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Cosmic Horror Story
alt title(s): Lovecraftian Fiction
Simply reading this play is said to drive one mad. A book by this name really exists. The play itself does not. As far as anyone knows...

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
— H.P. Lovecraft, opening of The Call of Cthulhu.

Even now there may be ghouls gibbering in the sewers beneath your feet, ghosts hovering unseen in the air around you, and the vile spawn of an Elder God lurking in the recesses of your own family tree.

Scared yet?

Such was the vision of H.P. Lovecraft. Humanity is utterly insignificant and its gods feeble. All victories are fleeting and doom is certain. Worse still, the monsters don't even care about us. Satan is evil, but he values every human soul. Cthulhu would obliterate humanity without ever really noticing its existence.

If you aren't sure if a work is a Cosmic Horror Story or not, ask yourself these questions:
  • Is the antagonist evil or uncaring on a cosmic scale? We're talking a Big Bad who is capable of destroying the universe, the world, humanity, or all three.
  • Is the attitude of the antagonist towards humanity disregard, simple pragmatism, or incidental hatred? (A godlike antagonist that actively hates humanity and its works is more in line with Rage Against The Heavens or God Is Evil.)
  • Are the antagonist or his minions so alien in appearance that simply seeing him is sufficient to drive a human to madness? Are they Eldritch Abominations?
  • Are the antagonist or his minions indescribable — literally? Lines like "I cannot find the words to describe the vile thing I saw..." are a hallmark of Cosmic Horror Stories.
  • Is the tone of the work deeply cynical about the possibility of the antagonist being defeated completely?

Answering "No" to more than two of these means that the work is probably not a Cosmic Horror Story, although it may share tropes with the genre.

Common tropes in Cosmic Horror Stories include:

The genre is sometimes called "Cosmic Horror", Lovecraftian Fiction, or Weird Fiction

Note that while the Cthulhu Mythos Shared Universe originated in the Cosmic Horror fiction of HP Lovecraft, a Cosmic Horror Story need not refer to the Mythos or borrow from its imagery. Lovecraft Lite goes a step further than that and does not expect us to take Lovecraft's vision seriously in the first place. Compare/contrast with Crapsack World, Mind Screw and Through The Eyes Of Madness.

Examples

Anime
  • Getter Robo Armageddon. A force that can assimilate any life-form, assume any shape, and is constantly evolving. Oh, and the only thing in existence that lets humanity fight them, the Getter Rays? Yeah, they accelerate that evolution. By series's end, Getter Robo's forced to do suicidal attacks to take down its opponents, and even then, the Invaders aren't completely beat.
  • Bokurano: Something is making you fight in its super robot against other super robots, which themselves are piloted by similarly coerced pilots from other universes. If you win, that entire alternate universe will be destroyed and you die. Don't pilot? Okay, your entire universe will die. Why? Why not?
    • Also, each time your robot fight the current pilot dies after it, and if both decide not to fight, BOTH universes get destroyed.
    • And the whole thing is a fiendish trap anyway; the ones responsible for the fight are just using it as a means to get the participants desperate enough to research and reverse-engineer the alien, eldritch technology which, when activated, will take over their reality and extend the hideous, abnormal existence of the perpetrators. The only way to avoid having to participate is to not reach a certain level of technological development.
      • The "aliens" in question do not appear to be hideous, abnormal, or alien. In fact, they appear to be nice, toga-clad humans living in a paradisical country - heaven on earth, pretty much. This really just makes it worse.
      • The above point is anime-only. The manga gives no concrete evidence of the cause of the battles, but Dung Beetle implies that it may be nothing more than a natural phenomenon that humans have yet to comprehend. Your Mileage May Vary on whether this makes the manga more or less of a Cosmic Horror Story than the anime.
  • Uzumaki. Its essentially what you would expect if Lovecraft drew Manga. A town is built ontop of an impossible spiral structure, which proceeds to cause increasingly horrible things to happen before absorbing the entire town. The protagonists are turned to stone forever, while still apparently cognizant, but at least they do so in each other's arms.

Comic Books
  • Grant Morrison's Zenith mainly fought the Lloigor, shapeless body-stealing beings from beyond time and space who can consume reality. Turns out they're actually the first-generation superheroes who "self-evolved" into Reality Warper Gods and subsequently went mad with power, but were forced to live outside normal space-time since their own universe was too fragile to hold them. And they want back in. Badly.
  • The notorious work of indy comics artists Al Columbia and Hans Rickheit and, at times, Edward Gorey.

Fan Fic
  • Challenge of the Super Friends: The End, where the Legion of Doom travel to a horrific Lovecraftian universe and begin winding up like victims in the Event Horizon and Hellraiser films. The unseen Benefactor may well be an Ultimate Evil.
  • The Shape of the Nightmare to Come takes regular Warhammer 40k and cranks up the Cosmic Horror elements to max. The Ophilim Kiasoz, an Eldritch Abomination, destroys entire star systems simply by passing through them, and no one knows just what it is. The Nex, of which virtually nothing is known, drives people mad by just mentioning it. Heck, the whole first segment reads like it was written by Lovecraft himself.

Film

Literature
  • Proto-example: Robert W. Chambers' book The King in Yellow, which was an influence on Lovecraft himself, and he made references to it that are now better known than the original source. Filled with Mind Screw and Take Our Word For It.
    • The Arthur Machen novella The Great God Pan, which came out even earlier, gives us the eponymous all-natural Eldritch Abomination. Machen wrote other works of this kind, though The Great God Pan stands out as the most significant.
    • Lest we forget, William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land and The House On The Borderland are notable forerunners.
  • And then there are, of course, H. P. L. "Grandpa Cthulhu" Lovecraft and his Weird Tales colleagues - Clark Ashton "Klarkash-ton" Smith, Robert E. "Two-Gun Bob" Howard, etc. - who started the whole "Cthulhu Mythos" thing (although it wasn't actually named, nor any kind of cohesive whole, until August Derleth layed his grubby mitts on Lovecraft's work and mostly missed the whole point) as a collective attempt to lend their works an air of authenticity, by sharing common elements and references as if the stories were actually based on Real Life sources. And it worked - there are now people who genuinely believe the Necronomicon is a real existing book and that Cthulhu was worshiped by ancient Sumerians.
  • The Atrocity Archives and its sequels take place in a world where bureaucratic top secret government agencies even more covert and shadowy than MI 5 and the CIA battle Eldritch Abominations attracted to reality after Alan Turing discovered a theory that allowed the user to warp reality with computers and the Nazis attempted to summon the Great Old Ones using the souls of those slaughtered in the Holocaust to win the Second World War.
  • Sarah Monette's Kyle Murchison Booth stories (collected in The Bone Key) take place in a Cosmic Horror universe — unsurprisingly, as she openly acknowledges Lovecraft as a major influence.
  • Stephen King likes tropes associated with this genre, particularly Eldritch Abominations, although most often they're limited in how much they can affect the world. He also uses Lovecraft Country (many of his works are set in New England, most often rural Maine)
    • In IT, the eponymous monster is perceived as a giant spider by the protagonists, because this was the closest analogue that their rational minds could find for Its appearance. Attempting to fight It can result one's mind being flung beyond the edge of the universe, then being driven mad by the Deadlights (which It is merely an appendage of). After the protagonists succeed in killing It, they magically forget about the entire incident; apparently this was the only way they could have lived a normal life afterwards.
    • The Mist describes what happens when ordinary folk are confronted with an encroaching alternate reality that gradually enshrouds everything in an unnatural fog filled with predatory Eldritch Abominations.
    • In The Dark Tower several hints are dropped regarding entities and realities of this magnitude, especially in regards to "Todash Darkness and the unspeakable things that dwell there in the black never between realities". The scenes in Book Seven regarding Roland, Susannah, and Oy fleeing through Castle Discordia from one of these things that somehow got OUT of Todash are laced with suggestive themes about what would happen when the Tower falls and Todash sets these critters loose on all the many universes.
  • The Haunting Of Alaizabel Cray has the standard deluded-fools-summoning-eldritch-abominations plot. Said Eldritch Abominations are called the Glau Meska, but often known as the Deep Ones. Now where did that idea come from...?
  • The American horror writer Thomas Ligotti has written a few of the only genuinely Lovecraftian pastiches ever. A few, though not many, of the works explicitly use the names of Lovecraft's creations.
  • Some stories by Clive Barker could fall into this category. Skins Of The Fathers springs to mind.
  • The fantasy of Michael Moorcock is full of Cosmic Horror. The Elric Saga's world especially has many, many ancient evils that used to rule the world and now lie around decaying and waiting to destroy any traveler they meet. Elric himself rules over the remnants of one of these evil empires, and his patron god is an Eldritch Abomination. The final book involves the world being completely remade by the Eldritch Abominations, and even the "good" ending to the story accepts this as inevitable. The Corum series is an example too; he fights against Elric's Lords of Chaos in the first series, and in the second series against a group of Eldritch Abominations who are based on the elemental forces of cold and death.

Live Action TV
  • Sapphire And Steel took place in a universe threatened by formless evils. The (presumably) non-human "Elements" Steel and occasionally even the more sympathetic Sapphire, could, on occasion seem alien themselves.

Tabletop RPGs
  • In White Wolf's original World Of Darkness, Cosmic Horror is not the central part of the game, but the authors love to incorporate alien Eldritch Abominations from beyond time and space into the setting, whose presence corrupts souls, drives people insane or warps reality. Included in this list are the Wyrm and its servants from Werewolf: the Apocalypse, the Nephandi and their patrons from Mage: the Ascension, the Fomorians from Changeling: the Dreaming, the Onceborn and Neverborn from Wraith: the Oblivion (and Grandmother from Orpheus), and the Earthbound from Demon: the Fallen.
    • The new World Of Darkness also injects a certain amount into the various settings; werewolves have certain powerful spirits (especially the Maeljin and idigam), mages have Abyssal entities, Prometheans have the qashmallim, and Sin-Eaters have the Kerberoi. The Others from Changeling might qualify as well, but Faeries are their own category.
  • Unknown Armies subverts the trope; the setting's big secret is that the universe is humanocentric, existing only for our benefit. Any horrific monsters beyond time that make us insignificant, then, are actually the product, not the cause, of our sense of insignificance. It's a vicious cycle.
  • The Swedish RPG KULT mixed Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Aleister Crowley occult traditions and the Hellraiser movies, and took its aesthetics from Splatter Punk, Clive Barker and H.R. Giger art. It's actually subversion. Humans are hopeless against supernatural force, but will triumph once awaken. In fact, most super beings are hopelessly try to prevent that. In other words, they broke their arms punching us.
  • Pikathulhu's Gonna Catch You All.
  • The Whispering Vault offers an odd inversion in that the player characters are all minor Eldritch Abominations who act as a "police force" that apprehends and retrieves abominations who have illicitly made their way to Earth.
  • Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 take place in worlds infiltrated by Chaos, a corruptive force given strength by the ickier parts of the human psyche. In both cases, the only way to combat Chaos is to be frighteningly dogmatic and wipe it out whenever it looks at you funny, no matter who gets caught in the crossfire.
    • The Necrons (and their Eldritch Abomination gods) have an alternate plan to defeat Chaos: completely sever the material universe from the Warp, where Chaos — and the souls of every sentient being — dwell.
    • And let's not forget the unending fun of the Tyranids and their Hive Mind: they're a bit more grounded in the real world, but that doesn't change the sheer scale and impossibly alien will behind them.
  • Somewhat recently—it was one of the last supplements for 3.5 Edition of Dungeons And Dragons, Wizards released a book called "Elder Evils". It contains many examples of how you might consider ending your campaign, and they're all apocalyptic scenarios, which include horrible things happening to the world no matter what you do and the creatures you defeat are more deflected instead of destroyed. It features a guide of how to create your own Eldritch Abominations, as well as several examples including Ragnorra, the Mook Maker Space Whale with an Evilutionary Biologist streak, Pandorym, the living Forgotten Superweapon with a personality you don't want anywhere near a Forgotten Superweapon, Atropus the undead planet, and of course, the Hulks of Zoretha. It's even possible, however unlikely, to have more than one of these going on at the same time. One wonders how the campaign world has survived this long.

Video Games
  • The Survival Horror game Eternal Darkness (cheerfully subtitled "Sanity's Requiem") for the Gamecube. This one takes one of the most interesting twists, as the most powerful Eldritch Abomination, the Corpse God, is actually mildly fond of humanity, even serving as a fertility god in a small village in Cambodia. He's ultimately responsible for the main character's destruction of the "evil" abominations, and he's probably the only abomination even close to being good. Ever.
    • The secret Twist Ending reveals that nice ol' Mantorok is just as bad as the rest of his mates, just more subtle - he used humans as part of a Xanatos Gambit to wipe out the other non-Euclidean nasties.
    • Not to mention Mantorok is the titular Eternal Darkness...
  • In 1987, Infocom made an Interactive Fiction text adventure called The Lurking Horror loosely drawing on the themes of the Cthulhu Mythos.
  • Another IF example: Anchorhead is an award-winningly well-regarded example of a text adventure set in the "slowly unraveling horror" Lovecraftian milieu. Look here for download and information on the game.
  • In Drakengard, The World Is Always Doomed because the gods are not just evil, but also composed entirely of Eldritch Abominations. There are not slithering masses of tentacles that cause insanity by their very sight, but [[/Video Game something very morbid.]]
  • The events of Persona 3 ultimately leads to the The End Of The World As We Know It, complete with a doomsday cult and brain-dead people uttering prophetic warnings. This is all due to the subtle influence of the reawakened Nyx, a vast and ancient being and who apparently is the moon, being called down to the earth. Her presence causes people to explode into puddles of black ooze and random organs. In all likelihood, she doesn't care in the slightest. Oh and she's mainly summoned by the Anthropomorphic Personification of the malice and despair in the hearts of humanity.
  • The premise of a Sugar Bowl world with Cosmic Horror Story influences is almost as brain-breaking as Cthulhu himself is, but the Kirby series pulls it off in the last few levels and bosses of each game. With Alien Geometries for levels, Eldritch Abominations for bosses, and Nightmare Fuel ahoy. The anime actually implies that Kirby is a good Eldritch Abomination.
  • Shadow of the Comet, Prisoner of Ice and the better-known Alone In The Dark, by Infogrames, are all in the same Cthulhu Mythos-haunted world, with several direct Lovecraftian references, including the Necronomicon and De Vermis Mysteriis. The name of the mansion from the first Alone In The Dark, Derceto, is revealed in-game to be an alias of Shub-Niggurath, the Mythos' equivalent of a fertility deity...
  • Eversion gradually reveals itself to be a game of this kind. It starts out as a cute Sugar Bowl of a world, but as you progress further and use your titular Reality Warper powers in order to get the gems you need, the game gradually gets darker and darker. The Lets Play by Deceased Crab in particular reads like a Lovecraft story towards the end of it, right down to the rejection of the Sugar Bowl world's "cheery lies."
  • Earth Bound morphs into one of these for the final boss fight.
  • The Metroid setting has quite a few things in it that are extremely nasty, but the X-Parasite stands out. An entity that seems to be immune to basically everything other than the Metroid's energy drain, that can infect and kill extremely strong entities, which it can subsequently mimic, and gains intelligence from those it consumes. By the end of Fusion, its made not one, but ELEVEN enemy without copies of the protagonist at her strongest. The sole reason it hasn't wiped out everything is because a sufficiently advanced race made a kryptonite to it that is insanely dangerous in its own right before the X could get its hand on a spaceship.
  • System Shock 2 fulfills almost all above tropes (minus Tome Of Eldritch Lore and The Unpronounceable) but on a fortunately contained scale (less fortunate for those who lived there.) However, Shodan is still out there...
  • Whether or not Lavos qualifies is up to the player's imagination, but as of Chrono Cross...
  • Mass Effect is basically a Cosmic Horror [1]. The Reapers are a race of sentient machines that wipe out all advanced life in the galaxy every 50,000 years or so. Sovereign has been described as Mecha-Cthulhu.
  • The Shadow Hearts series takes place in a universe where nearly every monster is a Cosmic Horror, especially in the first game.

Webcomics
  • Thanks in part to Real Life Writes The Plot, Thunderstruck has gained elements of a Cosmic Horror Story world. The city in which most of the action takes place is doomed, period. The primary action focuses on a race of gods for whom all of human history is a single generation - and the action is centered on the scions of the preceding generation's champion.
  • Brawl In The Family has Mario jumping into paintings like in Super Mario 64, he makes a bad choice in deciding to jump into The Scream, we are spared whatever horrors within unlike Mario.
    • Considering that the picture takes on the form of Giygas when Mario jumps through...

Web Original
  • In the world of the SCP Foundation, the only thing standing between humanity and a legion of sanity-shattering artifacts or implacably destructive monsters is a shadowy organization of MIBs... whose ruthlessness makes them only slightly less dangerous than the monsters they're protecting humanity from.
  • The Whateley Universe has a Cosmic Horror backstory, and the Sara Waite stories are all centered around one or more eldritch abominations... including Sara Waite herself. Plus, there's an in-universe example, since Sara Waite's previous form Michael Waite wrote a best-seller called "Incongruity" which turns out to be The First Book Of The Kellith, which is now in print all over the world. Oops.

Western Animation
  • Mighty Max arguably takes place in such a universe. Although over the course of the series we find Max beating his fair share of enemies, ultimately the great big-bad is show to be unstoppably powerful, and our hero's only hope to even TIE with him is to let all his friends die and restart the timeline with his own death in the hopes it goes better the second time. Unfortunately, given the prophecies frequently referenced, this cycle has happened at least several dozen times.
  • Shadow Raider's premise is that the 4 elemental worlds must band together using ancient technology to fight a great giant planet that wants to eat their homes. It is unstoppable, unrelenting, and unbeatable. The only hope is to run away, or face certain destruction. And they can't run forever. For a child's show this is somewhat jarring.

Real Life
  • This Cracked article lists a few cosmic events that can wipe Earth clean. While none of them are outright inevitable, they can all strike without sufficient warning for us to actually do anything to prevent them.
The Corruption
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Creepy Basement
Body Horror
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Defanged Horrors
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