the thing higher because of the setting, the atmosphere and the alien being vastly more complex and suggesting more complicated ecosystem of alien life for it to have evolved though granted no suggestion of it being anything but mundane

>blood so corrosive it melts through space-age metals
>*throws baking soda on you and watches you melt*

I like to inject myself into the conversation.
>Muh xenomorph
Are trash.
Realistically there is no way excluding plot magic for these things to be a threat to civilization.

Xenos have the most moronic reproduction requirement in existence.
They literally need to get 1 human or dog to make 1 of them.
Do you understand how crippling that is?

To get hoards and hoards of Xenos requires hoards and hoards of humans or dogs or whatever.

The also are dumb animals who can not operate technology like the later movies have shown.

>blood so corrosive it melts through space-age metals
Yet armored military transports can ride over them and not have problems for over 30 minutes.

The magic acid is inconsistent in the movies.

>blood so corrosive it
And then you realize that this is moronic.

>Have acid blood
>Big animal eats you
>You are dead, the animal dies.

What really would make them dangerous if they SPIT THAT ACID on command and every time. Not keep it in them and only get it out when they bleed.

I would grant you the tone but it is broken by the goofy rubber suit alien doing jazz hands and the stupid 'horror movie' character decisions. The existence of aliens is not enough to imply cosmic horror that is probably the most common standard of all scifi. To be lovecraftian the alien has to be of a grandiose nature or at least imply such, migos for example arent overly grandiose but they imply it as part of the setting through their indifference to mankind and their subservient status to the other entities despite being so advanced compared to humans.

>and some of which are certainly indifferent to it
what indication is there in alien that anyone is indifferent to humans? what you're describing is space horror not cosmic horror alien fits into standard scifi horror genre

T. moron.

The creators literally said it was. The Alien is a spawn of an Eldritch space god.

>nooo i dont like the comparison waaa
no one cares

its what the writer stated, its a spawn of Yog-Sothoth.

I prefer the analogy that the Pilot is an old one and the xenomorph was a shoggoth.

yes, you know better than them of course

yes, and he's better than you
so you're wrong and he's right, simple as
you didn't write or direct Return of the Living Dead

I like AvP more than I like anything you've ever written professionally

Oh, I do?
So, what have you written?
Or directed?
This is an argument of credibility at this point, over which individual's genre classification of Alien is right, and you're not a professional writer or director.
If the argument is Alien vs. Predator versus nothing, you lose every time. Now have a nice day, you're the type of person who eventually troons out.

Yes, everyone I hate is a troony until proven otherwise.

I'm ruling in favour of the autist no 1.
colour out of space will henceforth be included under cosmic horror.

next up the court will be hearing... jfc not this shit again - whether alien is a slasher

Alien would be a slasher if the Xenomorph more tangibly demonstrated near-human levels of intellect, which it does in the script but not necessarily in the movie.

I wasn't disputing that anon, my point is that he cites numerous influences and that the film fundamentally fails at the themes it supposedly (keyword here hence my quotation) was attempting.

well I already posted a definition summarized from lovecraft's own definitive essay so why dont you prove me wrong by explaining how it displays those themes point by point?

appeal to authority is a fallacy anon, but taking it to the point that you think someone can't post an authority's writing because they aren't an authority an impressive level of stupid

you posted a bunch of paragraphs with like 3 actual quotes, all of which describe color out of space

no, moron
we're at the point where the longest quote in your diatribe supports my argument, as do the other quotes, and yet you argue my point only fit with 1/14th of your post, because you're that autistic but also not in a smart way because you counted things like "lovecraft said" as being pertinent and exclusionary

NTA but are you arguing the story or the movie? The story Colour out of Space makes it very clear it's cosmic horror:

>This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

Slither is technically similar, in terms of what the argument is about (monster from outer space, see vision of another planet etc.).

I don't see much in

ok lazy:
The core themes and atmosphere of cosmic horror were laid out by Lovecraft himself in "Supernatural Horror in Literature", his essay on gothic, weird, and horror fiction. A number of characteristics have been identified as being associated with Lovecraftian horror:

Fear of the unknown and unknowable.[20]
The "fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance".[21] Here horror derives from the realization that human interests, desires, laws and morality have no meaning or significance in the universe-at-large.[22] Consequently, it has been noted that the entities in Lovecraft's books were not evil. They were simply far beyond human conceptions of morality.[22]
A "contemplation of mankind's place in the vast, comfortless universe revealed by modern science" in which the horror springs from "the discovery of appalling truth".[23]
A naturalistic fusion of horror and science fiction in which presumptions about the nature of reality are "eroded".[24]
That "technological and social progress since Classical times has facilitated the repression of an awareness of the magnitude and malignity of the macrocosm in which the human microcosm is contained", or in other words, a calculated repression of the horrifying nature of the cosmos as a reaction to its "essential awfulness."[25]
Having protagonists who are helpless in the face of unfathomable and inescapable powers, which reduce humans from a privileged position to insignificance and incompetence.[26][27]
Preoccupation with visceral textures, protean semi-gelatinous substances and slime, as opposed to other horror elements such as blood, bones, or corpses.[28]

that doesn't match TCOOS.

"The realizations that humans don't have significance at large" is absolutely there in the story, but the character is more perturbed by it than has a total breakdown from a gigantic reveal. which is normal in Lovecrafts stories.

Lovecraft says "this gas obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos", but more key is the idea of a new colour - it's like a paradox where it can be written in text but not seen in your head.

Like how he often describes shapes as "non euclidean" he's doing the same thing - there's a shape that exists in the story, but it's beyond normal comprehension, or scientific understanding that can exist in this dimension.

Regardless the cosmic part to me is really about the link to the existence of a mysterious other dimension, rather than needing to embody it. In At the Mountains of Madness from memory they find a corpse of an alien, or they kill it or something.

Cthulhu is more a shorthand where Lovecraft is having his cake and eat it too, with a physical squid dude under the ocean and unimaginable godlike figure horror in the same concept. Not that there's anything wrong with that but Cthulhu does care enough to fight a boat.

Holy reddit

He also got sued by A.E. Van Vogt for apparently ripping off two of his stories, Black Destroyer and Discord In Scarlet, which form part of the fix-up novel Voyage of The Space Beagle.

And the cat alien was also the apparent inspiration for the displacer beast from D&D.

ST Joshi, the foremost HPL scholar, considers Alien and The Last Wave the most Lovecraftian movies of all time.
It's important to take into account that Lovecraftian is whatever connects to Lovecraft's work and thoughts, not just what we decide to cherrypick from it and definitely not just the mythos (Cthulhu etc).
This discussion is missing that anon who insists that the only Lovecraftian movie in existence is Mothman Prophecies, he used to hang around /hor/ generals

Mothman Prophecies is based on a supposedly real case and the plot is expanded with an explanation about the entities behind the events. It isn't based on any specific Lovecraft work

I see. The explanation of the researcher in the movie is interesting in that it encapsulates the notion that cosmic horror is often an invisible force being felt on Earth, not something seen from the perspective of the universe

Galaxy of terror is pretty good, influenced by alien but galaxy went on to influence aliens and event horizon.

All Lovecraft is Lovecraftian and exceptions (such as the story you mention) only reinforce the concept by contrast.

It's self-evident because nobody has the authority to define an author other than his own works and the sum of its essential, core themes, which in Lovecraft's case includes encouraging other writers to keep on working within the universe he created.

Authorial intent (how the author defines his voice and intentions) adds a layer of information and has to be taken into account within the author's universe, which is easy enough in Lovecraft's case as he was consistent. It's also more or less easy to identify core elements even in authors whose works span multiple genres-- Stephen King for instance.
That is: the works says it all, and sometimes it escapes the author's attempts to define it.

By addressing the multiple tropes he used, both narrative and thematic. Shouldn't be too hard to figure that out.

Don't assume others share your limitations

That's a literal autistic misrepresentation of how literature and culture work.
You just failed the famous test of intelligence being the power to hold different ideas under consideration etc etc

>lovecraftian is a term for a genre
Not really. The word can be used as a genre but also to compile his works as a whole.

>color out of space
>diverges from the "lovecraftian" genre

it's a color outside the color spectrum that makes people sick and/or crazy from simply looking at it
it's far more of an abstract cosmic horror tale than the Call of Cthulu or Shadow Over Innsmouth, which deal with far more mundane creatures that also drive people crazy but without having as good of a justification

I want you to understand that a sentient race of fish men is literally more plausible than a color outside of our color spectrum that human eyes would even biologically be able to register.
It is by default a more cosmic story.

it comes from space and it's a weird unexplainable thing that distorts reality itself simply by being a "new" color
it is by definition cosmic horror

>scifi horror
there's virtually no actual science in any Lovecraft stories
>space horror
it takes place on earth, in a fricking rural village
>why is it cosmic
because it's
>cos·mic
>adjective
>relating to the universe or cosmos, especially as distinct from the earth.
and the fricking space rock that is a strange new hue came from the cosmos
and it is a horror story

why don't you

>"fear and awe we feel when confronted by phenomena beyond our comprehension, whose scope extends beyond the narrow field of human affairs and boasts of cosmic significance"
yep, like a new color
thanks for agreeing with me

> is not beyond human comprehension
Oh, my mistake,
Describe the color then, compare it to something.

No, the color is the most defining feature of the entity and the story itself. It's why its called Color out of Space and not Vegetation out of Space.
The color is, again, less plausible than Cthulhu actually existing in the Atlantic Ocean right now.
Because it's a NEW COLOR, something that literally cannot exist for us as humans.

Because their eyes could not register it properly, because it was a new color.
That's why it's not "bright pink" or "off white" because those make sense. The color of the thing doesn't make sense, it cannot be, and it's from space. Hence cosmic horror.
Why aren't you also arguing that the story isn't horror? It's certainly not horrifying, and wouldn't be to anyone born in the 80 years or so.

and you're still suggesting it's not cosmic horror
did you forget what the story was about?
you listed alongside Re-Animator as if it isn't a story about a fricking cosmic event that is horror

the definition which described several aspects of the story, yes
meanwhile you argue that innsmouth or coc are cosmic horror despite those being far more mundane and far less cosmic

>civilizations of (partially incorporeal, unkillable) eldritch horror have colonized earth for eons and when daddy wakes up the world will go mad in an instant
this is different from women fainting at the sight of the creature from the black lagoon how?

>No, isn't Color Out of Space
glad we agree?
>Tell me you haven't read Lovecraft
are you nitpicking about the term eons anon? the elder things in mountains predate earth life and Cthulhu arrives shortly after them

>that one with the thieve getting eaten by a werewolf-thing
The Hound, which in addition to having weird shit in a graveyard which he seems to like never actually shows the creature so it's a story of unseen horrors and mounting dread of same that permeates so much of lovecraft's work. It's also his first work to mention the Necronomicon, putting it at least mythos-adjacent.
Even when he diverges he doesn't stray far from one of his pet themes.

That hardly counts since it's a round-robin and Howard literally wrote that section. (and if I haven't said it before, somebody really needs to write a fanfic of that if they haven't already)
That said, several of Howard's own stories themselves fall under the aegis of the Cthulu mythos.

At least a couple of lovecraft's more "lovecraftian" tales are actually Dunsanian too.

It's admittedly difficult to see how almost half of a author's output fails to define their work. Granted, there are several sub-genres in play but they tend to use repeating and often linked themes.

>yes and howardian doesnt incorporate lovecraftian themes does it?

Doesn't it now? Howard was influenced by his association with Lovecraft and incorporated the idea of impossibly ancient other-worldly god-creatures into several of his works for one. I was coincidentally going over 3 different comic adaptations of The Tower Of The Elephant earlier today and the lovecraftian elements come shining through.

im not a zoomer, sorry I insulted your tranime

That's a literal autistic misrepresentation of how literature and culture work.
You just failed the famous test of intelligence being the power to hold different ideas under consideration etc etc

you're calling me autistic? you just deleted your post so you could newline a sentence. I wasn't trying to represent literature or culture, I was making a mathematical/linguistic analogy and it went over your head somehow

>brainlet doesnt know the difference between plot and themes
yikes no wonder you like anime

No, I deleted my post to remove an additional s, and decided to hit enter to make it 2 paragraphs, and yes it's autistic to cling to this otherwise unrelated detail as a type of argument. Likewise resorting to an unrelated analogy

And Dagon was taken out by a 1930's submarine...
Cthulhuboys we got too wienery.