Colours Beyond Space, Shadows Out Of Time, Whisperers in Darkness: A Thread of Cosmic Horror

William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland is batshit and fantastic

Dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial? Don't mind if I do (a weird fiction thread)

Dunsany views man's insignificance in the grand scheme as a somewhat benign thing, imo; cf that awesome story that begins with the narrator being buried alive for some unnamed crime and then kept alive through decades as the world changes. Sounds grim as fuck written down like that but the story is actually kinda peaceful, reveling in the glory of nature that outlives us all. Lovecraft saw no beauty there.

I mean, what's the camera gonna pan away to (literally and rhetorically)?

Theoretically at least, I reckogn a lot of German expressionism was about highlighting man's insignificance, not in the face of cosmic horror but of authority/bureaucracy, but the visual shorthands they came up with for that could still be applied?

I feel like sound design has often been the way to do this? Even just with something highly spiritual like Kiarostami, where off-screen voices abound, to Son of Saul that deliberately keeps the most horrific thing (the gas chamber) heard but unseen. A cosmic horror film would work with sound as much as image. And coincidentally, Twin Peaks The Return does this a lot :)

i dont really think David Lynch is a good fit, he is too spiritual, too optimistic. he may play with horror but there is clearly an underlying order to things.

just never found "it turns people insane" to be all that interesting a concept in and of itself. people go insane over money, jealousy, etc. people go insane from their brains failing in the natural course of time.

I mean, there's a couple of things. One is cosmic horror as a philosophy. No, Lynch probably doesn't fit. But if we're talking a possible cosmic horror visual aesthetic, I would say you should learn from Kiarostami and Lynch, rather than Carpenter. Even though Carpenter, philosophically, might be closer to cosmic.

XXP don't think that holds up at all tbh, at best there's a layer of order laid over things

anyone else read adam roberts' the thing itself? touches on lovecraftian cosmic horror pretty cleverly by tying in kant, artificial intelligence and the thing - i liked it quite a bit

Does 2001 have a place here

i don't think so - while the motives of the aliens behind the monoliths aren't expressed directly they seem pretty keen to help bowman have a good death and then return to earth to move evolution forward for the second time, which suggests a level of care that cthulhu is just not into

which is not to suggest that 2001 isn't scary, cuz i find it genuinely unsettling

shout-out to The King in Yellow, well used in True Detective

this book is great but I ended up resenting how it got dropped into TD tbh

One detail missing from the Brian Aldiss obituaries was that he coined the term "Shaggy God Stories"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_God_story

Event Horizon i think fits in here, insofar as films go. whether or not you find it successful or even not-terrible (i think it's pretty solid) is another matter.

event horizon is such a frustrating missed opportunity - that cast and production design with a better script and director could have been great

David Lynch probably captures the mood of "basic wrongness" the best, but his stuff is dependent on people and their relationships to one another. I'd love to see him take a crack at a Ligotti story, though.

― Devilock, Tuesday, 29 August 2017 18:09

Lynch optioned an adaptation of "Last Feast Of The Harlequin" but I think he would have just been the producer if it had gone ahead.

Have no idea how you'd create a satisfying Lynch tribute anthology but I'd like to try this book, but I don't have high hopes
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/8190Uq0CTJL.jpg

Music on the other hand would be quite doable.

Anyone else spot Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror In Literature in Nanjiani's book pile in The Big Sick? It's the most important piece ever written about horror stories.

Just realizes H.P. Lovecraft's "Nemesis" has the same meter as Billy Joel's "Piano Man." pic.twitter.com/Oty5JxoHWW

— Captain Video (@OurWorldcomic) January 14, 2018

https://m.soundcloud.com/julianvelard/hp-joelcraft

Revive as I've recently started listening to the great Weird Studies podcast, which takes a completely serious analytical approach to aspects of "the weird" in popular culture(topics including Twin Peaks, Philip K Dick, Robert Aickman, Under The Skin, Shirley Jackson etc). It can get a bit heavy into the philosophical side but it's always interesting.

https://www.weirdstudies.com/

The episode on Crowley and magick is a bit of a headspinner, in which both hosts basically conclude "Yeah, it shouldn't work but it completely does."