Cosmic Horror Story / Film

Films — Animated

• The Adventures of Mark Twain: The Mysterious Stranger creates a miniature civilization out of clay figures and bestows life on them only so that he can snatch it away again. He points out that he does not do this out of malice, as he has no concept of human morality.
• Mad God takes place in a disturbing and nightmarish hellscape full of deformed horrors and horrific abominations. It goes on step further towards the end of the film when we see that the entire universe of the film has been meddled with at the start by a black hole in space which sends monoliths to come down and ruin worlds.
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: On one hand, the main characters and antagonists want to retrieve the celestial Wishing Star that has fallen from space into the "Dark Forest" mutating its landscape into an alien, dangerous and constantly-changing environment almost like a family-friendly version of the Shimmer from Annihilation (except changing to reflect the nature of the characters and their philosophies instead of Body Horror). On the other, Puss is horrified by an Implacable Man, fearsome Wolf bounty hunter who turns out to be The Grim Reaper itself, that has decided to torment Puss into fearing death because he has taken all his previous 8 lives for granted all while foolishly saying that he "laughs in the face of death". Only at the very end, when Puss overcomes the fears of his mortality and fights him claiming that he will never stop fighting for his last life that he wants to enjoy to its fullest, the Wolf/Death respectfully leaves him in peace, but tells Puss that he'll return when his time will truly come, as he will do with all of us too, someday.

Films — Live-Action

• 2001: A Space Odyssey crosses into this in its final act. Space is a vast, incomprehensible place that is completely apathetic towards humanity, and any sort of advanced life that we may encounter would be so advanced as to be utterly unfathomable to humanity, would likely either refuse to communicate with us or would communicate in an incomprehensible way with horrific consequences, and would view us with callous indifference at best, and at worst would view us as convenient tools or incidental curiosities in the same way that a small child dismembering an earthworm is curious.
• Alien: Before Aliens and the following franchise gave the Xenomorph an Insectoid Alien coded hierarchy with a Queen, Drones and Warriors, the depiction of the original and the film itself give strong Cosmic Horror vibes. It presents a crew responding to a Distress Call in the middle of nowhere in deep space that is coming from a disturbing Ancient Astronauts relic where one of them is infected by a parasite that pops out of a Time Abyss egg. Then the parasite dies, only for the crew to remain stuck with an Implacable Man Eldritch Abomination that burst out of the infected man's chest and effortlessly begins snatching and killing anyone trying to stop it, all while they have no way of calling for backup, and in the Bittersweet Ending the last survivor is left to an unknown fate drifting off in the vast and uncaring cosmos. Tellingly, At the Mountains of Madness served as an inspiration for the story. Later installments of the series like Alien vs. Predator (which takes place in Mysterious Antarctica) and Prometheus (which discouraged Guillermo del Toro from making his own adaptation at the time) would take way more obviously cues from Lovecraft's book, although the monsters and the advanced aliens having their own bodycount puts them into Lovecraft Lite territory compared to how seemingly unstoppable Kane's Son was presented.
• AM1200 features an Eldritch Abomination of which the viewer is only able to see its eye and gaping maw through a deep hole in a cellar floor. The protagonist is lured into servitude to the creature after being drawn into a mysterious, abandoned radio station.
• Annihilation (2018) give us the Shimmer, a strange, complex alien entity that arrives to the Earth via a strange meteorite and does not one bit adhere to the law of physics as we know it, emanating a ever-growing dome of radiation that horrifically mutates every lifeform it comes into contact with, mashing together the DNA of things like Play-Doh, which creates vicious, disgusting monsters out of the wildlife. It's left entirely vague whether or not it is a malevolent entity seeking to destroy everything out of irrational hatred, or if it's so utterly alien to the point it doesn't even comprehend it's own existence, making it essentially an oversized cancer cell.
• The original ending to Army of Darkness had more than a touch of this as in it, Ash drinks too much of the sleeping potion and wakes up After the End, which given how freaky the scenery is was likely a result of the supernatural forces mentioned in the Necronomicon running rampant.
• Bug (1975) is about blind, pyromaniac cockroaches who emerge from a fissure in the ground after an earthquake. A local scientist named Parmiter becomes curious about them, which gradually turns into an obsession until it's apparent that something else is compelling his actions, particularly cross-breeding them with regular cockroaches, so that the subterranean insects can survive on the surface, and this is after one of them kills his wife. It turns out that it's the roaches themselves compelling him. True to this genre, the movie ends with the insects' final form, now with eyes and wings, thanking him by dragging him back to Hell with them.
• Right from the start, The Cabin in the Woods shows that it's not your typical "dumb kids go in the middle of nowhere to get killed off one by one", given that everything is planned and monitored by a nebulous but obviously very well-funded organisation... It's because that organisation's goal turns out to be to provide sadistic entertainment to beings known as the Ancient Ones, who'll otherwise destroy the world. They have bases throughout the world, each enacting scenarios in accordance to the prevalent Horror Tropes of their country/culture, so that at least one succeeds; in the end, they all fail, and the film closes on an Ancient One's titanic arm bursting from the ground.
• John Carpenter's "apocalypse trilogy" — The Thing (1982), Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness— is an escalation of the trope over the three movies. First, a protean, invasive lifeform threatening to subsume in itself every living thing on the planet in a desolate Antarctic setting reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains Of Madness; then a liquid corruption that turns out to be Satan, and whose goal is to bring to our world its true father, The Anti-God, in an old church being investigated by academics from an establishment similar to Miskatonic University; and finally, ineffable, unreal horrors attempting to find purchase in our reality through the writings of a Mad Artist and his previously-fictitious Town with a Dark Secret in the middle of Lovecraft Country, all the while screwing over the protagonist in such a way that it was formerly the Trope Namer for Through the Eyes of Madness.
• Color Out of Space (2020), given that it's an adaptation of a Lovecraft story, unsurprisingly has a bleak tone. The Color cannot be stopped from achieving its goals, the Gardners all go mad and die horribly, Ward is left traumatized by his experiences, there are countless other creatures just as terrible out in the vastness of space (and beyond), and the Color's passage may have tainted the water supply for most of the Eastern Seaboard.
• Dark Skies: A dysfunctional family finds themselves psychologically tormented by inscrutable beings from another world, beings who are utterly impossible for humans to truly understand and who are impossible to truly defeat because they've already taken over the planet, controlling society from the shadows and using humanity for their strange ends. The only hope of overcoming them is making yourself such a nuisance that they decide to simply restart the experiment with someone less annoying and leave you be. The protagonists fail to achieve this.
• Demon Knight is centered on the final stand of a man rendered ageless to protect a key from demonic collectors who want to take it in order to revert the entire universe into a dark chaos thriving with demons. And there's no resolution in the ending: both the hero and the collector die and leave successors that continue the chase.
• Don't Look Up is a rare example of a Cosmic Horror Story Played for Laughs. On the surface, it could be read as a straight example without any Lovecraft Lite elements to soften the blow barring the lack of a supernatural force. Two scientists, Dr. Randall Mindy and his student Kate Dibiasky, discover a comet on a collision course with Earth, and slowly but surely Go Mad from the Revelation as they realize just how small and meaningless humanity's accomplishments are in the face of an unthinking, uncaring cosmic force that will do to humanity what the Chicxulub meteor did to the dinosaurs. In the end, the comet hits Earth and the most that the protagonists can do is Face Death with Dignity, and while it doesn't quite kill everyone on the planet (Jason survives, and others may have done the same), it definitely knocks what's left of humanity back to the Stone Age. The difference is that it's done as a comedy, specifically a very dark satire of climate change and humanity's response to it. Kate's descent into madness is illustrated by her having a meltdown on national TV that goes viral, Dr. Mindy's is illustrated by him having an affair with a morning show host and basking in his newfound celebrity because he's decided that nothing matters anymore, and the reason the rest of humanity doesn't go insane upon learning of its impending doom is because, as far as this film is concerned, we're already living in a World Gone Mad. What's more, it's strongly implied that humanity could have stopped the comet, but was foiled by its own greed and foolishness.
• The Empty Man veers hard into this after detective Lasombra starts investigating the Pontifex Society.
• Event Horizon, in which "Hell" is the easiest way for the characters to describe hyperspace, but some elements suggest it to be far, far worse. Warhammer 40,000 fans like to joke that the film is a prequel.
• Everything Everywhere All at Once discusses this idea in-universe and plays with it in general. When the Alphaverse's Joy Wang saw her mind splinter after experiencing the entire multiverse all at once, causing her to become the mad omnidimensional villain Jobu Tupaki, she came to the conclusion that it's first and foremost scary simply being the first human being to go through something like that, and a big part of her supposed evil comes from the nihilism this has caused. The Bagel itself is virtually unknowable, but looks incredibly unpleasant to experience first-hand. It's subverted in the end, however, when Joy/Jobu's mother Evelyn Wang goes through the same experience and, despite initially seeming like she too will succumb to the same nightmare that befell her daughter, ultimately rejects Jobu's nihilistic philosophy.
• The Final Destination series has its protagonists cheating Death and trying to survive the consequences. Death is never presented as a defeatable force, and is unimaginably cruel about how it goes about balancing the books. And no matter what the characters do, Death will always claim them, even if it has to break the laws of possibility and probability to do so.
• The Forgotten turns out to be one. Telly and Ash's children were kidnapped by Eldritch Abominations and put through all that hell because they were experimenting. The Abominations have the ability to snatch people right out of the air and instantly make any person close to you forget who you are. They have human agents that go along with them because they can't stop them. There's a happy ending, but only because the Abominations said the experiment failed.
• From Beyond. When an overambitious scientist builds a machine that connects our world with the Outer Darkness - and tests it on himself - you know nothing good is going to happen.
• While Italian director Lucio Fulci's horror movies are usually more remembered for their bizarre dream-logic and ultraviolent deaths, at least two (The Beyond and City of the Living Dead) can be considered to be Cosmic Horror Stories, as both are deeply nihilistic, concern themselves with incomprehensibly malevolent supernatural forces, and end very badly for pretty much everybody. The links to the Cthulhu Mythos (The Beyond features the Book of Eibon as a MacGuffin, and most of City of the Living Dead takes place in a town named Dunwich) help a bit.
• Glorious: The movie centers on the main character getting stuck in a public rest stop bathroom where Ghatanothoa is hiding in a stall, who explains that he needs help to keep himself hidden from the all-powerful primordial god who made the universe by accident and created him specifically to wipe it all out, but he refuses to be his father's tool wanting to preserve the world instead, as he has developed affection for humanity.
• Hellboy (2004): The Big Bad Rasputin's plan is to unleash an apocalypse by freeing his Eldritch Abomination masters, the Ogdru Jahad. In 1944 he almost did this with the help of the Nazis, but was foiled by the intervention of the Allies. He's resurrected by his henchmen 60 years later and tries to coerce Hellboy, an Anti Anti Christ that got out of the portal he opened back in '44, into freeing the Ogdru Jahad by corrupting him via killing his adoptive father and threatening the soul of his Love Interest, and nearly succeeds.
• The Ju On series and its American remake series, The Grudge are actually quite young in regards to the time scale of the horror since the curse only started in the past 10 years or so before the events of the films, but for all respects they have the characteristics of a Cosmic Horror Story. The curse itself was technically a jealousy-turned-murder-turned-revenge story gone wrong, but it seems that the fulfillers of the curse have strayed from this path to include everyone, even (and especially) the innocent ones, as their targets. Once you do as little as taking a step inside the vicinity of the house or being associated with someone already cursed, it doesn't matter if you're in the cursed house, in your own residence, in your school, in the hospital, in the countryside, or even in another part of the world (the second and third American films take place in Chicago) or if you think that you're safe for a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a year, or even 10 years (the third Japanese film's third act is set a decade after the others), it will always claim you. It's best exemplified in the third Japanese film. The whole of Tokyo is deserted, apparently having each and every one of its inhabitants claimed by the curse.
• Knowing - The aliens are completely inscrutable in their reasons, their decision to only save kids sounds creepier than it should be, their information has already driven one poor woman to madness, they are unstoppable, and the world ends in a way that is inescapable and utterly savage — a way that these aliens saw coming from many decades prior and did nothing about (other than give an incredibly vague warning that was utterly useless, and depending on the audience's interpretation they may believe they even caused it), which again makes their decisions look even more inhuman.
• Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce (1985) ends up being this. It starts with astronauts finding an Eldritch Starship trailing Halley's comet, filled with dead, dessicated bat-things, and three strangely human-looking (and attractive) survivors; it all goes downhill from there. By the end nearly all the hero characters are dead or servants of the ship. Then the ship, after its snack (read: pretty much all of London's population, if not more), goes off on its merry way to devour other planets. The one survivor who knows anything about what actually happened probably won't be believed, so there will be little to no preparation for the thing's inevitable return.
• One possible interpretation of The Lighthouse is that the film is about two New England lighthouse keepers who are cursed by the sea gods for violating maritime tradition... Then again, maybe they just went mad from the isolation after being marooned in a freak storm and they hallucinated everything.
• Life (2017) - The entity discovered by the crew is utterly alien in its biology, impressively cunning and intelligent, and is demonstrated to be unstoppable in its drive to survive and increase/improve itself by manipulating and/or feeding on every other lifeform available. The end of the movie strongly implies that the creature will destroy all life on Earth, which in turn implies that it likely destroyed all life on Mars, where the soil sample containing its cells was collected.
• In Pacific Rim, were it not for the Jaegers, man would be less significant than mere bugs before the apocalyptic tsunami of mountainous bone and muscle that are the Kaiju. Given how humanity ultimately triumphs by itself in this one, and the optimistic outlook of the end (apparently, it's not a Pyrrhic Victory, all the sacrifices were worth it, and it looks like humanity will manage to rebuild and turn the page), this should be more in Lovecraft Lite. Of course, there's also the environmental implications that are mentioned, like how dropping nuclear bombs on several large cities (San Francisco, Sydney, etc.) and the Kaiju's poisonous dead bodies has destroyed a significant chunk of liveable, arable land around the Pacific...
• Possession, a film by Andrzej Zulawski which maps Cosmic Horror Story onto a disintegrating marriage.
• In Resolution,the entity creates an inescapable Xanatos Gambit for its victims, making it completely impossible for them to try and change its plans and ensuring that they would die one way or another. And even if they did manage to escape, they would just bring it back with them. This was followed in 2018 by a Stealth Sequel, The Endless, which ramps up the cosmic horror even more.
• The Thing from Another World has elements of this as well, with the monster being an alien unlike anything on Earth (apart from its humanoid appearance) and a being who is nearly impossible to destroy. The main narrative comes off more as Lovecraft Lite, but it's implied at the end that there's more of those things out there, and they may come attack again at any time.
• The Toho Universe, i.e. the fictional universe the Toho Studios films take place in. Invading aliens, Kaiju, ancient civilizations that worship unearthly beings, and humanity just barely able to survive any of the ongoing mayhem. Even films that have happier endings still heavily imply that the danger is far from over and that humanity are essentially insects to the giant monsters that rampage across the world.
  • Gojira is this as well as an allegory for the atomic bomb. A giant ancient monster is awoken/mutated by nuclear testing and ends up wreaking havoc upon humanity. Godzilla ends up destroying Tokyo, swats down airplanes and crushes tanks like they're little more than flies, and is impervious to conventional weaponry. At the end, it takes something worse than the monster to kill it (i.e. The Oxygen Destroyer). And, even then it's heavily implied that Godzilla wasn't the only one of his kind. Cue the sequels.
  • Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. A princess becomes possessed by the spirit of a long-extinct being from Mars (or Venus depending on which version you are watching) who proceeds to try and warn humanity about their impending doom. Meanwhile, a giant meteor has landed on earth and seems to be growing. Said meteor then bursts open revealing Ghidorah, a giant three-headed space dragon that goes from planet to planet wiping out all life. Why? Just for the hell of it. It takes the combined efforts of Mothra, Godzilla, and Rodan (three already powerful monsters that made humans seem like insignificant ants in comparison) just to drive him away.
  • While Matango lacks the space aliens and kaiju of other Toho films, it certainly has its share of inhuman horrors. A group of sailors end up washed up on an island that's strangely inhabited by a lot of unusual mushrooms. They find another boat washed up that belonged to a research crew, but said crew seems to have disappeared. And then we find out what happens when someone eats the mushrooms.
  • Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!. Not only do you have the Godzilla returning from the first film as a vengeful zombie-thing possesed by the spirits of those who died in World War II, but you also have three kaiju that were so feared by people that they were actually worshipped as gods. Said three gods (Mothra, Baragon, and Ghidorah) are awoken to help protect Japan against Godzilla's wrath due to the JSDF once again being useless against him. And, even then, the most powerful of the three god-monsters (Ghidorah, who also happens to be the Yamato No Orochi) is no match against Godzilla.
  • Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla centers around Godzilla going up against his alien clone. To give an idea as to how dire the situation is, when asked what would happen if Space Godzilla were to defeat his earthly counterpart, the Shobijin refuse to answer. As if that wasn't bad enough, the ending of the film also implies that Godzilla's battle with Space Godzilla was the catalyst that causes Godzilla to become Burning Godzilla.
  • Shin Godzilla centers around some sort of sea-dwelling....thing that comes on shore, causes tons of massive destruction, and rapidly mutates. It turns out that this incarnation of Godzilla isn't a mutated dinosaur, but rather some sort of ancient organism with adaptive abilities and genetics that are beyond human comprehension. It quickly becomes clear to everyone in the film that Godzilla isn't just some irradiated sea creature, it is a destruction god incarnate. Standard weapons don't work on it. And, while armor-piercing weaponry can cause it to bleed, Godzilla can easily dispatch such weapons using numerous beams of atomic enargy (Not only from his mouth, but also from his tail and dorsal spines). About the only saving grace humanity has comes from when Godzilla is frozen alive by a mixture of chemical coagulants and, even then, it's hinted to not be a permanent solution. Godzilla's tail splitting into Human-Godzilla Hybrids at the end doesn't bode well for humanity either.
• This is what separates the MonsterVerse from other cinematic universes like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Extended Universe. Humanity is surrounded by gigantic monsters that have existed long before humanity was even born, and they are basically powerless against them once they awaken and begin laying waste to the world. Whereas the MCU and DCEU has gods and aliens who are willing to protect humanity, the few benevolent monsters (Godzilla, Kong, etc.) in the MonsterVerse can be just as destructive to everything around them as the malevolent monsters causing said destruction.
  • The Legendary Pictures reboot film centers around the premise that hundreds of millions of years ago Earth was dominated by radiation-feeding giants, but some have survived. A mere three of them in the modern day threaten to wipe out human civilization entirely, with the M.U.T.O (Massive Unknown Terrestrial Organism) pair destroying any electronics and are a breeding pair with possibly thousands of eggs, while Godzilla himself creates tidal waves just by rising from the ocean and in the past shrugged off multiple nukes to the face. The most powerful military on the planet can only serve as a distraction, and the only thing that can be done is hope Godzilla kills the MUTOs, as he doesn't like them anymore than humans do.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) not only has Godzilla coming back, but now also throws in King Ghidorah whose mere presence is considered a "living extinction event". he's also revealed halfway through the film to be an alien horror who fell from the stars and seeks to terraform Earth to his liking. Even newcomer kaiju Rodan doesn't even try to limit collateral damage and couldn't care any less about killing any humans that get in his way.
• Vanishing on 7th Street gives us a phenomenon that can consume entire cities. Darkness becomes a sentient, malevolent force that hunts down and absorbs everyone it can, leaving only Empty Piles of Clothing and turning those it snatches up into shadows in its thrall. Light can keep the shadows at bay, but becomes harder and harder to sustain the longer the phenomenon is active, and the daylight hours grow shorter and shorter. There is no reason or explanation for this phenomenon, only the growing, desperate sense of inevitable doom. It's heavily implied that the will to live is the key to surviving this, but even then the darkness does everything it can to break the resolve of the few remaining survivors, and succeeds in almost every case.
• VHS: The films. Essentially, a large collection of tapes appear throughout various places portraying strange and disturbing supernatural events. The tapes are a Brown Note and watching them drives people into murderous insanity and resurrects the dead as violent zombies. The wraparound of the third film has an unseen force or cult uploading footage from the tapes to phones and computers in a city. In the end, the force behind the tapes manipulate the protagonist into activating a mass upload that presumably causes mass destruction as people all over the world go insane and begin attacking everyone around them.
• The Void has a sinister cult laying siege to a near-empty hospital, people turning into insane murderers, monstrous abominations, or both, experiments meant to resurrect the dead involving corrupted pregnancies resulting (again) in grotesque horrors and the cause of it all, a massive pyramid-shaped God-thing from a strange, barren wasteland dimension that just may be the afterlife.

---