Okay, it’s time we have a talk about cosmic horror. Not creaky doors in the dark, or your standard, run-of the-mill jump scares. No, I mean the sort of movies that keep you awake at night, as you lie there and wonder if reality is nothing more than a thin membrane, stretched over vast and unspeakable horrors. Movies that remind us that we humans are basically slightly sophisticated bags of meat holding onto a rock which hurtles through an incomprehensibly enormous void. Cheerful, no?
Cosmic horror, for those not in the know, is all about confronting humanity’s basic insignificance in the face of an indifferent universe. About forces and entities that are so far beyond our understanding that even just perceiving them is enough to shatter our minds like a dropped glass. It’s a subgenre of horror that I still find genuinely frightening, even after decades of watching horror films and reading horror novels!
The play-book for what’s considered “cosmic horror” was written by H.P. Lovecraft, and moviemakers have been trying to translate what he wrote down (all that existential dread) onto the big screen ever since.
So, dig out your old comfort blanket, or cuddle your therapy dog, because I’ve decided to share ten cosmic horror movies remind us that, sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.
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10. X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963)
I’m starting the rundown with X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes. It’s a brilliant cult classic that proves you don’t need a huge budget to mess with your audience’s minds.
Ray Milland stars as Dr. Xavier (no, director Roger Corman does not do subtle). He’s a scientist who develops eye drops which give him the ability to see beyond the normal spectrums of light. It’s a good party trick, except it doesn’t stop. He begins to see more and more, with reality’s layers being peeled back until he’s seeing things that humans were never meant to see.
What makes this Roger Corman movie truly unsettling is how it treats Dr. X’s greater perception as body horror. Xavier’s hunger for knowledge becomes a curse, one that builds beautifully through the movie. To start, he’s seeing through clothes (probably every teen boy’s fantasy), then through walls, then flesh and bone, until… Well, let’s just say he manages to see the machinery of the universe, and it’s not a comforting sight.
The ending is incredibly brutal even now and has sparked a lot of debate through the years. The last line of the movie is a preacher telling the good doctor “If thine eye offends thee…pluck it out!” And so he does, followed by screaming. Perfect existential horror.
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes asks us what happens when our mind tries to process information it just wasn’t designed to handle. And it’s nothing good. It’s a tight, frightening nightmare which shows us that the scariest special effects are sometimes the ones in our imagination.
Where X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) is streaming now:
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963) | PG | 1h 19m
9. The Void (2016)
Watching this love letter to 1980’s practical effects and bizarre Lovecraftian geometry we see what happens when moviemakers obviously grew up reading the right kind of scary literature.
The plot of The Void follows a group of people who are trapped in an (almost) abandoned hospital, surrounded by robed cultists. That already sounds like a bad time but then things inside the hospital begin to get strange. And by strange, I mean warped reality, dimension-bending, “what am I even watching?!” strange.
The Void is not a movie that will hold your hand. Instead, it throws you into the deep end of those incomprehensible cosmic forces and wishes you the best of luck. There are transformation scenes here that make David Cronenberg look timid. We get creatures that seem to exist in too many dimensions at once, and a doctor trying to beat death by digging into forces that really shouldn’t be dug into. Just a normal Tuesday in cosmic horror.
The movie’s commitment to practical effects is a big selling point. Every impossible geometry and grotesque creature are right there on the screen, real and tangible. There really is something about seeing actual, physical effects to make the wrongness hit all the harder. CGI can look overly polished, but when you’re watching a person twist into a thing which shouldn’t exist using puppetry and prosthetics, the lizard part of your brain registers it differently. It tells you “That’s real, it’s happening, and I want to leave now.”
Also, the ending goes full metaphysical and offers no apologies. You’re looking into the wrong horror subgenre if you want concrete answers.
Where The Void (2016) is streaming now:
The Void (2016) | Not Rated | 1h 30m
8. The Color Out of Space (2019)
Nicholas Cage fights a color. That’s the actual pitch and it works brilliantly. Richard Stanley adapted one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most celebrated stories and really nailed the utter weirdness of the source material.
A meteorite lands on a family farm and something is released which isn’t quite matter, isn’t quite energy, or really anything we have words for. It’s a color (or colour, if you hail from my homeland) but it’s also more than that, and it warps everything it touches.
Cage is his usual unhinged self. I mean that as a compliment! In cosmic horror, you need someone who can convincing sell “I’m losing grip on reality.”
The real star, however, is the sense of growing wrongness. Plants go wrong, time feels wrong, space starts looking wrong. The reality the family enjoys starts to slowly corrupt, like a computer file being overwritten by something alien.
The body horror on display in The Color Out of Space is superbly disturbing. There’s a scene involving some of the family members which is honestly hard to watch. It’s not that it’s horrifically gory, it is just so…well, wrong. Bodies are melted together and consciousness is merged in a way that suggests the universe has no mercy. It’s a rough one!
What Color out of Space gets right is the helplessness at the core of cosmic horror. You can’t fight this thing or reason with it. It isn’t evil; that would be too easy. It’s just totally indifferent to humanity and operates on principals our physics can’t explain. You can’t rise up and punch a color! You can only watch as reality is unmade around you. Sweet dreams…
Where The Color Out of Space (2019) is streaming now:
The Color Out of Space (2019) | Unrated | 1h 51m
7. Under the Skin (2013)
Scarlett Johansson is an alien. That’s pretty much all we’re explicitly told and, to be honest, it’s enough.
Under the Skin is an art-house nightmare which follows her character driving around Scotland and luring men to their destruction in scenes which manage to be both absolutely horrifying and beautiful.
When we watch the men follow her back into her black void of a house, we get pure and distilled dread. They slowly sink into nothingness, into something which looks like water but isn’t. They remain suspended in that abyss while she walks on the surface. What happens to them after?
Eventually the movie shows us, and we wish it hadn’t. It’s body horror meeting cosmic indifference. We’re seeing people being processed in the same way we would process cattle, and the creature doing it doesn’t think of them as conscious beings worth its consideration.
What makes Under the Skin cosmic horror instead of regular alien horror is how it uses perspective. We watch something completely inhuman try to navigate our existence. The movie is filled with long and uncomfortable shots that linger a moment too long, sounds that just seem off, and interactions which showcase just how odd human behavior has to look from the outside. We see ourselves through (literally) alien eyes, and we look like scurrying insects.
There’s a scene where Scarlett Johansson’s character is on a beach, watching a family tragedy unfold and doing absolutely nothing that I think is the most unsettling part of this movie. It isn’t showing us a monster; it’s showing how monstrous real indifference looks. The universe doesn’t care about your tragedy. It keeps right on going.
Where Under the Skin (2013) is streaming now:
Under the Skin (2013) | Rated R | 1h 48m
6. The Mist (2007)
Director Frank Darabont took the novella by Stephen King, turned the cosmic horror up to eleven, and then gave us one of the most soul-crushing endings in modern cinema.
A strange mist rolls into a small town, and hidden in that mist are creatures which make absolutely no evolutionary sense. Because they didn’t evolve here, they evolved somewhere else. Somewhere with much different rules.
The Mist starts as a monster movie, and then begins to reveal itself as something more existentially frightening. They aren’t just random made-up creatures, but part of an actual ecosystem in a dimension that humanity accidentality opened a door into. And the kicker is, we’re no longer the apex predator. Not even close. Now, we’re prey. And not even all that impressive prey.
The creatures range from creepy spider things, to tentacled horrors, to something at the end which is so huge, it doesn’t even notice the humans. It’s that final creature, just happily striding through the mist like a walking mountain, which is pure cosmic horror perfection. It isn’t hunting anyone, it’s just here. Existing on the kind of scale that make our own concerns meaningless.
Then there’s the ending. Oh, boy, that ending. I won’t spoil it here in case you haven’t seen it, but it really makes everything that came before it retroactively worse. There’s a bleakness that only cosmic horror can really justify. That sometimes the cruelest thing isn’t the monsters, but the timing. Stephen King himself said he wished he’d written the ending Darabont came up with, and that has to be about the highest praise you can get!
Where The Mist (2007) is streaming now:
The Mist (2007) | Rated R | 2h 6m
5. The Call of Cthulhu (2005)
Try and say “Cthulhu” out loud. I dare you.
This little indie-made gem adapted H.P. Lovecraft’s most famous story as a silent movie in the 1920’s German Expressionism style, and that brave creative choice works incredibly well. Made for around $50,000 (in moviemaking terms, that’s pretty much nothing) and distributed by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, The Call of Cthulhu is way more faithful to the spirit of Lovecraft than any of its big-budget cousins.
The movie follows the structure of the original story: scientists putting together evidence of something terrible and massive lurking just beyond the walls of human perception. There are cults, odd dreams that plague sensitive individuals all over the world, and finally Cthulhu itself is revealed. A being so geometrically wrong, so massive, that even though we see it in grainy black and white, the effect is still unsettling.
This short (only 47 minutes long!) movie understands that cosmic horror works best when atmosphere and suggestion are used instead of explicit gore. Its silent movie format means it has to rely on intertitles and visual storytelling, and those help create the strange and dreamlike quality The Call of Cthulhu has. Events feel disconnected and confused, as though we’re receiving parts of different nightmares from several unreliable narrators. Reality starts to feel slippery.
The best part, I think, is the ending which preserves Lovecraft’s maybe most famous line: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.” That’s not a monster we can defeat. It’s something that was already ancient long before we crawled out of the oceans, and it will be here long after we’ve gone. It’s sleeping now, dreaming down in that underwater city of R’lyeh. And the fact it may wake up one day is a threat that hangs over all of humanity. This film isn’t going to do your insomnia any favors, but it’s a great watch.
Where The Call of Cthulhu (2005) is streaming now:
The Call of Cthulhu (2005) | Not Rated | 47m
4. Event Horizon (1997)
Let’s say someone wanted to make a haunted house movie… But they made the house a spaceship, and it’s haunted because it went to Hell. That’s how you get Paul Thomas Anderson’s Event Horizon. And it’s just glorious. It’s a movie that starts as a sci-fi, and ends up in a place which makes Clive Barker’s Cenobites look cuddly.
The Event Horizon was a ship made to fold space for faster-than-light travel. But when its experimental drive was activated, it did more than fold space. It folded space through somewhere else. And that place was bad. That place made the ship gain something like consciousness and a desire to make humans suffer in ways old Pinhead would applaud.
But where the cosmic horror of Event Horizon comes in is… It wasn’t “Hell,” really. Not as we know it. It was just another dimension, but one with much different physical laws and different entities. The crew perceives it as Hell because their limited human minds are trying to process something that is incomprehensible. The way the ship feeds on their guilt and trauma, the visions they see along with reality becoming negotiable, it’s because they’ve touched something far beyond human understanding.
Sam Neill descends into whatever he becomes, and it’s honestly disturbing. The implication is the ship showed them “everything” and seeing everything broke them totally. That’s peak cosmic horror! Neill’s character Dr. Weir says “Where we’re going, we won’t need eyes to see” for a reason. The moment we observe the true nature of the reality behind our thin, safe little bubble, our meat-computer brains can’t handle it.
There’s pretty extreme gore, (and apparently, the now lost original cut was even more extreme) but what lingers long after it ends is the sense that the crew touched something and that something noticed them. And it was not friendly.
Where Event Horizon (1997) is streaming now:
Event Horizon (1997) | Rated R | 1h 36m
3. In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
When John Carpenter asked “What if H.P Lovecraft was here now and his stories could rewrite reality?” it was really as bonkers as it sounds.
Sam Neill is back, having another awful time with cosmic forces, playing an insurance investigator looking for a missing horror author named Sutter Cane, whose works are apparently causing violence and mass hysteria among his readers. These sorts of things make insurance companies nervous.
The movie’s genius lies in how it plays with the nature of fiction and reality. As Neill’s character is drawn deeper into the mystery, that line between Sutter Cane’s novels and real events start to break down. He ends up in a town that shouldn’t exist (but does) and it’s populated by things that definitely shouldn’t exist and he slowly begins to realize he may be a character in someone else’s story.
The monsters here are real Lovecraftian nightmares; creatures with far too many joints, geometries that hurt the head, and so-called bodies that seem to phase between forms. But the real horror is in the existential stuff.
What if YOU aren’t real, and everything you do is written down? What if your reality is just consensus, and that consensus is starting to change?
There’s a scene where Sam Neill encounters a group of Sutter Cane’s readers. Their minds have been broken by his work and they’re just…waiting. For the world to end, to change, waiting for reality to hurry up and finish collapsing. It’s so unsettling because they’re almost relieved. It’s as though they’ve looked behind the curtain and are ready for the end of the show.
The ending, where we see Neill sitting in an empty cinema, watching himself on the screen while crying and laughing as he realizes his own story was just a set-up for the end of the world? Talk about cosmic horror. Your entire life was a narrative, written by something that doesn’t care about you. And the punchline is entropy.
Where In the Mouth of Madness (1994) is streaming now:
In the Mouth of Madness (1994) | Rated R | 1h 35m
2. The Thing (1982)
Another masterpiece from John Carpenter! It’s a simple premise and he pulls every drop of dread from it. An alien organism which can perfectly replicate any living thing it touches crashes in Antarctica. A small research team finds it and suddenly they can’t trust anyone. Including themselves.
While The Thing is justly celebrated for its practical effects (Rob Bottin’s work is now legend) what makes this cosmic horror is what the creature represents. This isn’t an alien with motivations we can understand. It’s just surviving, not invading. It doesn’t think like us because it doesn’t have a stable “us” to think with. It’s a cancer that spreads by mimicking, and it’s presumably been doing this across the cosmos for who knows how long.
The paranoia is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. But underneath that is a disturbing thought: the Thing may not even be malicious. It’s just going by its nature. It replicates and assimilates because that’s just what it does. It’s an unknowable form of life that is completely incompatible with ours. We can’t reason with it or appeal to it to stop, and if it gets off Antarctica, it’s game over for life on Earth as we understand it.
The ambiguous ending, with Childs and MacReady sitting in the snow, not able to trust each other, shows us cosmic horror pretty perfectly: With no clear victory, or moment of triumph. Just (maybe) two people at the bottom of the world, who know survival may not even be possible, never mind guaranteed.
And the blood test scene still stands as one of the tensest in horror cinema. The Thing can hide itself in your blood? Nightmare fuel.
Where The Thing (1982) is streaming now:
The Thing (1982) | Rated R | 1h 49m
1. Alien (1979)
Another masterpiece, this time from Ridley Scott. It earns the top spot on my list because of how it nailed cosmic horror in a way that ended up defining the genre for decades. Technically, I suppose, it’s another “haunted house movie in space,” with a slasher structure. But it’s also deeply Lovecraftian in ways that aren’t apparent at the start.
H.R Giger created the perfect cosmic horror monster in the Xenomorph. It’s incomprehensible biological perfection, solely designed for killing. Giger’s design is a mix of sexual, biomechanical, and totally alien. It hits all the primal fear parts of our brain while at the same time being something our poor brains can’t quite categorize. Is it biological? Technological? Both? Neither? Even its life cycle, from our perspective, makes no evolutionary sense. And that’s exactly the point.
The real cosmic horror isn’t the actual alien itself. I think it’s what’s behind it. The Space Jockey (or “Engineer,” if you’ve watched Prometheus) lies in that ship, dead, and so large the crew at first think it’s part of the architecture. It’s been there an incredibly long time, fossilized into the pilot seat of a vessel filled with Xenomorph eggs. It’s a single image and tells us everything: there are older civilizations out there, and they’re as dead as the crew is going to be.
The crew of the Nostromo are blue-collar workers who fall into something way above their pay grade. They aren’t equipped to deal with this and, really, who would be? The Company’s ready willingness to sacrifice them shows us another layer of cosmic horror: that human institutions are just as indifferent to individual survival as the universe itself.
And Ash. Oh, dear, Ash. An android who admires the purity of the Xenomorph. He sees humanity as inferior, fragile, and he represents a cold logical perspective that is ‘technically’ correct. Taken from a certain point of view, we are inferior. We’re emotional, easily squashed, and irrational. The scene where his decapitated head is still functioning, spitting out both milk and admiration for the creature, is nightmarish perfection.
Alien works as a cosmic horror movie because it lays out that space is filled with things that can kill you, that ancient civilizations have risen and fallen out there, and our own exploration of the cosmos just means there are new ways to discover how insignificant we really are. We aren’t explorers, really, and not “boldly going” anywhere. We’re potential prey, and we wandered too far from home.
Although the sequels may have turned the Xenomorphs into action movie fodder (yes, I’m looking at you, Aliens… although I still love you) the original movie captures real cosmic horror. It’s one creature, on one ship, and the best technology and ingenuity of humanity just about allow Ripley to survive. And, even then, the thing made it onto the escape shuttle. We didn’t win; we survived by the thinnest margin imaginable.
Where Alien (1979) is streaming now:
Alien (1979) | Rated R | 1h 57m
Which Cosmic Horror Films Scare YOU…?
So, there we have it. Those are what I currently consider the top 10 best cosmic horror movies.
Cosmic horror works as it taps right into something fundamental: our fear of insignificance. These 10 movies remind us that we aren’t special and the universe does not care about us. There are things out there (or in here, or in dimensions we can’t perceive) that we can’t understand or fight. We probably can’t even survive encountering them.
They tear away our comforting illusion that we’re the main characters of reality. Instead, we’re background characters in someone else’s nightmare. Or maybe, more accurately, we’re just small organisms living in a universe with rules we can’t comprehend, never mind control.
But something to take away is a perverse comfort in cosmic horror. If the universe really is vast and indifferent, then those embarrassing moments from high school don’t matter a jot. Any mistakes or failures? Cosmic dust. The ol’ existential dread has a way of putting things in perspective.
So, put one of these movies on, turn the lights out, and enjoy the feeling of your ego dissolving as you stare into the infinite void. It’s cheaper than therapy, and I’d argue (sometimes) more effective.
But keep the light on afterwards. And don’t think too deeply about what might be out there, dreaming between the stars, in dimensions we can’t perceive. Madness lies in that direction.
Or a brilliant movie night. It’s a coin toss, really.
Images for this article were purchased via MovieStillsDB and CineMaterial. The featured image is a free stock photo of a galaxy nebula with cutouts from movie stills from The Mist, In the Mouth of Madness, The Void, X (1963), and The Thing arranged on top.
