Cosmic Horror

This video was made for Buffer Festival 2023!

CREDIT:

Executive producer: Cathy Jenkins

I played this during one of the NextFests, and I’m psyched that it’s almost out. Think of Slay The Spire, but with Lovecraft.

As readers and writers, there are many immediate images that we conjure when imagining the weird tale.

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer from their site Weird Fiction Review give an excellent overview and definition of the Weird and by association the weird tale:

“As a twentieth and twenty-first-century art form, the story of The Weird is the story of the refinement (and destabilization) of supernatural fiction within an established framework but also of the welcome contamination of that fiction by the influence of other traditions, some only peripherally connected to the fantastic.” (...)

Books suggested:

• The King in Yellow By Robert W. Chambers

• Zothique: The Final Cycle - By Clark Ashton Smith

• The Great God Pan By Arthur Machen

• The House on the Borderland By William Hope Hodgson

• The Horla and Others By Guy de Maupassant

This Halloween, comedian and filmmaker Mike Handelman has created a new vision in terror: a family restaurant called Verne Wells Lovecraft! With the help of director Joe Whelski, artists Rocco George and Dylan Mars Greenberg, and musicians hot glue and the gun, this short begins as a commercial for a family dining establishment that soon becomes something far more sinister. If you love Adult Swim’s surrealist brand of comedy, then this is a must-watch.

“Verne Wells Lovecraft was inspired by my time doing spooky improv comedy dinner theater at New York’s Jekyll and Hyde Club. It was an extremely cheesy (but fun) sort of Mel Brooks-ian animatronic experience where the fantasy was the restaurant run by magic, full of public domain characters like Frankenstein, the Mummy, and Wolfman, and of course, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. So for this project, I thought of making my own restaurant using a different set of public domain IP.

Because three is better than one, and it felt so weird and specific to the kind of crazy person who’d open a place like this, I went with Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and HP Lovecraft. And rather than Manhattan, which has been done, I put it in nearby Jersey City, for its own weird history and because New Jersey is kind of a joke unto itself (apologies to anyone from there, at least it’s not Long Island).

Verne, Wells, and Lovecraft, besides being in the public domain, come with such rich worlds and established fans, but the one I’m most drawn to is Lovecraft, because what’s funnier than cosmic horror? I’d love for Verne Wells Lovecraft to become a movie or TV show, but for now, I’m just happy I got to make something cool with my friends that incorporates my own weird sense of humor, puppets, Dylan Mars Greenberg’s amazing 3D world-building, and of course, music!”

Featured in the DreadXP’s Indie Horror Showcase and coming December 2024 – A bizarre road trip buddy comedy meets Appalachian cosmic horror in this psychological horror story full of fear, heart, and strange sights.

After 3 years of development, Duonix Studios is excited to announce that their critically acclaimed 10 Dead Doves is launching on Steam this December. The exact release date will be announced soon, but fans of its unique "Dovecraftion" horror can already have a look at the new teaser trailer that was just featured in DreadXP’s Indie Horror Showcase today!

“One of the most ambitiously cinematic indie narratives I’ve seen in a while – it’s impossible to not be charmed by the back-and-forth between leads Mark and Sean.” ​- Rock Paper Shotgun

“It truly takes something wild, weird, or just plain spectacular, to remind you that actually, yes, horror can still surprise you. 10 Dead Doves is very much its own thing from the off.” ​- DreadXP

“10 Dead Doves (A+ name) makes a strong statement with its staggeringly strong production value, intriguing mystery, and polished gameplay. Simply put, 10 Dead Doves is not to be missed.” - Bloody Disgusting

Since the early days of Doom and Quake, super-fast FPS games – the now-dubbed boomer shooters – have brought us some of the best PC games of all time. Combine that speed and power with one of the most luridly compelling settings, the eldritch unknown of Lovecraftian horror, brought to life in striking comic-strip style, and you have Forgive Me Father 2. One year since developer Byte Barrel launched it into early access, the full 1.0 release arrives today on Steam, and it’s one you’ll definitely want to see for yourself.

Forgive Me Father 2 ticks all the boxes of a great boomer shooter. It’s fast but slick, driving along its relentless action with a pulse-quickening soundtrack. The Lovecraft-inspired setting brings some fantastic atmosphere and design to the world, continuing the tale of the Priest from the first entry. It boasts a look that could stand out in any crowd; a dark fantasy whirlwind of gloriously vibrant comic book shading, lavished with blood and tentacles aplenty. And then of course there’s the guns, the beating heart of all the best FPS games.

It’s safe to say you’re spoilt for choice in this regard. Forgive Me Father 2 hands you some of the most inventive weapon designs I’ve seen in a long while, each lovingly animated with distinctive and bizarre firing styles. What starts out as your run-of-the-mill handguns, revolvers, and shotguns quickly descends into the realm of the eldritch and surreal...

The manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's classic short story The Call of Cthulhu is now available in English, just in time for Halloween. Written and illustrated by Gou Tanabe and published by Dark Horse, The Call of Cthulhu manga is a 288-page paperback with incredible cover art and a distinctive aesthetic that feels fitting for a Lovecraft story. It's very reasonably priced at $20--though Amazon is selling it for $18. A Kindle edition is available for for $12.

The Call of Cthulhu is the second Lovecraft manga release of 2024. In July, Dark Horse published At the Mountains of Madness Deluxe Edition, a 626-page doorstopper collecting both volumes of the classic Lovecraft tale. At the Mountains of Madness Deluxe Edition manga is on sale for $32.58 (was $50) at Amazon...

There is no greater advertisement for the virtues of patience than No Man’s Sky. The game was an underwhelming fart when it first released back in 2016. Now it’s one of the best titles around, thanks to continuing support by developer Hello Games. The company just dropped a surprise Halloween-themed update and it’s pretty darned cool.

The latest release is called The Cursed and it’s filled to the brim with creepy stuff to experience. There’s a whole new “twilight universe” where “players will fight to keep a grip on reality while haunted by visions and voices from another dimension.” Time can shift unexpectedly and players could encounter “spectral anomalies.” There’s also no FTL in this twisted realm, forcing players to strategically use the ancient portal network.

This kind of reality-bending nonsense seems plucked straight out of the Gamecube classic Eternal Darkness or, more recently, the horror fishing sim Dredge. I’m very much here for it...

Yotube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uS6CK0EVsEM&t=6s

CREDIT:

Therapist: Chester Curtis

Executive producers: Cathy Jenkins Dylan Porter blayzinlava Sr.Lemon Darren Ryall Dangerous Dizzles's Second Channel Wes tree Shydrad

Junji Ito Edition

... Stanley has confirmed that ‘Dunwich Horror’ is indeed happening. The announcement was made during a ‘Color Out of Space’ retrospective screening of the film at the Rhode Island International Film Festival, where Stanley revealed ‘Dunwich’ to be his next project.

In ‘Dunwich Horror,’ an invisible creature terrorizes the small and isolated village of Dunwich for several days, killing two families and several policemen, until Armitage, Rice, and Morgan arrive with the knowledge and spiritual weapons needed to kill it.

So, Stanley’s exoneration in French court seems to have helped him in turning his proposed Lovecraft trilogy into a reality. Production List has ‘Dunwich Horror’ now eyeing a June 2, 2025 shoot on the film.

“The Dunwich Horror” will be produced by Ace Pictures Entertainment in collaboration with Side Street Studios, continuing Stanley’s deep dive into the enigmatic world of Lovecraft. In a rather ambitious move, Stanley also revealed that ‘Dunwich Horror’ will be adapted into a two-part film, allowing for a “more expansive and detailed exploration of the story's complex themes and haunting atmosphere”...

It's natural to feel some trepidation about darkness. It's a survival instinct, rooted in the need to protect ourselves from very real predators. Cosmic horror is a little different: The only present danger the blackness of space presents is its inhospitable nature, and that only matters to the scientists (and billionaires) going up there. And yet, we still look at the blackness of space and find things to be afraid of. That's where cosmic horror, the genre pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft, comes from.

We like to think of humanity as being the center of the universe. As far as we can tell thus far, we are. Not in that the Earth is the center around which the universe spins, but in that we haven't yet found any confirmed signs of life and, thus, can really only worry about ourselves. Cosmic horror wonders at our insignificance against the vastness of space--millions of stars, billions of planets, and an almost infinite opportunity for other life to thrive. That life could be larger, older, and more powerful than us. It could be so large, so unfathomably ancient to our comparatively short-lived civilization, that we're as significant to it as ants are to us.

Cosmic horror is also equal parts fascinated and terrified by scientific discovery and the curse of knowledge. It fears the potential of knowing the unknowable and being unable to forget it, and what that can do to the human mind. It's fascinated with madness, superstition, and existential dread.

• Alien (1979)
• Stalker (1979)
• The Thing (1982)
• In The Mouth of Madness (1994)
• Event Horizon (1997)
• Call of Cthulhu (2005)
• The Mist (2007)
• Cabin in the Woods (2011)
• Under the Skin (2013)
• Black Mountain Side (2014)
• Annihilation (2018)
• Color Out of Space (2019)
• The Lighthouse (2019)
• Underwater (2020)
• Glorious (2020)
• The Empty Man (2020)

https://www.tumblr.com/eldritchfriends

Occasionally, an indie film slips through the mainstream and becomes a hit. It's easiest to do in the horror genre, where a low budget doesn't keep fans away (the recent Terrifier franchise is a great example of this, but it goes back to Night of the Living Dead, Carnival of Souls, and many earlier films). In 2023, Older Gods became one of the crossover hits, a microbudget horror movie with a trailer that garnered over 500 thousand views on YouTube (watch the trailer below). Using thick layers of atmosphere and drawing on the terrifying lore from H.P. Lovecraft's body of work, Older Gods managed to create a spellbinding horror mystery with very little money. Now it's streaming for free...

"Older Gods is filled with enough passion to not only look past its small budget, but to offer a more personal horror film with a surprisingly large scale. Older Gods is perhaps one of the best horror movies so far this year, certainly in the Lovecraftian horror genre. It offers a deeply compelling mystery, an undeniably tense atmosphere, satisfying jump scares, and plenty of creepy visuals. If you're a fan of horror and Lovecraft in particular, Only Gods is the movie for you."

"One of Older Gods' major achievements is its haunting atmosphere," continues MovieWeb's review. "From the location, music, cinematography, and pacing, Older Gods is a tense and haunting movie the whole way through. It never eases up; thank God it was only 80 minutes, because it'd almost become oppressive if it was any longer. Filmmaker David A. Roberts does a wonderful job at expressing isolation and anxiety throughout"...

Background

Despite rarely gaining accolades and praise from contemporary and mainstream film critics, Lucio Fulci is a name that needs little introduction among horror fans and aficionados of cult European cinema. Known for creating images of excessive violence that earned him the nickname the "godfather of gore," Lucio Fulci spent much of his career pushing the envelope and, in many cases, tearing it completely to shreds.

Among the best-known contributions from the director is his Gates of Hell trilogy, consisting of The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, and The House by the Cemetery. All three took place in the United States and explored some of the horror traditions associated with their accompanying areas. Set in New Orleans, The Beyond embraces the Southern gothic horror tradition, and the City of the Living Dead contains a subtle nod to H.P. Lovecraft, with the film taking place in the town of Dunwich.

The House by the Cemetery, with its exterior shots being filmed in Scituate, Massachusetts, and the film taking place in and around Boston, makes full use of its location to weave a New England horror story influenced by H.P. Lovecraft's writings. The House by the Cemetery, while featuring many of Fulci’s trademarks that fans of his films instantly recognize, such as quick camera zooms, close-ups of eyes, and depictions of unrestrained violence, is a tale of Victorian evil that exists within the landscapes of New England...

Problematic as his views are today, H.P. Lovecraft is still regarded as one of the giants of horror literature, and his stories have been finding their way to the big screen for decades. But equally interesting are the Lovecraft-adjacent works, movies clearly influenced by his vision of an indifferent universe full of monstrous entities, yet not specifically based on anything the man wrote. John Carpenter, for example, has mined this territory with films like The Thing (1982) and In the Mouth of Madness (1995), while Lovecraft Country addressed Lovecraft’s racism within the context of the cosmic horror he made famous.

One of the best films to derive inspiration from Lovecraft’s work is The Lighthouse, directed by Robert Eggers from a script by Eggers and his brother Max, and released on October 18, 2019. The siblings had discussed the idea around the time Robert was seeking funding for his stunning 2016 folk-horror debut, The Witch, with its success allowing them to finally move forward.

The Lighthouse was initially inspired by an unfinished story fragment, “The Light-House,” by that other early titan of horror and mystery, Edgar Allan Poe. Aside from the title and bleak setting, however, The Lighthouse doesn’t really have any connections to Poe’s tale. As the film opens sometime during the 1890s, two lighthouse keepers arrive on a desolate island off the coast of New England for a four-week tour of duty...

... It’s the more mythic and cosmic aspects that are overtly Lovecraftian, along with the constant stream of ichorous fluids, putrefying bodies, barely glimpsed tentacular horrors, panicked sexual tension, and allusions to gods of the sea, where many of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods slumbered. Some of these merge, as when Pattinson’s Winslow (whose real name, it turns out, is also Thomas, adding the loss of identity to the thematic morass) hallucinates himself beating Dafoe’s Thomas Wake, only for the latter to morph into the Greek sea god Proteus. And then there’s the lantern atop the lighthouse, which will likely remind horror veterans of the “unnatural light” of Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” or the “deadlights” from Stephen King’s It.

There’s a lot going on under the hood of The Lighthouse; in addition to Poe and Lovecraft, Robert Eggers has cited authors like Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, along with playwrights such as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, as instrumental to the film’s flavor and mood. Yet as an original psychological horror in which reality itself is besieged by unseen forces, it remains a Lovecraftian tone poem, an oppressive yet cosmic study of madness, desire, and ancient terror that, minus the author’s more noxious tendencies, could fit easily alongside his best works.

There’s something so unique about Lovecraft. While classic horror tropes like vampires, werewolves, and psychotic serial killers all feel well within the realms of human understanding, Lovecraft’s twisted gods and grotesque monstrosities feel completely alien – comprehensible, yet incomprehensible. It’s a universe I love to see reimagined in videogames, and RailGods of Hysterra is doing just that. From the ominous shadowy Cthulhu in the key art’s background, to the weird train that sports a glowing orange eye and rows of teeth, I’ve fallen for the survival game’s universe hook, line, and sinker.

RailGods of Hysterra is described as a co-op survival game set in a Lovecraftian hellscape. You are a Dreamer, and you’ve awoken bound to your eerie RailGod – the aforementioned living locomotive. As either a five-man squad or a solo traveler, you’ll venture through nightmarish landscapes, abandoned outposts, and cult hotspots, gathering new gear in order to upgrade your RailGod.

Combat looks a little Diablo-esque, with multiple players slinging spells at a poor, unsuspecting crocodile. You’ll have to take down various terrors to fuel your RailGod (or kidnap them, whatever you prefer), helping it transform into the horrific Eldritch fortress that it’s supposed to be...

https://www.tumblr.com/jetremulant

Skyrim, but heavy metal horror. That's how (mostly) solo developer Nate Purkeypile has been pitching The Axis Unseen. And after spending a couple of hours in its Steam Next Fest demo exploring a vast, creepy forest dotted with gargantuan skeletons, while also being hunted down by packs of Werewolves to intense guitar riffs, I can confirm that The Axis Unseen ticks the Skyrim, heavy metal, and horror boxes with ease.

Skyrim's inspiration is immediately obvious when you're first thrust into this mystical open-world, with a trusty bow in hand and the promise of magical powers to come. These similarities perhaps aren't surprising when you learn that Purkeypile is also an ex-Bethesda developer who has worked on the Fallout series, Starfield, and Skyrim itself. While this can make the game look like an ambitious mod for Skyrim at first glance, it doesn't take long for The Axis Unseen's Next Fest demo to unleash its unique folklore-based cosmic horror on you - to terrifying effect...

If you're someone who regularly finds themselves reminiscing fondly about the early days of computer role-playing games, then you might be interested to learn about Cyclopean — a promising new retro RPG from the Islands of Caliph developer Schmidt Workshops that is currently in development for Steam.

The game draws influence from various early role-playing games including Ultima, Questron, and Legacy of the Ancients, and features stunning monochrome graphics and pixellated character designs as well as two perspectives of the game's world that are split between a 2D map display and 3D first-person dungeons.

Much like Schmidt Workshops' previous titles, the title aims to evoke the look and feel of classic role-playing games from the '80s, but this time around, the developer is pairing this presentation with an ample dose of Lovecraftian horror, setting the game in the Great Abyss, a vast underworld that featured across various H.P Lovecraft's short stories...

Penflower Ink. Is a full time artist specialising in RPG art and character portraits. Since 2020 desig games.

https://www.penflower-ink.com/

In this video I'm drawing two cosy, autumn-themed eldritch gods for my own pantheon, and sharing my thoughts on the cosmic horror genre.