“I am not a monster.”
The declaration from Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) comes near the end of Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space – much too late for us to believe him. Gardner has already shown that his ideas of fatherhood are corrupted. That corruption is mirrored in his home, a bastion of peace turned into a den of horrors. Certainly, an alien force that descended on a strange meteorite is destroying all this goodness. But Nathan’s darkness, even his monstrosity, was always there, waiting.
Of course, “man is the real monster” is the most overplayed of smart horror tropes, but Color taps into much more specific real-world anxieties. It’s the story of an environmental catastrophe, an accelerated version of the upheaval happening around us. As the chaos of the alien incursion plays out, Stanley’s movie also evokes the deeper uncertainties of the age of social media and social fragmentation: our growing distrust of our institutions, of consensus reality, even of the people we love.
Color is just the latest in a spate of high-profile film and TV works that explore our moment’s unease through the depiction of vast, incomprehensible forces and eroding identities. What started with Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective carried through to Benson and Moorhead’s The Endless, Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse, and now Stanley’s Color. We are arguably living in a cinematic golden age of what’s known as “cosmic horror.”
If you’re reading FANGORIA in 2020, you have probably heard of H.P. Lovecraft, the writer who first truly articulated cosmic horror nearly a century ago (and whose short story Color is based on). The cosmic, which since Lovecraft has blossomed into a vast subgenre in both film and literature, is often mistakenly thought to be about tentacled space monsters. But it’s ultimately about much deeper human fears: the strangeness of the familiar, and the familiarity of the strange. It’s about safe places becoming dangerous, distrust of our own senses, and our inability to fight against terrible change. Or as the hermit Ezra (Tommy Chong) puts it succinctly in Color: “What is in here, is out there. And what is out there is in here now.”
There’s a reason cosmic horror is having a moment. What has come “in here” in 2020, in America and around the world, are unrestrained, sometimes ugly, yet often seductive ideas: Nationalism, class warfare and racial hatred have sprung back to life like flabby shoggoths resurrected in an ancient city. They were all held “out there” for much of the 1990s and 2000s by a safe neoliberal consensus: free trade, anti-racism, scientific rationalism, imperial/democratic nation-building, rule of law. Historians celebrated “the end of history”: an end to all change, all strangeness and all conflict.
But it turns out the consensus wasn’t as firm as it seemed. Some say the neoliberal order has collapsed under the weight of its own failures, particularly its failure to protect workers or its unwillingness to truly fight structural racism. Others blame a deeper disordering under the pressure of a fragmented, chaotic media landscape. Long-forgotten is religion, a singular worldview whose struggles and failures are central to Mandy. That film’s comical/terrifying Jesus freaks stand in for the get-rich-quick schemers and actual human-shaped demons who hold so much sway in today’s religious husks. There are no answers there – at least not any that withstand scrutiny.
Technocratic progress was, for a moment, a sort of secular religion, but now even science has been replaced by a thousand realities. For too long, we didn’t know whether the coronavirus was a deadly plague or a mere nuisance, because an authoritarian government has created its own pocket dimension. Climate change is either the end of the human race or an elite conspiracy, depending on what TV channel you watch. Without either religious or secular consensus, chaos reigns. Witches walk the streets of Brooklyn, Christians peddle miracle oils and astrology everywhere insists that The Stars are Right.
Lovecraft, as a man and artist, both embodied and predicted what has driven us to this crossroads. And 80 years after his death, cosmic horror has become a disturbing but invaluable Rosetta Stone for understanding the present.
Lovecraft was, on the one hand, a rationalist and atheist, who based his new form of horror on a complete opposition to the supernatural. This was counterintuitive at the time: The glories of science were still widely hailed as a way to push back the darkness of superstition and replace it with “enlightenment.” But Lovecraft saw science itself as a path to madness and destruction. He warned that its “unguessed horrors,” from the threatening anti-humanism of evolution to the infinitude of the cosmos, would prove far more disordering than the myths and ghosts that came before.
Ghosts, after all, at least used to be human. But if the stars are infinite, we aren’t just worm food – we are worms. Or as Mary Shelley put it, accepting science and reason can mean being “required to exchange chimeras of boundless grandeur for realities of little worth.”
Cosmic horror is the story of that defeat. In Annihilation and the novels it is based on, a hyper-rationalist government agency throws itself at a great mystery of existence and is destroyed by the attempt. The Lighthouse is a more oblique allegory, in which a literal guiding light of trade and communication is revealed as a nightmare horror. The central character of True Detective seeks truth and finds nothing he wants to know. In the past, we imagined monsters out of ignorance. But the horrors of the present arise from knowing too much.
In the 21st century, that too-muchness has gone further than even Lovecraft could have guessed. Instead of tomes hidden deep in Miskatonic libraries, the internet creates its forbidden knowledge from whole cloth. Anti-vaccine madness, the flat Earth resurgent, and the LARP known as Qanon are what happens when reality is torn apart. The protagonists of The Endless flee an apparent death-cult only to be let down by the emptiness of normal modern life, and are nearly drawn back in. The cult provides a tantalizing framework for grappling with a reality that must be more than it seems. Escaping a monster is nothing compared to escaping that allure.
And there are worse escapist fantasies than conspiracy. Lovecraft himself retreated from the horror of reason down a path that’s all too familiar today: He was a virulent racist, even by the standards of his own time. He was unique among racists, though, in the depth of his exploration of his own fear of difference. His stories constantly returned to the themes of forgotten lineages reasserting themselves, of brain-swapping aliens – of the other becoming the self, of the outside truly coming ‘in here.’
Fear of difference, it seems, is often fear of what we don’t know, or can’t acknowledge, about ourselves. Color, Annihilation and The Thing – an early triumph of cosmic paranoia on film – are all in their ways meditations on the paranoid terror behind the (milder) chant of the Charlotte rioters: “You will not replace us.” There is, after all, no scientific basis for the concept of race, and yet the vilest or most downtrodden often cling to it most fiercely. To change, or to be undefined, is to some no different than becoming a monster.
But there is hope here. The most overlooked element of cosmic horror, one that may be better captured in the new films than in the literature they’re built on, is that the Outside is not just to be feared – it is also beautiful and revelatory. Lovecraft’s characters often give in to their own transformation with a joy that is meant to be chilling but can also be read as liberating. One protagonist declares that in becoming a monster, he goes to “dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.”
This has left a rich lane for writers such as Ruthanna Emrys (The Innsmouth Legacy) and Victor LaValle (The Ballad of Black Tom) to turn Lovecraft’s xenophobia on its head, making heroes of the Other. Color gives a nod to this reformist tradition by casting Elliot Knight, a person of color, as protagonist Ward Phillips.
Other works are more symbolic. At the strange conclusion of Annihilation, two beings who have utterly lost their own identities nonetheless seem on the verge of finding redemption in each other. In Mandy, madness and loss transmute into a kind of joy, as Cage’s Red Miller is transported to a bizarre alien hellscape, buoyed by the memory of love. Cosmic horror, a century after Lovecraft, is less about either escape or destruction than about acceptance of our own capacity to be different than we are. (The greatest weakness of The Endless is its status quo-preserving ending.) The genre offers not just bleak nihilism or tentacled gross-outs, but a way forward.
And there is more good news: Authoritarianism everywhere lashes out against the feared unknown in part because strangeness is winning. Women, people of color and sexual minorities have gained unprecedented traction in overthrowing the baseless privileges of “normal people.” And in turn, those “normal people” are being forced to reckon with their own monstrosity: the realization that their delusional fight to preserve what is “normal” – their refusal of the humanity of others, their denial of what they have done to the Earth itself – threatens to kill us all.
We can no longer afford to reject the monstrous. It is coming for us. It is already in us. It may burn – but it is beautiful.
