Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror, is a subgenre of horror, fantasy, and weird fiction originating from the United States that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft, whose work emphasizes strange and eldritch (unnatural) phenomena, with themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics.
Origin
H. P. Lovecraft refined this style of storytelling into his own mythos that involved a set of weird, pre-human, and extraterrestrial elements. His work was influenced by authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, Ambrose Bierce,Kelley, Rich. ″The Library of America interviews S. T. Joshi about Ambrose Bierce″. ‘’The Library of America’’. September 2011. Arthur Machen, Robert W. Chambers, and Lord Dunsany. However, Lovecraft was keen to distinguish his work from existing gothic and supernatural fiction, elevating the horror, in his own words, to a "cosmic" level. Stephen King has said the best of Lovecraft's works are "uniquely terrible in all of American literature, and survive with all their power intact."
The hallmark of Lovecraft's work is cosmicism, the sense that ordinary life is a thin shell over a reality that is so alien and abstract in comparison that merely contemplating it would damage the sanity of the ordinary person, insignificance and powerlessness at the cosmic scale, and uncompromising negativity. Author China Miéville notes that "Lovecraft's horror is not one of intrusion but of realization. The world has always been implacably bleak; the horror lies in our acknowledging that fact." Many of Lovecraft's stories are set in New England.
Themes
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. 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".Ralickas, Vivian. "'Cosmic Horror and the Question of the Sublime in Lovecraft." Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 18, no. 3 (2008): 364. Here horror derives from the realization that human interests, desires, laws and morality have no meaning or significance in the universe-at-large. Consequently, it has been noted that the entities in Lovecraft's books were not evil. They were simply far beyond human conceptions of morality. 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". A naturalistic fusion of horror and science fiction in which presumptions about the nature of reality are "eroded". 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." Having protagonists who are helpless in the face of unfathomable and inescapable powers, which reduce humans from a privileged position to insignificance and incompetence. Unlike traditional moral or Christian dualism of light versus darkness, this cosmic horror stems from rational individuals confronting an amoral, indifferent cosmos, often resulting in madness or death.Taal, Wilmar (2017). The Necronomicon: From Fiction to Falsifying History. Capall Bann Publishing, p. 39. Preoccupation with visceral textures, protean semi-gelatinous substances and slime, as opposed to other horror elements such as blood, bones, or corpses. Focus on psychological deterioration and cognitive decay, wherein the horror derives from the protagonist's mental breakdown, loss of language, and erosion of sanity upon confronting the unknown, prioritizing internal psychological reaction over physical descriptions of the entities.Lidman, Daniel (2017). Ascending the Mountains of Madness: The Language and Psychology of H.P. Lovecraft (BA thesis). University of Gothenburg, p. 15.
Collaborators and followers Much of Lovecraft's influence is secondary, as he was a friend, inspiration, and correspondent to many authors who developed their own notable works. Many of these writers also worked with Lovecraft on jointly written stories. His more famous friends and collaborators include Robert Bloch, author of Psycho; Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian; and August Derleth, who focused on extending the Cthulhu Mythos.
Subsequent horror writers also heavily drew on Lovecraft's work. While many made direct references to elements of Lovecraft's mythos, either to draw on its associations or to acknowledge his influence, many others drew on the feel and tone of his work without specifically referring to mythos elements. Some have said that Lovecraft, along with Edgar Allan Poe, is the most influential author on modern horror. Author Stephen King has said: "Now that time has given us some perspective on his work, I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the Twentieth Century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."
By the late 20th century, Lovecraft had become something of a pop-culture icon, resulting in countless reinterpretations of and references to his work. Many of these fall outside the sphere of Lovecraftian horror, but represent Cthulhu Mythos in popular culture.
Literature and art Lovecraft's work, mostly published in pulp magazines, never had the same sort of influence on literature as his high-modernist literary contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, his impact is still broadly and deeply felt in some of the most celebrated authors of contemporary fiction. The fantasias of Jorge Luis Borges display a marked resemblance to some of Lovecraft's more dream-influenced work. Borges also dedicated his story, "There Are More Things" to Lovecraft, though he also considered Lovecraft "an involuntary parodist of Poe." The French novelist Michel Houellebecq has also cited Lovecraft as an influence in his essay H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life in which he refers to the stories written in the last ten years of Lovecraft's life as "the great texts".
Lovecraft's penchant for dreamscapes and for the biologically macabre has also profoundly influenced visual artists such as Jean "Moebius" Giraud and H. R. Giger. Giger's book of paintings which led directly to many of the designs for the film Alien was named Necronomicon, the name of a fictional book in several of Lovecraft's mythos stories. Dan O'Bannon, the original writer of the Alien screenplay, has also mentioned Lovecraft as a major influence on the film. With Ronald Shusett, he would later write Dead & Buried and Bleeders (film), both of which were admitted pastiches of Lovecraft.
The Call of Poohthulhu, an anthology of Lovecraftian horror short stories set in the Winnie-the-Pooh universe, was published in 2022.
Comics Lovecraft has cast a long shadow across the comic world. This has included not only adaptations of his stories, such as H. P. Lovecraft's Worlds, H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu: The Whisperer in Darkness, Graphic Classics: H. P. Lovecraft, and MAX's Haunt of Horror, but also the incorporation of the Mythos into new stories.
Alan Moore has touched on Lovecraftian themes, in particular in his The Courtyard and Yuggoth Cultures and Other Growths (and Antony Johnston's spin-off Yuggoth Creatures), but also in his Black Dossier where the story "What Ho, Gods of the Abyss?" mixed Lovecraftian horror with Bertie Wooster. Neonomicon and Providence posit a world where the Mythos, while existing as fiction written by Lovecraft, is also very real.
As well as appearing with Fort in two comics stories, Lovecraft has appeared as a character in a number of Lovecraftian comics. He appears in Mac Carter and Tony Salmons's limited series The Strange Adventures of H. P. Lovecraft from Image and in the Arcana children's graphic novel Howard and the Frozen Kingdom from Bruce Brown. A webcomic, Lovecraft is Missing, debuted in 2008 and takes place in 1926, before the publication of "The Call of Cthulhu", and weaves in elements of Lovecraft's earlier stories.
Boom! Studios have also run a number of series based on Cthulhu and other characters from the Mythos, including Cthulhu Tales and Fall of Cthulhu.
The creator of Hellboy, Mike Mignola, has described the books as being influenced primarily by the works of Lovecraft, in addition to those of Robert E. Howard and the legend of Dracula. This was adapted into the 2004 film Hellboy. His Elseworlds mini-series The Doom That Came to Gotham reimagines Batman in a confrontation with Lovecraftian monsters.
Gou Tanabe has adapted some of Lovecraft's tales into manga.
Issue #32 of The Brave and the Bold was heavily influenced by the works and style of Lovecraft. In addition to using pastiches of Cthulhu, the Deep Ones, and R'lyeh, writer J. Michael Straczynski also wrote the story in a distinctly Lovecraftian style. Written entirely from the perspective of a traumatized sailor, the story makes use of several of Lovecraft's trademarks, including the ultimate feeling of insignificance in the face of the supernatural.
Film and television From the 1950s onward, in the era following Lovecraft's death, Lovecraftian horror truly became a subgenre, not only fueling direct cinematic adaptations of Poe and Lovecraft, but providing the foundation upon which many of the horror films of the 1950s and 1960s were constructed.
1960s A filmmaker who devoted effort to the Lovecraftian was 1960s B-filmmaker Roger Corman, with his The Haunted Palace (1963) being very loosely based on The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and his X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes featuring a protagonist driven to insanity by heightened vision that allows him to see God at the heart of the universe.
Though not direct adaptations, the episodes of the well-known series The Outer Limits often had Lovecraftian themes, such as human futility and insignificance and the limits of sanity and understanding.
Amongst the other adaptations of this era are Dark Intruder (1965) which has some passing references to the Cthulhu Mythos; 1965 also saw Boris Karloff and Nick Adams in Die, Monster, Die! based on Lovecraft's short story "The Colour Out of Space"; The Shuttered Room (1967), based on an August Derleth "posthumous collaboration" with Lovecraft, and Curse of the Crimson Altar (U.S. title: The Crimson Cult) (1968), based on "The Dreams in the Witch House".
1970s The 1970s produced a number of films that have been classified as Lovecraftian horror. This includes the themes of human fragility, impotence in the face of the unknowable, and lack of answers in Picnic at Hanging Rock, and The Dunwich Horror, with its source in Lovecraft's work and emphasis on "forces beyond the protagonist's control." The 1979 film Alien has been described as Lovecraftian due to its theme of "cosmic indifference", the "monumental bleakness" of its setting, and leaving most questions unanswered.