More_Badass
Member
I used to love zombie fiction when I was younger. Still kind of do, and World War Z is probably my favorite in the genre, but once you've read a few different takes, you've mostly read them all
Horror can be dulled by familiarity. Even the genre mainstays - the vampire, the werewolf, the demon and ghosts, and so on - can lose some of their bite due to how ingrained they are in our culture and pop culture. For every vampire flicks like Stakeland, The Strain, or 30 Days of Night, that does something a bit different, there are dozens more works where you know the rules, understand what the heroes have to do, how they have to fight back, simply due to being familiar with the genre.
But cosmic horror, and all that genre entails...nothing prepares you for that.
Now while cosmic horror and Lovecraftian horror tend to be used interchangeably, personally I tend to think of the former as more general unknown/unexplainable phenomenons while the latter is a bit more specific: cults, Cthulhu, etc.
In some ways, the horrors in the genre feel more base and primal. Take for example, Stephen King/Joe Hill's novella In The Tall Grass, and how it takes the experience of getting lost and the incomprehensible spatial behavior of its setting to create unease and terror, a sense of wrongness. It goes back to the most basic thought process when consuming media: what would I do in that situation? We can never know what it's like to be hunted by vampires or fight off waves of zombies, but getting lost, questioning yourself and your mentality, struggling to understand something...that's something any person can understand.
Even more than that, it's the unknown element of cosmic horror that can make it scarier than the more traditional. As humans, we crave a why. A reason. An explanation. But often in cosmic horror, these is no why. Whatever phenomenon just is. and the characters can only react and try to understand what's happening from their own limited perspective, as seen in works such as Stephen King's The Mist and IT, House of Leaves, Junji Ito's Uzumaki, and various SCP entries (I particularly enjoy this one). It can be anything. A piece of land. A house. A room. A painting. An idea
Horror can be dulled by familiarity. Even the genre mainstays - the vampire, the werewolf, the demon and ghosts, and so on - can lose some of their bite due to how ingrained they are in our culture and pop culture. For every vampire flicks like Stakeland, The Strain, or 30 Days of Night, that does something a bit different, there are dozens more works where you know the rules, understand what the heroes have to do, how they have to fight back, simply due to being familiar with the genre.
But cosmic horror, and all that genre entails...nothing prepares you for that.
Now while cosmic horror and Lovecraftian horror tend to be used interchangeably, personally I tend to think of the former as more general unknown/unexplainable phenomenons while the latter is a bit more specific: cults, Cthulhu, etc.
In some ways, the horrors in the genre feel more base and primal. Take for example, Stephen King/Joe Hill's novella In The Tall Grass, and how it takes the experience of getting lost and the incomprehensible spatial behavior of its setting to create unease and terror, a sense of wrongness. It goes back to the most basic thought process when consuming media: what would I do in that situation? We can never know what it's like to be hunted by vampires or fight off waves of zombies, but getting lost, questioning yourself and your mentality, struggling to understand something...that's something any person can understand.
Even more than that, it's the unknown element of cosmic horror that can make it scarier than the more traditional. As humans, we crave a why. A reason. An explanation. But often in cosmic horror, these is no why. Whatever phenomenon just is. and the characters can only react and try to understand what's happening from their own limited perspective, as seen in works such as Stephen King's The Mist and IT, House of Leaves, Junji Ito's Uzumaki, and various SCP entries (I particularly enjoy this one). It can be anything. A piece of land. A house. A room. A painting. An idea
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