Q for week 6

4. Stableford (2007) details the historical formation of Cosmic Horror prior to Lovecraft. Describe in brief this formation and how it affected the Lovecraftian School of Cosmic Horror which would soon become the gold standard. Can you see any of these historical movements having an influence in The Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Colour out of Space?

Lovecraft school of witchcraft and wizardry. No, sorry. Lovecraft school of weird fiction!

Stableford (2007) writes about H.P. Lovecraft and his works of Cosmic Horror and how the genre developed over the years. Lovecraftian fiction is simply explained, stories where the horror arises from knowledge that are too much to handle, though Lovecraft was not satisfied by this and wanted to take his work to the next extreme level.
Clark Ashton Smith helped Lovecraft transition from cosmic fear to a more detailed, full-fledged notion of Cosmic Horror. Lovecraft and Smith pioneered the hybridization of horror and sci-fi, and it was later taken further by Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long.
Lovecraft wrote The Color out of Space in 1927 which makes Cosmic Horror manifest as a kind of ancient, parasitic sheen.
I’ll come back to Lovecraft in a bit but before that I want to talk about some of the other things and authors that influenced the Cosmic Horror phenomenon and I want to start with the sublime.
The sublime originates from the fundamental emotion of astonishment and Stableford (2007) writes that according to Edmund Burke sublimity is associated with danger, power, vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence, vastness and so on. Sublimity always have an element of horror.
Scientific discoveries such as Newtons conception of the universe and the discovery of the Milky Way played a huge part in feeding the writers imaginations. Proto-Meteorogist Adam Walker’s notion that the world of ordinary sensory experience, mundane time calculation and social interaction were nothing, but a network of appearances was also a contribution to the Cosmic Horror development.
Stableford writes on about how the tradition of Cosmic Horror fiction can be seen as a heroic attempt to communicate the uncommunicable, “by suggesting—in the absence of any possibility of explicit description—the sheer enormity of the revelation that would be vouchsafed to us, were we ever granted permission to see and conceive of the world as it really is, rather than as it appears to our senses: deflated, diminished, and domesticated.”
Next up is the Romanticism’s rebellion against “Classism”, who took many forms, the most outstanding is the nostalgic interest in the fantastic and folkloristic and “its championship of the spontaneity of psychological and aesthetic responses against the imposed order and discipline of formal representation.”
Then we have the Gothic Horror Fiction which is one of the main extensions into prose fiction.
Stableford points out that Romanticism were a good breeding ground for developing a type of Cosmic Horror who weren’t just supernatural, but also embodied a new exaggerated sense of sublimity and attitude. A good example of this is Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Speaking of Mary Shelly, she was one of several authors who helped push the progress forwards, some of the others were Robert Browning, Edward Bulwer Lytton and Edgard Allan Poe. We also have the work of Gustave Flaubert who presumably inspired what Stableford describes as one of the 19^th centuries most striking accounts of existential breakthroughs of Cosmic Horrors: Jules Richpin’s La Machine à métaphysiqe or The Metaphysical Machine.
Some other influences and inspirational fountains were of course opium and other types of drugs who helped feed the writers imagination.

Lastly Stableford talks about the works of the Lovecraftian School. Now I’d like to mention that Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos were continued by his disciples, in fact he encouraged people to use his motifs in their own work.
The Lovecraftian School continued it’s work but moved from Cosmic Horror to a more intimate form of psychological stress. It became pointless to them to describe the indescribable, it was to repetitive and ex-Lovecraft authors such as Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch became more effective when they moved away from Lovecraft’s template.
The arrival of pulp sci-fi switched added an ideological force and the wonder component who used to be horror was switched out with the more important aspect of the modern experience of the sublime.
Other influences were Olaf Stapleden and John W. Campbell, who took the work in a different direction. Pierre Teilhard’s The Omega Point and Frank Tipler’s reconfiguration of it also triggered responses in the world of sci-fi writers.

The Colour our of Space is a psychedelic Cosmic Horror film where we watch the characters slowly lose their mind. We see some classic Lovecraft elements in the monstrous blobs of various animals and humans fused together into something indescribable and of course in the colourful light that can’t be explained, “not like any colour I’ve ever seen before.” The film shows the hybridization of horror and sci-fi that I talked about earlier but also plays more on the psychological aspects of cosmic horror. We see elements of the sublime in how the family is isolated from the rest of the world (solitude), there is an obvious danger and power they can’t understand or fight against, and we find darkness both in the sense of scenes set at night but also in the characters.
The scientific progress and discoveries a about the universe who inspired various writers can be seen in the ‘bad guy’ who is an alien being or presence if you like. Then again you could argue that the bad guy is actually the human main characters, considering how the ‘thing’ draws out the worst in them and they become increasingly more aggressive towards each other as the movie progresses.
We also see the addition of psychological stress as the movie goes on, the characters are pushed closer to the edge as the entities power over them grows stronger. There is no clear understanding of what the colour/creature is, what it wants or where it actually came from, although we do get a look of it’s home planet which is a nightmare-ish place full of worm-like tentacles. Tentacles or roots are a repeated element in the movie together with horrific scenes where people are melted together with each other. People die and come back to life and are in the end absorbed by the colour.