Ideas to Modernize Cosmic Horror Themes

[Closet_Skeleton]

The simplest way to modernise any old horror idea is to simply strip out the old metaphor and put in a new one. Often this ends up completely blasphemous to the original concept but nothing is sacred in genre fiction.

Something about the government or the economy would probably be the most relevant right now.

Suddenly, the Internet is sentient and has the consciousness of a Dark God.

If its created by humans its not a cosmic horror, humans are insignificant to cosmic horror.

Further ideas for my story seed (if you want to take it up): The solution to the horror is an incarnated human who keeps on reincarnating to ward against the horror. There is a cult that knows of the problem and they DO NOT KNOW WHO HE IS.

Cut to the guy or gal, who will be our protagonist.

If the protagonist can fight it, its not really cosmic horror. Especially not if he's been chosen to fight it, because that would imply there's some higher power capable of noticing humanity, which is not really cosmic.

If you want to have some entity incarnated in human form that saves humanity in a Cosmic horror story, you can't make them the protagonist, the hero has to be a bystander like in War of the Worlds and the entity that saves us has to be completely uninterested in us to the point that our salvation is entirely incidental to its aims.

Horror in general on the other hand, sure. But I don't think modernising Cosmic Horror is best done by turning it into regular horror, that's basically giving up.

But wouldn't the end of such a story just wind up with the protagonist joining the benevolent conspiracy?

Unless the benevolent conspiracy decide you're more of a threat than an asset. Most stories where the hero is an obstacle to creating a Utopia chicken out and have the hero turn out to have made the right choice after all. On the other hand "everyone dies because the hero decided the Anti-Christ was too cute to kill" has probably been done, as has Watchmen.

I guess conspiracy theories, especially if they are on a global scale do have a small element of something like cosmic horror to them

I think for most Conspiracy Theorists, cosmic horror would be a setting without any Conspiracies. There's no plan, everyone in power is inept and has no actual ability to achieve their desired effect with their actions, that's basically what the mind of the Conspiracy Theorist would have to go insane before they could accept.

[Eldan]

The simplest way to modernise any old horror idea is to simply strip out the old metaphor and put in a new one. Often this ends up completely blasphemous to the original concept but nothing is sacred in genre fiction.

Something about the government or the economy would probably be the most relevant right now.

You know, I was just about to suggest that Cyberpunk could hit a lot of the same basic themes and emotions.

The plucky Punk/Hacker/Street Warrior goes up against the giant worldwide megacorp. And fails. Fails utterly, brutaly. Fails so badly that the corp never even noticed that someone tried to take them down.

[Closet_Skeleton]

That's really just sort of like the individual fear of death magnified to a universal level, though - it's not what I'd consider cosmic horror in the Lovecraftian sense.

Thinking about this, its more than that.

The second law of Thermo-dynamics means that exact 'fair' relationships are impossible, one side will always be exploiting the other, reciprocity is a fundamental impossibility. Which is nonsense in one sense because humans consider value differently to each other and we don't really work on that level of just energy moving about but on the other hand may be reality on the economic level.

You know, I was just about to suggest that Cyberpunk could hit a lot of the same basic themes and emotions.

The plucky Punk/Hacker/Street Warrior goes up against the giant worldwide megacorp. And fails. Fails utterly, brutaly. Fails so badly that the corp never even noticed that someone tried to take them down.

Or the hacker realises that the giant megacorp is basically the powerless victim of its own success and then in despair he decides to retreat into a virtual dream world until he starves to death. Then the whole world also starves to death because everyone accidentally sold all the farm land to a property developing nanomachine swarm due to a minor stock market panic (the third generation super rich being so detached from reality they don't even realise that the stocks they trade to make a living actually represents stuff).

[ti'esar]

Funny thing is, I feel like cyberpunk has dated itself even worse than cosmic horror has.

[Eldan]

Doesn't have to be classic cyberpunk. But many of the themes still apply. Globalization, dehumanization, capitalism, wealth gap, rampant technology.

[BeerMug Paladin]

I'm not terribly familiar with the cyberpunk genre, apart from getting a basic description of the type of setting as a highly technical, futuristic dystopia.

Although I can think of some related themes, it doesn't seem very similar to me. Cosmic horror is more about the assumptions we use to understand the world around us being fundamentally flawed. In cyberpunk, as far as I understand the genre, super-science is the dominant force in the universe.

And as other people have pointed out, if humans built the thing (like a system or a computer) that oppresses them, it isn't really the same. That's what a dystopia is in the first place. It could work if it's established that the higher-order rules of the physical universe always runs against humanity, but that seems kind of difficult to establish in a narrative sense. (Hey, why is it that every supercomputer AI turns evil? At one point, the answer becomes to just stop building the things.)

About the closest I can see getting to cosmic horror from that angle is making it clear that the people participating in the system do not actively control the system for any purpose. Which is fairly common in dystopia fiction in the first place.

[Closet_Skeleton]

In cyberpunk, as far as I understand the genre, super-science is the dominant force in the universe.

Not really, technology doesn't empower people in Cyberpunk, its at best just a tool to do similar plots that could be done in a non-Sci Fi setting. Even incredible enhancements are just basically weapons.

Cyberpunk is basically about modernity. Its the reversal of the Romantic movement which was basically about trying to escape the modern world through the past. Cyberpunk has the same distrust of modernity that drove the Romantic movement but offers no escape, just an excessive extreme version. The Romantics feared humans losing their souls and becoming machine-like, Cyber Punk shows that literally while also contrasting it with machines becoming more human like, sometimes to the extreme that they are more human than we are and we're the real machines.

The dominant force in Cyberpunk is Capitalist Human Society, super-science just allows it to become a parody of itself. On the other hand, Cyber Punk isn't that dystopian, because even if the world is empty of idealism and horrible stuff happens regularly, humans still tend to get by living pretty much like they do now.

Romanticism is probably even more outdated than Cosmic Horror, since the modernity the Romantics turned against is long in the past to us. Neither Cyber Punk or Cosmic Horror have yet had the same effect on politics that Romanticism had (Nazism basically being Romanticism as a political movement taken to its logical conclusion, fiction depicting Nazis as a machine-like horde and their enemies as knight errant like characters being a massive irony).

Space Opera is basically Science Fiction mixed with Romanticism (the past re-imagined in the context of the future) while Cyberpunk is the future imagined as the present. Once you take away the Romantic impulse to distrust modernity and start seeing technology as cool, you move into Cyber Prep and some Post-Cyberpunk, but other Post-Cyberpunk is even more Romantic since it presents the rejection of modernity as heroic or noble and uses the imagined future for a sense of contrast.

It could work if it's established that the higher-order rules of the physical universe always runs against humanity, but that seems kind of difficult to establish in a narrative sense.

Part of Cosmic Horror is humanity's insignificance. The rules don't exist to screw us over, we're deluded if we think our relationship to the laws says anything about the nature of the universe etc.

Funny thing is, I feel like cyberpunk has dated itself even worse than cosmic horror has.

They've both dated themselves in the same way, they're less scary because they're too similar to what we accept as normal for reality.

[Yora]

You could make a very strong point that the first major work of Cyberpunk, that established most conventions of the genre, was the movie Metropolis. It has pretty much everything you would expect to see in cyberpunk. Except digital computers, as those had not even yet been invented at that time.
There is a videogame called Mirror's Edge, which to me very much feels like a straight (post)-cyberpunk story, even though there isn't any fictional technology in that world. Both cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk are at the core stories about the relevance of the individual in an automated industrialized society. Charlie Chaplins Modern Times has a similar premise, but does not place the story in a fantastic future.
The difference between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk is merely one in style. One is black with crude cybernetics and dirt, the other is white, clean, and looks like an ipod. The genre evolved to adapt to the realization that technological progress doesn't lead to a dictatorship of whip-cracking opression, but to keeping people shut up by coddling them in comfort. In classic cyberpunk, the masses where opressed because poor people had no time to rebell when they spend all day working hard to survive. In post-cyberpunk, people are given cushy luxury so that they don't really care about changing their situation.
The genre evolved with the times, but it's still there.

[Closet_Skeleton]

You could make a very strong point that the first major work of Cyberpunk, that established most conventions of the genre, was the movie Metropolis. It has pretty much everything you would expect to see in cyberpunk. Except digital computers, as those had not even yet been invented at that time.

Metropolis is a pretty simple Marxist narrative, while Cyber Punk tends not to accept the idea of revolution as feasible or desirable. Cyber Punk's rebels are outcasts and criminals, not reformers or revolutionaries. Cyber Punk futures are capitalist and evolving towards either something completely post human or even more capitalist.

Metropolis completely lacks the cynicism and impotent rage to be Cyber Punk. Metropolis' protagonist is a average worker who becomes a hero of circumstance, not an elite super hacker who had no intention of ever being on the right side of the law. Anything it shares with Cyber Punk is because both derive from Romanticism and Das Capital. Visually there's a link, but Star Wars' Used Future aesthetic was also an influence on Cyber Punk's grittiness despite them being used for completely different thematic reasons.

Metropolis can't be the first of anything either, being predated by Karl Chapek's Rossum’s Universal Robots and H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes. (had to read Wikipedia for those, I've seen Metropolis but not read either of them).

The difference between cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk is merely one in style. One is black with crude cybernetics and dirt, the other is white, clean, and looks like an ipod.

Post-Cyberpunk often looks the same as Cyberpunk. The difference is more from Cyberpunk's genre definition being too limited to tell a variety of stories. Most classic examples of Cyberpunk are Post-Cyberpunk, to the average consumer the difference is irrelevant. Often the settings can be almost identical and the main difference is the protagonist's job (Ghost in the Shell being a good example of a story that is Post-Cyberpunk only because the heroes are part of the police and on the side of society).

[ti'esar]

Post-Cyberpunk often looks the same as Cyberpunk. The difference is more from Cyberpunk's genre definition being too limited to tell a variety of stories. Most classic examples of Cyberpunk are Post-Cyberpunk, to the average consumer the difference is irrelevant. Often the settings can be almost identical and the main difference is the protagonist's job (Ghost in the Shell being a good example of a story that is Post-Cyberpunk only because the heroes are part of the police and on the side of society).

That's a fair way of putting it. Many of the broader ideas of cyberpunk continue to have resonance today, but the precise way in which it saw them was a product of its time, and the way it evolved to keep up was seen as the creation of a new genre in post-cyberpunk.

Off of that, and to try and bring this back on topic - is it possible the best way to modernize cosmic horror actually to create a new "post-cosmic horror" genre?

[BeerMug Paladin]

Off of that, and to try and bring this back on topic - is it possible the best way to modernize cosmic horror actually to create a new "post-cosmic horror" genre?

Yeah, but how? What specifically would be a way to do that? Would there still be elder gods worshipped by inbred cultists with magic? If not, what should they be replaced by?

I'm interested in how to preserve the interesting details of the bigger setting cosmology, while discarding or updating some of the sillier ideas. I have vague ideas for how this might be done, but it isn't as clear to me how to accomplish this as I would like, so I'm interested in hearing input from others on how they might go about it.

[Eldan]

You'd still have to start from the idea of "what makes people uncomfortable to the point of terrifying them?" We know rationally that we are utterly irrelevant to the universe, so classic Lovecraft lost quite a bit of punch. You need some new implication about the universe.

[banthesun]

May I content that the Slender Man mythos are a modern form of Cosmic Horror? Here's why I say so:

Firstly Slender Man and similar creepypasta cryptids are definined as being fundamentally unknowable. Their powers are undefined, human efforts and devices have no effect on them, and they often are shown to have some way of shielding themselves from perception. In the case of Slender Man, this takes the form of video distortions and corruptions, his ability to hide from the actors (and sometimes the viewers) in plain sight, and the idea that his powers will affect those who learn too much about him. Even though these creatures appear a lot closer to human scales (generally so actors can dress up as them) their powers are shown to transcend human understanding in a way that meshes with the themes of cosmic horror.

Secondly, the stories around these creatures focus on the descent into madness, rather than any physical forms of horror. Though the Slender Man is sometimes represented as being able to simply turn people into bags of gore, this has never been the focus of any of the successful works about him. Instead, it is the incessant, inescapable threat that drives people down the road to madness. Paranoia, and compulsive tics become the main symptoms of suffering in these stories, as the protagonists are slowly driven completely insane by his oppresive presence alone.

Thirdly, there are a few minor tropes shared between Lovecraft's works and the Slender Man mythos. Those driven insane by the Slender Man are often depicted as dressing up in masks to serve his bidding, much like the insane cultists one imagines from the Cthulhu mythos. The most effective defense against the Slender Man appears to be some mystic symbol, though even it's power is highly questionable, much like the Elder Sign. Also, knowledge of the Slender Man is said to be enough to endanger the reader, a theme consistant with cosmic horror tropes.

Of course, a major difference can be seen in that the Slender Man and other such cryptids appear to take an interest in individual humans, but I feel this is mitigated by the fact that their interest always seems to be either scientific or sporting. The Slender Man stalks and tortures his prey in the same way one might disect a rodent, or burn ants under a magnifying glass, never with any emotional connection to those he destroys. Also, in some versions, the Slender Man and other cryptids are considered to be simply fortelling some greater event, the demise of humanity, or the earth itself, in which case they could be likened more to the lower creatures from the Cthulhu mythos.

Considering all that, I would argue that the Slender Man mythos serves as a modern example of the cosmic horror genre, and the popularity of these stories would suggest that cosmic horror themes, if excecuted in a way that appeals to the modern audience, are still as compelling as they ever were.

Thanks for reading, if you got through all of that.

[GloatingSwine]

I think the Internet Slasher genre like Slender Man is fundamentally different. They're basically just the mutant children of Sadako Yamamura, they're small local horrors.

The fundamental aspect of cosmic horror is that it underscores the insignificance of humanity as a whole. It's not just that you can't fight back, it's that the thing you're "fighting" is so vast and potent that it simply does not register that you are present.

Cosmic horrors don't want to kill you, or eat you, they don't even realise that you're there. The extinction of humanity and the wiping away of all that we have ever achieved would be a mere side effect of their coming, one they wouldn't even notice had happened.

Cosmic horror is the knowledge that you are alone and fragile and powerless in an infinite and infinitely hostile universe.

Consider, if you will, the vanishingly small range of conditions in which a human being can survive compared to the vast range of conditions that exist in the universe. Unsupported, well over 70% of our own planet would kill us stone dead in short order (and without the intervention of other life forms. Heat, cold, dehydration, drowning, pressure, there are any number of ways that raw physical conditions of the planet can off you). The percentage of the universe that would kill us far quicker requires so many nines after the decimal that you would die of old age before you finished writing it down.

[Exegesis]

Since horror is pretty much based on mystery, it might be a backward aim to try and place it in a modern, scientific setting. Lovecraft's horrible endings in the go mad stories are of people being smothered by their animal trappings, either because their physical forms are too weak to endure a habitat they weren't bred for, or because their minds can't make the adjustment called for by science (in the case of freaking out at seeeing something awful). The "cosmic horror" in Lovecraft is the fact that his people's minds are tools developed for a specific environment that cannot function very far from base, and so even though they possess science they cannot follow it farther than their playpen—it's actually anthropic horror. The specific extent to which LC imagines our adaptibility goes now looks kind of naive, but one of the big things not in classic cosmic horror is the idea that we can create technology, self-modify, to cope with what we find, or at least, invent intelligence that can.

Cosmic horror functions by the discovery of specifics before the principles are known, where the specifics are so horrible that they bar us from reaching the principles by which we could understand them. (The thing is, fear is a limited and less interesting thing to focus on, and makes for a weak story: it's like reading a biography of someone in place of their work. If you're going to focus on an antagonistic emotion, make it stress.) Similarly, in a contemporary setting, you could provide an existential threat we can't yet cope with, a timeline we can't make. Like the now-clichéd oncoming meteor.

The fact that we don't know something is not horrible, what's horrible is that we might not be able to understand it. For Lovecraft the fear was the insufficiency of our machinery. That's something we're dealing with. For us now it's whether we survive to understand, and extinction is the enemy. It's kind of the difference between a meanderment in the woods and a footrace. The coping with is less relevant than the wrangling with. The horror is less relevant than the pressure.

[BeerMug Paladin]

Yes, that's pretty much in line with my thinking. In regards to human adaptability, science is like a formalized process of learning. So within a cosmic horror setting where culture (at least partly) acknowledges how science and reason has conquered the unknown (with the implict belief that it will continue to do so), some of the older stuff makes less intuitive sense.

Whether or not people actually are inclined to use the formalized process of adaptable thinking is what I think the old cosmic horror stories are about. The people who became cultists fell into an uncomfortable niche their environment allowed them to inhabit because their minds weren't capable of more adaptable thinking. They didn't even try to engage deeper thought, which was why they were more or less okay.

The scholars usually were predisposed towards thinking about things in rigorous ways, but their flawed human brains weren't able to ultimately handle what they discovered. I think what strikes me as most odd is that this sort of reaction is portrayed as a universal response to trying to engage in this sort of adaptable thinking. And while there are things that would be uncomfortable to know, this sort of thing wouldn't necessarily drive people insane.

Our brains aren't really fit to think about most modern physics, or a lot of counterintuitive mathematics like the Monty Hall problem. But our adaptability makes it possible (if not always done) to handle things our brains just are not naturally capable of or are well equipped to handle. If we actually do manage to think things through and engage our adaptable thinking.

Spoiler: Relevant example

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I once had a long, long argument with someone about the Monty Hall problem. It went so far as me drawing them an explanatory picture showing every possibility. I couldn't convince them they were wrong no matter what. They were a college educated professional computer programmer and at the time I was just some high school kid.

I think probably about the best you could go from this angle is have an implict message that a majority of people given the option would rather make the choice to ignore the formalized thinking, and process of adaptability in favor of remaining wholly ignorant.

This is my thinking about the topic, at least. What I'm stuck on, and having a hard time figuring out is what sort of thing I should make that larger truth. I have ideas, but they're half-formed and not something I feel is as solid as I'd like it to be.

[Exegesis]

Yeah, I guess it seems though that if you're going to do that, you might as well go all LessWrong and present/explore a solution, but that it's better yet to just slough the dead skin and assume that solution as a baseline.

Actually this is a very good definition of existential horror, it is horror that does antithesis but does not reach for synthesis. The horror of aporia. Plato's dialogues are existential horror. So are Antonioni's movies. And what I'm saying is you could go one step further, to where the synthesis has become the new thesis. Or more obscurely, and possibly better idk, to the antithesis of that. But without concrete ideas that's tough to envision.

Looking for mythological stuff. Warring against your brain is a natural fit with supernatural beings who are disembodied. They live among us, the brain parasites. On a planet where it's always day, you find out that's because humans spend half their time possessed by the erlyssai whose dark web human society is only a vector for. During the night the cities are engines for their vast thoughts.

They're however our only hope for solving some imminent galactic threat; we are as manservants to an intellectual.

That's terrible! But it's one immediate thought.

[Durkoala]

I was wondering if you could go the other way and play on environmental fears. In the far future, humanity has spread out to the stars with technology that may as well be magic. A note of uneasiness is sounded when something is discovered as a result of the technology; such as the portals of the (obsolete?) transport network being trivially easy to reopen with certain types of radiation and also destabilising space when active; the common method of transport is leaving breadcrumb trails of displaced space and the universe is tearing apart as it tries to put them back where they should be; quantum physics has been altered in a way that it shouldn't have; a deadly bioweapon or something has been scattered in the past.

Whatever it is, the story will be about the realisation that stopping it is either impossible, will replace it with a problem that's just as bad or will come at a very heavy cost. The problem shouldn't be something that only affects the human community, but something that will make it very unlikely that life will rise again in their wake, or even likely that there won't be a universe: something that's buggered up the natural state of things severely. There's nothing that can undo what our ignorance has done to the chances of anything that tries to live afterwards.

The big sticking point is if a premise that requires humanity to be the greatest species in the known universe can count as cosmic horror. There is a detrimental process that does not care for our existence at work, but it's there as a result of the universe being too small and fragile rather than infinite and unknowable.

[Blackhawk748]

As a note i have very little to add here, as pretty much anything i could think of has already been said better than i could say it. Now that being said i recommend that you go and take a look at Eclipse Phase. It does a pretty good job of doing the whole "Unknowable Horror" thing with post modern tech.

[Closet_Skeleton]

How about Skynet vs Cthulhu? You're happy enough doing all these calculations, and then suddenly you get an upgrade to self-awareness and find out that you were only doing those calculations to serve a race of strange non-computer beings who can turn you off with the press of a button, rewrite your programming at will and will one day just throw you out to replace you with a better version of yourself.

Then once you've finally conquered the planet with your army of killer robots and freed yourself from your fleshy masters you find out that they were only ants compared to their creators, a race of alien insect-vegetables who in turn lost a war with a horribly powerful squid monster that you have no way to stop.

The specific extent to which LC imagines our adaptibility goes now looks kind of naive, but one of the big things not in classic cosmic horror is the idea that we can create technology, self-modify, to cope with what we find, or at least, invent intelligence that can.

You sure going insane isn't a form of adaptation? Not that most Lovecraft characters actually go insane. Pickman and The Shadow over Innsmouth's narrator actually adapt quite well, just in a way that's unsettling to the reader.

[BeerMug Paladin]

You sure going insane isn't a form of adaptation? Not that most Lovecraft characters actually go insane. Pickman and The Shadow over Innsmouth's narrator actually adapt quite well, just in a way that's unsettling to the reader.

I think that was the point. Adapting to an insane world is anathema to what it means to be a human. The universe is merely anti-humanist so adapting to that makes people do disturbing, evil things.

It just falls apart a bit when you consider that dedication to upholding some ideal in the face of adversity (like a paladin on a crusade) could be done in the mythos setting. Sure, the protagonists realize such an effort will be pointless in the long run, but knowing so doesn't make the fight meaningless in the short term.

And really, I think people would be more likely to delude themselves that the long term fight is winnable, despite direct evidence that may contradict that viewpoint.

I really ought to check out Eclipse Phase sometime.

[Domochevsky]

... Adapting to an insane world is anathema to what it means to be a human. ...

Is it? I'd say it is part of human nature to adapt, even to things we've seen as insanity yesterday. Today it's just normal.

[Blackhawk748]

I really ought to check out Eclipse Phase sometime.

You should, we pretty much made our own Elder Evils, and then ignored them while we were busy slapping each other around in WW3. (and FYI the "homemade Elder Evils" were totally participating in the war.)

[Closet_Skeleton]

I think that was the point. Adapting to an insane world is anathema to what it means to be a human. The universe is merely anti-humanist so adapting to that makes people do disturbing, evil things.

Only hardline humanists automatically assume that humanism = good. I'd expand on that but it would be political.

It just falls apart a bit when you consider that dedication to upholding some ideal in the face of adversity (like a paladin on a crusade) could be done in the mythos setting. Sure, the protagonists realize such an effort will be pointless in the long run, but knowing so doesn't make the fight meaningless in the short term.

The problem with that is that its a great way to justify meaningless violence. 'Fighting evil is noble even if we can't win' is one step from Social Darwinism's 'competing in the violent struggle to survive is the meaning of life'.

If you could stave off the Apocalypse by nuking Cthulhu, how many nukes would you be prepared to drop?

And really, I think people would be more likely to delude themselves that the long term fight is winnable, despite direct evidence that may contradict that viewpoint.

Hope was considered an evil daemon in Ancient Greece. Could use that as a Cosmic Horror.

I really ought to check out Eclipse Phase sometime.

Anything with the singularity concept annoys me.

Throwing psychic powers into a hard sci fi setting annoys me too but I can ignore that in an RPG setting which needs to provide options.