Category: Week 6 Questions – Horror

What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in both The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space?

Cosmicism is a philosophy that was developed by H.P. Lovecraft and had a significant presence in his work. The idea of cosmicism is “that there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence.” That there were eons before us and there will be eons after us, we are just a temporary spec of dust on a planet (C. R. WILEY, 2017). Cosmicism is used very effectively in Lovecraft’s work to convey dread. 

The Shadow over Innsmouth was written in 1931 but publicised later due to Lovecraft’s issues he had with it. Despite Lovecraft’s dislike for the story it still conveys dread through cosmicism. The story has many implications that stick with the reader after they have finished reading it. The first is that Robert is able to let go of his humanity. At the end of the story despite knowing he is going to lose his humanity and become a Deep One, he is able to accept this and even look at it optimistically. It implies through cosmicism, that we as human beings are able give up on something that should be a core part of ourselves, that we are so insignificant, that an unknown force can simply take away our self worth and values. The next implication is that the deep ones are able to make humans betray each other, that our bond as a species can be easily broken by the unknown, and make us prioritize them over our own kind. The next implication is that Robert had no control over his life from the very beginning. It was an inevitability that Robert was helpless to stop regardless as to whether he found out about it or not. According to cosmicism, there is no god, and the other humans are more inclined to take the side of the deep ones then robert, meaning there is absolutely nothing that can save Robert from his fate.

This trend of cosmicism in lovecraft’s work continues in The colour out of space. Some of the implications here are similar to The Shadow over innsmouth when cosmicism is considered, such as the humans being powerless against the creature, Gardner is unable to protect his family, his livestock, or himself, and the people who go to the farm are equally powerless and all they can do is run away. The alien was simply able to impose itself on humanity without consequence. The humans being unable to perceive the creature, or not being able to process it without feinting is another returning feature. In this story we can only perceive the alien as being a color, no shape, or size or texture, a color is all our brains can process. The last dread setting idea is that the odds of what happened to the Gardners was a cosmically incalculable number, the meteor could have landed in another state, or country, or planet, or could have ended up in a completely different galaxy. Yet it landed in the gardners farm, the implication is that no matter how unlikely it is in the cosmic expanse, it could still happen to you. 

C. R. WILEY. (2017, August 24). Lovecraft’s Cosmicism: What it Is, How It Works, and Why It Fails. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/gloryseed/2017/08/lovecrafts-cosmicism-works-fails/

Lovecraft, H. P. (1927). The color out of space.

Lovecraft, H. P. (1936). The shadow over innsmouth

Question 2: What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in both The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space?

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the nature and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.”-H.P Lovecraft

Cosmicism is a word to describe the followers of the Cthulhu Mythos which stems from H.P Lovecraft’s world of Cosmic Horror. The philosophy of cosmic horror focuses on the general fear of mankind’s insignificance in the greater universe. According to the ethos there is no divine presence or God and humans are completely inconsequential in the greater cosmos and landscape of creation as a whole. Those who follow the Cthulhu Mythos have an underlying belief of cosmic pessimism. It is about the scale and vastness of the cosmos, filling human’s with the dread felt when we realize our limitations as human beings.  

Unlike other horror genres which use, monsters, murderers and slasher modalities, cosmic horror uses anthromorphic figures that change shape and leaves slime in its wake. It is more abstract and elusive in nature. It leaves its victims unable to cope with the experience.  It creates existential dread. As Stableford (2007) says, “At first glance ‘‘cosmic’’ seems to be used here merely as a replacement term for ‘‘supernatural,’’ but the substitution also implies a particular psychological attitude to the supernatural.”

In the Colour out of Space, Lovecraft (1927) he uses language to build tension and unease from very early on in the piece, “the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep’s secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.” It continues, “When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries.”

His story continues to drop in mysterious circumstances of the area with the arrival of a meteorite that was constantly warm and glowed at night. It then disappeared completely. Later the story continues by referencing a well that seems to feed on the people until it grows strong enough to fly away into the sky. “It was no longer shining out, it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.” The narrator leaves us with questions… “What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos.” This uses another aspect of cosmic horror, the unknowable.

Again there is building on tension and of the unexplained with mental anguish as a result in a quote from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth” (1936)“I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination.”

Furthermore the narrator discusses the otherworldly mutated and transformed population of Innsmouth, “Only a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity—changes involving osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull—but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole.”

In conclusion the overall sense of dread is in play in both H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space. This is done with mysterious unexplained otherworldly agents affecting earth. The narrators of both stories are left with a mental unease and sense of dread.

References:

Joshi, S. (2007) “The Cthulhu Mythos”. Icons of Horror and the Supernatural. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp97-198.

Lovecraft, H.P.(1927)The Color Out Of Space.

Stableford, B. (2007) “The Cosmic Horror”. In Joshi, S. (2007) Icons of Horror and the Supernatural. Greenwood Publishing Group, pp65-96.

Lovecraft, H.P. (1936) “The Shadow over Innsmouth” by H. P. Lovecraft. https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/soi.aspx. Accessed November 20, 2020.

1. Reyes (2014), describes Body Horror as being a “fictional representation of the body exceeding itself or falling apart, either opening up or being altered past the point where it would be recognised by normative understandings of human corporeality.” How do The Colour out of Space and Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth make use of this definition to explore themes of the unknown?

Cosmicism is a literary philosophy that everything we do- as humans- is insignificant compared to the vast unknown universe. That “there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a God, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence.” (Nguyen, 2016)

Cosmicism capitalises on that feeling of helplessness in horror, that no matter what we do it’s all in vain. Some horrors that get the feeling of helplessness right are: ‘It Follows’ from 2014, a teenage girl finds herself being stalked by a demon that can shape shift and appears invisible to those around her, but it is restricted by it’s inability to run. The demon can only pursue her at a slow pace and thats how ‘It Follows’ hits that sense of dread perfectly, by having our main character be unable to rest while the demon is in pursuit.

‘Final Destination’, where the cast survives a catastrophic event that should’ve ended their lives, Death itself comes to finish the job. Having a omnipotent being as your enemy is horrifying, however it isn’t a physical being; you don’t have the luxury of knowing when it’ll happen, you simply have to wait as you watch the main cast attempt to outsmart a God.

The classic ‘Blair Witch Project’ has the sense of dread in spades. Not even being aware whether the characters are messing with each other, if they’re that inept, or that there really is a witch in the woods.

With ‘The Colour out of Space’ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’, they specifically gather dread from the anxiety of outer space. The fact that we don’t know everything that is out there, and maybe never will. However, this anxiety only works if there is an underlying fear about the universe within the audience, and if there is not- if the audience does not believe there is anything otherworldly to discover- then this literary philosophy falls flat.

References:

Lovecraft, H. P. (1936). The Shadow over Innsmouth.

Reyes, X. A. (2014). Body gothic: Corporeal transgression in contemporary literature and horror film. University of Wales Press.

Today, P. (2017, September 28). Lovecraft’s Cosmicism: What it is, how it works, and why it fails. Retrieved from https://www.patheos.com/blogs/gloryseed/2017/08/lovecrafts-cosmicism-works-fails/

Nguyen, T. (2016). History of Humans. EnCognitive.com.

What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in both The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space?

The Shadow over Innsmouth, follows a young man as he travels through towns, not really knowing where he is going. He finds himself taking a detour through the dead town of Innsmouth, where the locals are quiet and keep to themselves and the town acts as if there is a curse that hangs over it. During the short story the young man finds himself stuck in his hotel room for one night where he escapes away from a town of things that aren’t human but are hunting hi, for reasons unknown other that he is passing through the town.

The idea of cosmicism is that there is no higher power out there due to H.P Lovecraft’s ideas of horror. The sense of dread conveyed is the idea that the young man, is being pursued by creatures God did not make, creatures so unnatural that it sues terror to contribute fear into both the character and audience that if the young man does not escape and make it out of that town by morning then the ‘fish-head’ creatures that are hunting him will cause him either death or pain if not both. The sense of dread is created with every close call and the overall build up of the story as we learn about the town and how the town and its people have been exiled by surrounding towns due to its unfriendly nature and odd aura that plays on the idea of terror due to our imaginations.

The Colour out of space (Lovecraft) conveys a sense of dread when the main character sees a world through different eyes that shows no humanity and no higher power coming to save them and its as the readers realize that there is little to no hope is when the dread sets in. The idea is that hope is wiped out and replaced by fear and confusion.

References:

Lovecraft, H.P. (n.d.) The Colour out of Space: Summary & Analysis. (2016, August 16). Retrieved from https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-color-out-of-space-by-hp-lovecraft-summary-analysis.html  

What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in The Colour out of Space?

Cosmicism is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s idea that humanity and what we do are mere illusions, that “Human consciousness, human civilization, humane values, and all the rest, add up to a bubble that surrounds us and keeps us from seeing that the cosmos is wholly indifferent to us.” (Patheos). The concept of how small and insignificant humans are to the sheer size and age of the cosmos and cosmicism tries to use existential dread to provoke fear into its audience. Lovecraft used Cosmicism a lot in his stories, the most famous of which would be, “ The Call of Cthulu”.

Lovecraft’s horror doesn’t use much blood or gore, it uses the fear of the unknown, where he would introduce an antagonist that was immense in power, an existence what was as old as the earth, that had no malice but had enough power to destroy humanity without any regard for resistance. Lovecraft’s “monsters” would view humans the same way we would view ants, as either; something to admire from afar, or as a minor inconvenience that posed no threat, which could be dealt with by flicking it away, “Cosmicism is rooted in the absence of God and, ultimately, any sort of morality and meaning tethered to such a Presence.”(Duran, 2016). The Colour out of Space film based on H.P. Lovecraft’s story, directed by Richard Stanley, it follows Nathan Gardner portrayed by Nicholas Cage as he moves to the countryside with his whole family after a health scare, there he sees a colourful and bright meteorite that falls on their land. The meteorite gradually reveals itself as the film progresses, to be an evil entity from beyond our concept of reality that corrupts and warps whatever it touches with its colour.

In Colour out of Space, we see the usual conventions of darkness, and muted colour in horror completely ignored, as bright colours are not only used, but they represent the main villain of the film. The main antagonist was simply too large for the Gardner family to face as the entity could corrupt anything it touched, including plants, insects and animals. Near the end of the film, we see Ward played by Elliot Knight, returning to the Gardner farm, which has now been completely overtaken by the Colour, he sees Livinia who has been also taken over by the colour, all the while the Colour is trying to open a gateway to its home above the property. When Livinia touches Ward, both he and the audience are connected to the Colour, and it shows its homeworld, which looked like a bunch of abstract colours, we then see millions of worm-like creatures writhing around, with several giant worm-like creatures moving towards against monument, which looks like an eye which is also seen as a symbol on Livinias forehead. Here the audience is able to see what the colour had in store for humanity and that we would be hopeless in the face of such unimaginable power.

References
Reimann, T. (2020, February 28). ‘Color Out of Space’ Ending Explained: Color Me Bad. Retrieved from https://collider.com/color-out-of-space-ending-explained-easter-eggs/#:~:text=Based on the short story, from beyond space and time.

Wiley, C. R. (2017, September 28). Lovecraft’s Cosmicism: What it Is, How It Works, and Why It Fails. Retrieved November 6, 2020, from https://www.patheos.com/blogs/gloryseed/2017/08/lovecrafts-cosmicism-works-fails/

Duran, M. (2016, October 31). The Real Horror of Lovecraft’s Cosmicism. Retrieved November 6, 2020, from https://www.mikeduran.com/2016/10/31/the-real-horror-of-lovecrafts-cosmicism/

What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in The Colour out of Space?

Cosmicism is the literally philosophy developed and used by the American author H.P Lovecraft in his weird philosophic horror fiction. According to Duran (2016) the philosophy of cosmicism that Lovecraft established states that “there is no recognizable divine presence, such as a god, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence, and perhaps are just a small species projecting their own mental idolatries onto the vast cosmos.” In other words; Humans are insignificant in comparison to the cosmos and the cosmos is too significant that it is incomparable to anything.

Lovecrafts used the following principles to produce and create his universe:

• No divine presence in the universe.
• Human beings are insignificant in intergalactic existence.
• Human beings are like insects when referred to on a universe level.
• The universe is ancient including the stars.
• Characters can realize they are too powerless to build change. (Klu, 2019).

Slatten (2016) claims that many critics and scholars believed cosmicism was an important factor in Lovecrafts fictional universe; Cthulu Mythos. The stories are mature horror fiction based on an ancient time where earth was inhabited by something utterly alien-intelligent that was inconceivable and unexplainable to the human mind and science (Slåtten, 2016). Lovecrafts stories are all connected by non-human beings, fictional characters and reoccurring themes that evoke horror by relying on ‘the insignificance of humanity in the universe’ (Slåtten, 2016) and Duran (2016) believes that cosmos horror is also about the human beings physical and mental fragility. Lovecraft professed that ‘All his tales are based foundation of which human laws, interests and emotions have no validity or worth in the vast cosmos’ (Slåtten, 2016). Lovecraft created these stories as he believed that there was much more to the world, life, universe than simple human beings, he was curious for more and hungered to explore the hidden and unknown (Duran, 2016). “Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability” (H.P. Lovecraft Quotes, n.d).

The philosophy of cosmicism conveys a sense of dread in 2019 film adaption of Lovecrafts The Colour out of Space by introducing an extra-terrestrial entitie known as ‘The Colour’  the human family have no knowledge of what it is and what is to come. ‘The Colour’ took control of not only the characters sanity but also the film as a whole. What I mean by this is that ‘The Colour’ became the central character of the film and everything that happened, the sequences and the people in the film all became revolved around it. This initiated fear the characters couldn’t anticipate what would happen and neither could the audience. This leads me to the deforming of organic matter, this was completely unexpected and very intense to watch. Something people assumed to be insignificant and nothing ended up being powerful, monstrous and terrifying. ‘The Colour’ distorted time, changed the characters perception of reality and drew them into this void of uncertainty while living in solitude and being isolated. Then they were tortured and killed one by one all while insanity and madness were haunting them because of the contaminated water. The philosophy of cosmicism was crafted implausibly well in this film. There was no God visible aiding the characters, ‘The Colour’ proved that it had immense power over the human beings and environment, it showed humans were insignificant, weak and helpless creatures and the characters realized that they were powerless towards this unknown entity and could not change anything. ‘The Colour out of space’ was an exceptional movie that shared with us the fear of the unknown and unexpected. 

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” (H.P. Lovecraft Quotes, n.d).

Duran, M. (2016, October 31). The Real Horror of Lovecraft’s Cosmicism. Retrieved September 03, 2020, from https://www.mikeduran.com/2016/10/31/the-real-horror-of-lovecrafts-cosmicism/

Greenham, E. (2013). Neocosmicism: God and the Void. Retrieved September 03, 2020, from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c3c2/4ee0847fdbbf06ec861243faecf37cec3055.pdf

H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (Author of The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories). (n.d.). Retrieved September 03, 2020, from https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/9494.H_P_Lovecraft

Klu, R. (2019, March 04). Principals of Cosmicism (Lovecraftian Fiction). Retrieved September 03, 2020, from https://booksandmor.com/2019/03/06/principals-of-cosmicism-lovecraftian-fiction/

Slåtten, K. Ø. (2016, May). Humans in a Hostile Cosmos. Science, Cosmicism and Race in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Retrieved September 05, 2020.

What is the philosophy of cosmicism and how is it used to convey a sense of dread in both The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space?

Cosmicism is a developing subgenre of horror fiction and the philosophy of cosmicism is developed by the American writer H. P. Lovecraft, the philosophy is that “there is no recognizable divine presence, such as God, in the universe, and that humans are particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence.”(https://www.yourdictionary.com/cosmicism). More specifically, this philosophy indicates that human is not a significant existence in the universe as well as the existences of religions and beliefs. The insignificant of humanity probably is the most attractive and prominent theme in this philosophy of sub-genre. Lovecraft once described his worldview as that nothing is eternal on this planet including humanity, humans’ judgment and social norms and criteria toward good, evil, morality and immorality are only the ‘Victorian fictions’ (Duran, 2016).

The idea of cosmicism can be found in many of Lovecraft’s collections. For instance, both work ‘The colour out of space’ (Lovecraft, 1927) and ‘The shadow over innsmouth’ (Lovecraft, 1936) reveal a sense of fear and dread due to the unknown or mystic of the universe. It is not difficult to see how insignificant humans and other lives on this planet from ‘The colour out of space’, species mutate, humanity and humans are crashed due to that accident. Moreover, dread and fear are presented in ‘The shadow over innsmouth’ by describing the hybrid creatures that humans and ‘Deep ones’ produced, the disturbing appearances, capable of atrocity and unknown facts evoke the fear from people. Eventually, the narrator goes to madness after he found out that the ancestors of his family are also the hybrid production with the ‘Deep ones’. ‘The shadow over innsmouth’ also represents the insignificant of humans and their dread of unknown and mysterious. 

References

Duran, M. (2016). The real horror of Lovecraft’s cosmicism. https://www.mikeduran.com/2016/10/31/the-real-horror-of-lovecrafts-cosmicism/

Lovecraft, H. P. (1927). The color out of space.

Lovecraft, H. P. (1936). The shadow over innsmouth.

Your dictionary. (n.d.). Cosmicism definitions. https://www.yourdictionary.com/cosmicism

3. According to Joshi (2007), a tale from the Cthulhu Mythos has several defining features that occur regularly throughout Lovecraft’s work. What are these features and how are they used in The Shadow Over Innsmouth? Furthermore, can you see any of these features being used in The Colour out of Space?

Joshi mentions that there are several defining features that can be seen explicitly within Lovecraft’s Mythos. The imaginary New England topography used throughout Lovecraft’s works, the study of occult books, both old and new, by academic researchers, the mention or the explicit interactions between humanity and the “gods” and the perception of the cosmic fear (Joshi, S. T., 2007). These themes can be identified within Lovecraft’s works of The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Colour out of Space.

Innsmouth was described by Lovecraft as a depopulated seaport in which the neighbours believed it to be “an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.” (Lovecraft, H. P., 1936). Lovecraft goes on with the ticket agent who spends a lengthy amount of time recounting Innsmouth’s history, landscape and geology, focusing upon the Devil Reef where the elderly of the neighbouring Newburyport told stories about devils which could be seen beneath the water “darting in and out” (Lovecraft, H. P., 1936) of the reef tunnels and caves. Furthermore, within The Colour out of Space, Lovecraft describes Arkham and its surrounding terrain in vivid detail, from the rising and wild hills, the valleys of deep woods and the narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically. Lovecraft uses the descriptions of roads overgrown and replaced and the way in which the old had been replaced by the new (Lovecraft, H. P., 1927). By doing this, Lovecraft has used the extensive descriptions of imagined New England to establish feelings of otherness and isolation, creating a framework in which the small and narrow world of his topography becomes a character and an antagonist within itself without personifying it completely.

In The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the protagonist is a studious man on a journey to explore New England as his coming of age, we follow him as he spends an entire evening pulling up as much information on Innsmouth as he can at the Newburyport Public Library as well as attempting to interview locals at stores, open garages and even the fire station in the hopes of discovering more about the mysterious seaport town but is met with cold shoulders and “obscure suspicion” (Lovecraft, H. P., 1936.) throughout his quest of discovery, demonstrating the second theme seen within Lovecraft’s works of the use of both ancient and modern occult books or study and the way in which the protagonist is demonstrated as having an inquisitive and rational mind. Meanwhile, the protagonist of The Colour Out of Space is a surveyor sent to study the new reservoir of Arkham where the locals told him stories about the legends of witches and evil that plagued the area (Lovecraft, H. P., 1927). This protagonist is once more described as a level-headed and rational man, who’s interest in the area stems from an academic or scholarly perception.

Furthermore, throughout Lovecraft’s Mythos is the perception of “cosmic fear” (Sederholm, C., & Weinstock, J. A., 2015) which is used often to negate the idea of human exceptionalism in the face of the immensity and power of the unknown. In Lovecraft’s essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, he says “the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” (Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror 12). This is demonstrated within The Shadow Over Innsmouth with the introduction of the undersea hybrid creatures known as The Deep Ones which acts as the sense of otherness, difference and alien unknowing that is prevalent within the Cthulhu Mythos. Now, while The Colour Out of Space does not cite creatures from the deep sea, it does exhibit the crashing of a meteorite which lands on a farmers property in which a mysterious entity or entities begin to manipulate and change the landscape and those whom reside upon it eventually leading to the mental instability and final death of the humans that had come into contact with it (Mastropierro, L., 2009). The sense of the otherness corrupting that which was once normal and right into something maddening and otherworldly is another demonstration of one of Lovecraft’s trademarks within his Mythos.

References

Joshi, S. T. (2007). Icons of horror and the supernatural: An encyclopedia of our worst nightmares. Greenwood.

Lovecraft, H. P. (1927). The color out of space. Amazing stories.

Lovecraft, H. P. (1936). The shadow over innsmouth. Visionary Publishing Company.

Lowell, M. (2004). Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, The Explicator, 63:1, 47-50, DOI: 10.1080/00144940409597257

Mastropierro, L. (2009). The theme of distance in the tales of H. P. Lovecraft. Hippocampus Press.

Norris, D. (2018). The void. Hippocampus Press.

Sederholm, C., & Weinstock, J. A. (2015). Introduction: Lovecraft now. International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.

The philosophy of cosmicism developed from the materialistic nature of Lovecraft, an american writer. Lovecraft’s works consisted of cosmic horror stories that integrated weird phenomena of alien miscegenation and astral possession.  As a result of Lovecraft’s materialistic nature, the philosophy of cosmicism developed. The philosophy is “a fundamental indifference to humanism and a lack of belief in a God, akin to atheism, recognizes death as an inevitability; for at the center of Cosmicism is a belief in a universe indifferent to the concerns of humankind (Price, “Lovecraft’s Artificial Mythology” 248). According to Lovecraft’s fiction, humans are but part of an ongoing cycle, they are not the last species on planet earth. Lovecraft also states “my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large” (Joshi, 2007, p. 103).

Lovecraft uses cosmicism to create body horror within the ‘Shadow Over Insmouth’ through ‘the deep ones’. The deep ones are a race of human-fish hybrids that are stripped of their humanity, until they essentially look like fish. They are referred to as the other, following the interbreeding with them.  The characteristics of the deep ones include the ability of being immortal.  Their features are repulsive with bulging eyes. Reyes describes body horror as  “fictional representation of the body exceeding itself or falling apart, either opening up or being altered past the point where it would be recognised by normative understandings of human corporeality.” (Reyes, 2014) The narrator as well as protagonist shares family ties with the ‘deep ones’ which boggles his mind, unable to come to terms with  his bond to the ‘other’, resulting in his insanity. (Snyder,2017) Accordingly, cosmiccm is depicted through the protagonist as well as the readers, who experience a feeling of dread as the protagonist despises his transformation into the ‘other’. He begins to question who the other really is, and whether he has been the other all along. The unfathomable is something the readers now have to fathom, they are filled with apprehension when realising they are one with extra terrestrial and gruesome creatures. Once again, Lovecraft makes readers aware of the unknown and the endless unknown creatures, and dread that the unknown brings.

The purpose of cosmicism is to reinforce  dread and terror that already exists according to the laws of science. Lovecraft didn’t write supernatural horror as  he believed that the cosmos within science was terrifying enough. The Color Out of Space uses cosmicism through hinting at signs and images of death and the unknown.  Within ‘The Color Out of Space’ the fate of the patriarch of the Gardner family suggests an outcome worse than the fear of death; the fear of the unknown. (Davis, 2018). The fear of the unknown is exhibited by the meteorite that landed in Arkham, in which residents are completely unaware of its existence or purpose, depicting a force or entity  from the unknown; outside the earth. Human beings have limited understanding of the cosmos evidence for the insignificant place we hold in the grand scheme of the universe (Stableford, 2007). The overwhelmingly colorful appearance of the meteor causes destruction through environmental mutations, and feeds off the energy of living things, eventually leading the  members of the Gardner family insane to the point of perishing.  This sort of event derives from the philosophy of cosmicism in which there is a suggestion that the universes outside of earth contain far more superior entities that humans can not fathom, such as the meteorite. The implementation of colors beseech a hostile cosmic force that is extremely difficult to comprehend on a human-level, thus the first response it is met with is far from fascination, and awe but rather  a sense of fear and dread of the oblivion, ultimately resulting in insanity. (Slaten, 2016). This event perfectly sums up feelings of dread and terror, as one tends to feel substantially insignificant in comparison to a universe filled with unknowns that we have no knowledge of. 

The fear of the unknown is a recurring theme that Lovecraft uses within his works. His philosophy of cosmicism is used within ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Color Out of Space In order to portray the unknown inevitabilities of the universes, while ingraining terror and dread within the hearts of readers.  

References

Lovecraft, H. P. (1927). The color out of space.

Jones, N. (2020). Lovecraftian Horror Video Lecture. Retrieved from AUT Blackboard.

Lovecraft, H. P. (1936). The shadow over innsmouth.

Reyes, X. (2014). Body Gothic: Corporeal Transgression in Contemporary Literature and Horror Film. University of Wales Press.

Wikipedia. (n.d.). The shadow over innsmouth. Retrieved october 5, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_over_Innsmouth