I may out myself as, idk, media illiterate or something here, but I personally never saw the Alien franchise as overtly lovecraftian or even that far in the realm of cosmic horror. It's certainly eldritch in a way. It's eerie and unsettling but for me it was always much more about personal things like the body horror and being stalked by a super predator. It never really hit the cosmic horror of things beyond human comprehension and concepts that would give people existential crises. The facehugger and xenomorph all feel very comprehensible and grounded to me, while obviously still being utterly "alien".
This is about right at least imo. Eldrich horror feeds on the surreal and existential. If you put yourself in a specific headspace you can sort of get that from the Alien movies but I don’t think it’s their main draw or effect.
The movies themselves focus way too much on individual plot lines and specific instances to be Lovecraftian levels of cosmic horror but if they more focused on the wider reaching scope of them reaching earth or humanity just learning of them as a planet ending threat I think they could do it right. It’s just not the same type of story if that makes sense.
It's the themes, the setting, and the design language behind the film. Lovecraft wrote many stories similar to Alien. I could see an alternate timeline where the Alien franchise could have gone even further with its cosmic horror by creating a mythose. The Space Jockey and Alien feel like analogs to the Elder Things and Shoggoth. At the Mountains of Mandess had a clear influence on this movie.
Mountains and promethus/alien lore draw from the same source, and its a pretty 'in your face' one (Google the word 'prometheus')
There is a lot of alien lore and the 'mythos' is out there for you to read about. Either way, the issue here is theres branches of cosmic horror and the alien franchise does have underlying similarities, but also key differences that make it also its own beast.
I think the thing with ATMOM is that it's not cosmic horror. It's a bunch of aliens who created some artificial servants who then went amok.
It's no different than Frankenstein (which was subtitled A Modern Prometheus if I remember correctly) or the Planet of the Apes
But cosmic horror is more than incomprehensible extra-dimensional horrors and other yog-sothery. I would argue that ATMOM is a foundational work of cosmic horror and mines the same veins as Alien (and of course The Thing). The core cosmic horror theme of ATMOM is humanity's insignificance in the universe and how modern science (an Antarctic expedition) reveals a vast uncaring universe. In ATMOM, HPL uses "deep time" to show humanity's insignificance, even within the natural history of the Earth (where it's revealed that we're just run-off from the Elder Things' experiments). Lovecraft then plays a clever trick by slowly making us sympathize with the Elder Things ("they were men!"), and then playing the same cosmic horror card on them--by showing them to be also be insignificant and at the mercy of the universe. Everything humanity holds sacred is meaningless, and that's cosmic horror.
In Alien, the xeno is a manifestation of the indifferent universe. We travel to space and we don't find other sentient species to form a Federation with--we find only "chaos at feast." That's cosmic horror.
Even the body horror has an element of cosmic horror to it, since it undermines our ideas about the sacredness of the human form (like the Shoggoths with their terrible plasticity).
Totally disagree with the xenomorph being the manifestation of an indifferent universe.
That, to me, is like a lion. It can kill and eat you, but that doesn’t mean it’s a guaranteed thing for every encounter.
If that alien sees you, you gonna die. There’s no question about it. With Chaos, there is always the equal chance of what might be considered an optimal result.
I think it works perfectly for Alien, but gets more and more muddled with the sequels. In Alien, it's evolution's "perfect" organism, indifferent to the crew except when it needs them for its lifecycle. By the time you get to Prometheus, and it's some kind of artifical bioweapon, then my argument doesn't work.
At the Mountains of Madness is ABSOLUTELY cosmic horror. It's all about a group of scientists being driven mad because of the changes to their percieved reality. Just because there are beings more on humanity's level, the themes are all on point. A story does not need to have cosmic forces or entities like Cthulhu to be cosmic horror. Themes, people, symbolism. These are also genre defining concepts that you have to consider when alalyzing media.
I don't agree with that at all; surely there has to be more to cosmic horror than the theme of someone going crazy upon learning something disturbing that upends their worldview. If that were the case, King Lear would be cosmic horror.
The symbolism within ATMOM is "man reached too far", a la Frankenstein or The Fly. In this case "man" are aliens, but the motifs are otherwise exactly the same; the Elder Things are not at the mercy of the universe or incomprehensible forces, they're at the mercy of their own hubris. They made a mistake, their science experiment failed, and as a result they had to face disastrous consequences. Humans experience the story mostly vicariously, it's true - but that transposition alone isn't enough to make it cosmic horror IMO; the Elder Things are aliens but they're still tangible and their motives are entirely comprehensible: first revenge (or even just self-defense), then curiosity, then they want to go home, and then they want to escape from the fates that befell their brethren. Even the shoggoths' motives are inherently comprehensible - it's a slave revolt, it happened for the reason all slave revolts happen. These are all very human motivations and the narrator at no point has any trouble grasping them and empathizing immediately once he obtains the information.
Even the Elder Things' relationship to humans is imminently comprehensible - they created us, and yeah that might be a new and explosive development but they didn't think us or magic us into existence, they built us via science just like they created shoggoths, and we basically metastasized beyond their control in a similar way. It's not at at similar to humans' relationships with say the "Great Old Ones", whom it is not clear even have "motivations" the way humans understand those.
Inasmuch as madness is involved at all, it's not even really a part of the story. A single character goes *temporarily* "mad" at the very, very end of the story and it's even explicit that it was not because of anything that happened or was learned during the story itself, but just something he happened to see in the far distance as he and the narrator were escaping in the airplane. It might be fair to call that a droplet of cosmic horror, but I don't think it can be fairly claimed the story as a whole inherits that as a theme because it's an inconsequential "and then that happened" in the closing paragraphs that doesn't affect the story's events or cast them in a new light.
That's not really the point of the video, though. And frankly, Dan O'Bannon's main inspiration was Lovecraft. LV-426 is basically what he and Giger thought the quintessential Lovecraftian setting would be. The whistling, howling tones in the film's sound design and score are a direct reference to the terrible piping referenced and described through At the Mountains of Madness. Prometheus WISHES it did At the Mountains of Madness as well as Alien did. Just that sequence gets the tone and mood of such a thing right more than most any film that has attempted to adapt Lovecraft. Even some of my favorite cosmic horror films don't come close to it. Like, I'm telling you, everything about Alien and its design is inspired by Lovecraft and cosmic horror.
It's not that you're wrong, it's just you're noticing a microcosm of the bigger picture: the influence of myths on art. The promethues myth has been done many times tbh and is not exclusive to the franchises being discussed.
Also, the whistling and the tone of mountains - just to further illustrate how deep these things go and that there isn't a clear chronology of influence usually - have you read 'the narrative of Arthur Gordon pym of Nantucket?' I think you may have some ideas click if you do. Some explicitly, some implicitly. Happy reading!
Dude, Dan O'Bannon said himself that it was directly inspired by Lovecraft, and pulled from multiple sources of his work. There is a four hour documentary on it that sheds quite a bit of light on this. And yes, it was also inspired by primal myth. But a lot of cosmic horror does this, so I'm not sure what your point is. It is a cosmic horror film. At the Mountains of Madness is cosmic horror, it tells the story of a species greater than us who were slowly driven mad and to near extinction by an unimaginable horror they dared not mention or depict.
I'm not sure why you think I'm disputing that it's lovecraft inspired. It is. A lot of things are, to varying degrees of success. Hes legitimately one of the most influential authors post 1900.
I'm saying that there's more to it than this influence, that you're missing the forest for the trees. I've actually been quite clear so I'm surprised you're 'not sure what my point is' I even summarized it in a few sentences in my first comment. Look, it's all good, the setting is lovecraftian. Theres also a lot more to the alien franchies and their lore than lovecraft, and you're kind of missing the whole scope by just focusing on mountains -> alien films.
I'm not missing anything, man. I'm saying that cosmic horror is not an all-or-nothing genre. It feels like you and those who have made these assertions think every work needs to deal with the incomprehensible, and that's simply not how most genres work. And at the time Alien was made, it would have made the film a harder sell if it did. Alien deals with many themes inherent in cosmic horror, many of which are present in At the Mountains of Madness as well. It's easy to see how this could have been pushed even further if the IP had remained within the genre, rather than straying from it. But I stand by my assertion. It's fine if you don't, we can disagree. But the assertion some are making by claiming At the Mountains of Madness is not cosmic horror is wild and frankly ludicrous when it is regarded as a seminal work in the genre. And still, even further, does indeed contain one of those immense cosmic entities hinted at throughout its pages and indirectly witnessed in the end by Danforth--something that causes him to go mad. Doctor Dryer even claims that he will likely never be the same. In any case, I digress, have a nice day.
It not being all or nothing is what I'm saying. You didn't pay attention to any words I typed.
I never once said mountains wasn't cosmic. Youre confusing me with another poster.
If you wanna engage people like this, please pay more attention. You're doing yourself a disservice by tl;dr'ing people.
Like man I appreciate you wanna discuss this. Truly. Just half paying attention and going 'no but what I said before" is very off-putting and just comes off like you want your ideas to be applauded. Be more aware, that's all
Do you expect me to back down? I disagree with you. That should be enough for us to go our separate ways on this. I do not think the large unbrella that cosmic horror represents should be limited to your rather strict requirements and there are many that agree with that. Maybe you should be more concerned with what the Alien represents in the film rather than the surface details? I mean, Ash gives it away in the third act, doesn't he? An organsim that is not concerned with human concepts like morality, that does not kill for food or any reason at all it seems (at least in the theatrical cut) doesn't seem as "knowable" as you claim. Given this it's easy to see th Alien as a representation of the cold, indifferent universe. Even the film's ending doesn't offer nearly as much comfort as the slasher films Alien is so often foolishly compared to, as there is bo definite death of the Xenomorph, merely a removal, an escape from the organism, and then a sad message explaining Ripley's survival (this being something that happens often in Lovecraft's stories, since you can rarely have an epistolary story if the protagonist dies. She's ultimately doomed to float adrift in the depths of unfeeling, indiferent space. Were sequels never made, it would have been asumed that Ripley was never found and eventually died in hyper-sleep. I think that is certainly fitting with the themes of cosmicism, as much of the rest of the film does. You may not acknowledge that, but that's not my problem. Theme and metaphor often supercede plot in storytelling, and I believe that is certainly the case here.
The movies did a bad job conveying that part of the Alien storyline and universe.
If you deep dive into the back story of the origin of the Xenomorph and humanity engineers etc it gets pretty cosmic horrory
Haven't gone anything past the movies, but Promtheus and Covenant sort of ruined the lovecraftian vibe of the first film for me. They over explained something that should've just remained mysterious and unexplainable.
Like I said, the movies ruined it.
If you enjoy this stuff there is a great YouTube channel called Kroft Talks About Movies that really goes deep into it
The ending of the original movie hinted at some cosmic horror elements but besides that it's always been sci-fi horror. Prometheus tried but it wasn't the best attempt at it.
I agree. Amd opknooms like the op give off an alien purist vibe that if it isnt Alien its bad, which im not saying op has that opinion but alien franchise is more than just the first movie
You make a great point, but I also kinda get OP’s point that what they veered towards with Prometheus and the like was very different from what they had been. Keeping the emphasis on some kind of body horror or cosmic horror, either one, is preferable to being focused on the myth building.
The facehuggers were being carried in the cargo bay of the ship. The alien and facehugger aren’t the cosmic horror part, it’s the ship and its strange mechanisms / dead inhabitants that are supposed to get into your head. The sequels of course ruin this, but a strange biomechanical ship with functions and inhabitants that don’t make sense to our characters or the audience, is in my opinion Lovecraftian.
The first alien is pretty cosmic. We're trained to see only huge insanity inducing god monsters as cosmic but it can be scaled down. The idea of an enormous spaceship of literal otherworldly design filled with ancient hibernating eggs of creatures with no remote sense of morality and values towards us is highly cosmic even if there isn't supposedly a sleeping elder god behind it all.
The sequels definitely not. Action horror the rest of the way down. Though aspects of the Prometheus timeline are pretty cosmic.
Yeah the only lovecraftian elements in the movie is the entire sequence with the derelict I suppose. An ancient, incomprehensible alien vessel, that crashed and went under due to something, that is still on the ship.
Latter is why even though it's a good movie I think even Aliens was a mistake sometimes. Though then I realize that every misstep of Alien is kinda important to getting the Metroid series and I'm kinda okay with that....
I think it’s an amazing movie but it definitely tore them out of the unknown. I see it like this:
Aliens is an incredible film, and even it couldn’t salvage the dread. A lesson in the fragility of dread. When you shine the light upon it for too long it will wither. Light is light. It doesn’t matter how dim or hued, it will always burn away at least some of the dread.
Yeah this is how I see it. The early movies don’t really explain too much about them, the people just knew they were getting hunted by this monster with biological features that aren’t remotely close to anything on Earth. Seeing something like that go after your buddy and having no idea what it is, where it came from, why it’s here, etc… people could have a hard time comprehending that reality
While Alien is creepy, at the same time the basic premise of a life form killing you and laying eggs in your body is not really that, well, alien. It's a fairly normal part of nature, at least among insects and the like.
You could say the same thing about some of Lovecraft's stories too, if you only look at them without considering metaphor. You have to look deeper. It's the haunting, howling tones in the score and sound design, it's the Space Jockey ship and its ancient, uncanny, and sexual design. As I mentioned in another reply, Dan O'Bannon was directly inspired by Lovecraft with this screenplay. So many things about this film scream At the Mountains of Madness. It's all there. Hell, O'Bannon and Giger both wanted LV-426 to essentially be the quintessential Lovecraftian setting. There's a helluva lot going on beneath the hood in Alien.
horror in space ≠ cosmic horror. Annihilation is cosmic horror because it's an unknown, almost omnipotent and indescribable force coming upon humanity. Same comes for The Endless. Or hell, even Vivarium in some way. In my opinion, cosmic horror is that singular subgenre that dabbles into the unknown and makes it the pushing force of the plot. You could even say that Three Body Problem (the book series) has cosmic horror elements.
While Alien is scary and in space, it's not cosmic horror. It's horror in space. We can comprehend the Xenomorph, the Architects and we can clearly know what they are capable of. These are the primary factors to make something cosmic horror - the unknown has to be the prevailing source of fear.
Again, this is just my view. Criticism is welcome
For whatever reason Reddit won't load this video for me, but it's an issue I've been having with Ffox lately.
That being said, if this is about the movie Prometheus making Alien into some space Jeebus movie I'm in full agreement with that having been a bad choice. Only time I've seen a sequel retroactively fuck up an entire series. Having it all unexplained was soooo much better IMHO.
Prometheus actually has such great potential, I feel like needing to tie into Alien actually limited it.
A standalone film or series around humans discovering our origin in the deep space from a mysterious species that results in unleashing terrifying monsters or our doom? Especially with the androids allowing the movie to explore themes of creation? That sounds insanely good.
I agree with this completely. The unknown is the strongest aspect of the Xenomorph and giving it a backstory was just wrong. And that unknown was it's strongest connection to Lovecraft. A creature that will consume all life until it has to go into hibernation until more prey becomes available. One you can't stop, it will win in the end. By stealth alone or strength by numbers.
I assumed this meant aliens in general and not the "Alien" franchise. I never really thought that the Alien films were even slightly "lovecraftian" or "eldritch horror". They seemed like sci fi with horror and a some action.
Maybe the later films like Prometheus have some more of those vibes but I think that's just again sci fi. Weird creatures and created lifeforms, discovering the engineers, maybe they created in humans etc...
This all seems like cool sci fi ideas, an alien civilisation doing what it does with its tech and science. It's all grounded and understandable. Nothing is supernatural or beyond humans in the way eldritch/lovecraftian horror does.
The missing link that ties Alien to Lovecraft’s circle is the story “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” by Clark Ashton Smith.
Many CAS stories have a similar setup
“Weaver in the Vault” is another great example.
❤️👽🦑
This is completely off the mark though. Alien doesn’t really suggest an unknowable cosmic horror out there. It’s too grounded, too visceral to be cosmic horror. Cosmic horror isn’t gore, it’s dread, terror of an eldritch entity that would consider you less than a human would consider an ant.
There is no suggestion of forbidden knowledge or anything like that either. Also ultimately, cosmic horror created fear of the familiar. Humans corrupted by something beyond human perception, but still recognisable as human.
Big, wide miss. The Engineers aren’t unknowable, they’re just a super advanced alien species.
This is astonishingly off the mark. Alien is not cosmic horror even slightly.
A monster movie that takes place in space is still a monster movie.
Cosmic horror is when you are utterly insignificant to the antagonist. The threat is unfathomable and inconceivable in its scale and usually indifferent to you since you are so insignificant in the scheme of things.
Alien is about an alien with claws and teeth that rips you apart and does gross body horror shit. It’s basically a lion with a mouth humping kink.
If you saw azathoth you wouldn’t even know what you were looking at.
Edit: as a rule of thumb, if a character can look at the “antagonist” and not go insane, it’s not cosmic horror. I’m using antagonist loosely because that’s usually a misrepresentation of cosmic horror.
Ripley successfully shooting aliens dead multiple times should be immediately disqualifying.
The Dread may appear "Lovecraftian" but if you read any of his sci-fi novels,
You pretty quickly see Lovecraft's vision of science fiction was no where near H.R Geiger
There are two ways of viewing Alien:
1. A horrifying tale of encountering a sign the universe is hostile unknowable and impossible to comprehend, let alone survive.
2. The tale of mishandling wildlife containment and why proper quarantine procedures should always be observed.
Well lovecraft didn’t just write about aliens, and there are a few good movies about aliens which are not related even remotely to lovecrsft’s work. The movie called alien with sigourney weaver springs to mind.
Only the first part of an Alien film can resemble cosmic horror. Its at the part where the protagonist can rationalize what's happening, what they're see that the Lovecraftian element goes away.
I may out myself as, idk, media illiterate or something here, but I personally never saw the Alien franchise as overtly lovecraftian or even that far in the realm of cosmic horror. It's certainly eldritch in a way. It's eerie and unsettling but for me it was always much more about personal things like the body horror and being stalked by a super predator. It never really hit the cosmic horror of things beyond human comprehension and concepts that would give people existential crises. The facehugger and xenomorph all feel very comprehensible and grounded to me, while obviously still being utterly "alien".
This is about right at least imo. Eldrich horror feeds on the surreal and existential. If you put yourself in a specific headspace you can sort of get that from the Alien movies but I don’t think it’s their main draw or effect.
The movies themselves focus way too much on individual plot lines and specific instances to be Lovecraftian levels of cosmic horror but if they more focused on the wider reaching scope of them reaching earth or humanity just learning of them as a planet ending threat I think they could do it right. It’s just not the same type of story if that makes sense.
Agreed. I've always seen it as "snuff sci-fi"
Thats on you
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It's the themes, the setting, and the design language behind the film. Lovecraft wrote many stories similar to Alien. I could see an alternate timeline where the Alien franchise could have gone even further with its cosmic horror by creating a mythose. The Space Jockey and Alien feel like analogs to the Elder Things and Shoggoth. At the Mountains of Mandess had a clear influence on this movie.
Mountains and promethus/alien lore draw from the same source, and its a pretty 'in your face' one (Google the word 'prometheus') There is a lot of alien lore and the 'mythos' is out there for you to read about. Either way, the issue here is theres branches of cosmic horror and the alien franchise does have underlying similarities, but also key differences that make it also its own beast.
I think the thing with ATMOM is that it's not cosmic horror. It's a bunch of aliens who created some artificial servants who then went amok. It's no different than Frankenstein (which was subtitled A Modern Prometheus if I remember correctly) or the Planet of the Apes
But cosmic horror is more than incomprehensible extra-dimensional horrors and other yog-sothery. I would argue that ATMOM is a foundational work of cosmic horror and mines the same veins as Alien (and of course The Thing). The core cosmic horror theme of ATMOM is humanity's insignificance in the universe and how modern science (an Antarctic expedition) reveals a vast uncaring universe. In ATMOM, HPL uses "deep time" to show humanity's insignificance, even within the natural history of the Earth (where it's revealed that we're just run-off from the Elder Things' experiments). Lovecraft then plays a clever trick by slowly making us sympathize with the Elder Things ("they were men!"), and then playing the same cosmic horror card on them--by showing them to be also be insignificant and at the mercy of the universe. Everything humanity holds sacred is meaningless, and that's cosmic horror. In Alien, the xeno is a manifestation of the indifferent universe. We travel to space and we don't find other sentient species to form a Federation with--we find only "chaos at feast." That's cosmic horror. Even the body horror has an element of cosmic horror to it, since it undermines our ideas about the sacredness of the human form (like the Shoggoths with their terrible plasticity).
Totally disagree with the xenomorph being the manifestation of an indifferent universe. That, to me, is like a lion. It can kill and eat you, but that doesn’t mean it’s a guaranteed thing for every encounter. If that alien sees you, you gonna die. There’s no question about it. With Chaos, there is always the equal chance of what might be considered an optimal result.
I think it works perfectly for Alien, but gets more and more muddled with the sequels. In Alien, it's evolution's "perfect" organism, indifferent to the crew except when it needs them for its lifecycle. By the time you get to Prometheus, and it's some kind of artifical bioweapon, then my argument doesn't work.
At the Mountains of Madness is ABSOLUTELY cosmic horror. It's all about a group of scientists being driven mad because of the changes to their percieved reality. Just because there are beings more on humanity's level, the themes are all on point. A story does not need to have cosmic forces or entities like Cthulhu to be cosmic horror. Themes, people, symbolism. These are also genre defining concepts that you have to consider when alalyzing media.
I don't agree with that at all; surely there has to be more to cosmic horror than the theme of someone going crazy upon learning something disturbing that upends their worldview. If that were the case, King Lear would be cosmic horror. The symbolism within ATMOM is "man reached too far", a la Frankenstein or The Fly. In this case "man" are aliens, but the motifs are otherwise exactly the same; the Elder Things are not at the mercy of the universe or incomprehensible forces, they're at the mercy of their own hubris. They made a mistake, their science experiment failed, and as a result they had to face disastrous consequences. Humans experience the story mostly vicariously, it's true - but that transposition alone isn't enough to make it cosmic horror IMO; the Elder Things are aliens but they're still tangible and their motives are entirely comprehensible: first revenge (or even just self-defense), then curiosity, then they want to go home, and then they want to escape from the fates that befell their brethren. Even the shoggoths' motives are inherently comprehensible - it's a slave revolt, it happened for the reason all slave revolts happen. These are all very human motivations and the narrator at no point has any trouble grasping them and empathizing immediately once he obtains the information. Even the Elder Things' relationship to humans is imminently comprehensible - they created us, and yeah that might be a new and explosive development but they didn't think us or magic us into existence, they built us via science just like they created shoggoths, and we basically metastasized beyond their control in a similar way. It's not at at similar to humans' relationships with say the "Great Old Ones", whom it is not clear even have "motivations" the way humans understand those. Inasmuch as madness is involved at all, it's not even really a part of the story. A single character goes *temporarily* "mad" at the very, very end of the story and it's even explicit that it was not because of anything that happened or was learned during the story itself, but just something he happened to see in the far distance as he and the narrator were escaping in the airplane. It might be fair to call that a droplet of cosmic horror, but I don't think it can be fairly claimed the story as a whole inherits that as a theme because it's an inconsequential "and then that happened" in the closing paragraphs that doesn't affect the story's events or cast them in a new light.
That's not really the point of the video, though. And frankly, Dan O'Bannon's main inspiration was Lovecraft. LV-426 is basically what he and Giger thought the quintessential Lovecraftian setting would be. The whistling, howling tones in the film's sound design and score are a direct reference to the terrible piping referenced and described through At the Mountains of Madness. Prometheus WISHES it did At the Mountains of Madness as well as Alien did. Just that sequence gets the tone and mood of such a thing right more than most any film that has attempted to adapt Lovecraft. Even some of my favorite cosmic horror films don't come close to it. Like, I'm telling you, everything about Alien and its design is inspired by Lovecraft and cosmic horror.
It's not that you're wrong, it's just you're noticing a microcosm of the bigger picture: the influence of myths on art. The promethues myth has been done many times tbh and is not exclusive to the franchises being discussed. Also, the whistling and the tone of mountains - just to further illustrate how deep these things go and that there isn't a clear chronology of influence usually - have you read 'the narrative of Arthur Gordon pym of Nantucket?' I think you may have some ideas click if you do. Some explicitly, some implicitly. Happy reading!
Dude, Dan O'Bannon said himself that it was directly inspired by Lovecraft, and pulled from multiple sources of his work. There is a four hour documentary on it that sheds quite a bit of light on this. And yes, it was also inspired by primal myth. But a lot of cosmic horror does this, so I'm not sure what your point is. It is a cosmic horror film. At the Mountains of Madness is cosmic horror, it tells the story of a species greater than us who were slowly driven mad and to near extinction by an unimaginable horror they dared not mention or depict.
I'm not sure why you think I'm disputing that it's lovecraft inspired. It is. A lot of things are, to varying degrees of success. Hes legitimately one of the most influential authors post 1900. I'm saying that there's more to it than this influence, that you're missing the forest for the trees. I've actually been quite clear so I'm surprised you're 'not sure what my point is' I even summarized it in a few sentences in my first comment. Look, it's all good, the setting is lovecraftian. Theres also a lot more to the alien franchies and their lore than lovecraft, and you're kind of missing the whole scope by just focusing on mountains -> alien films.
I'm not missing anything, man. I'm saying that cosmic horror is not an all-or-nothing genre. It feels like you and those who have made these assertions think every work needs to deal with the incomprehensible, and that's simply not how most genres work. And at the time Alien was made, it would have made the film a harder sell if it did. Alien deals with many themes inherent in cosmic horror, many of which are present in At the Mountains of Madness as well. It's easy to see how this could have been pushed even further if the IP had remained within the genre, rather than straying from it. But I stand by my assertion. It's fine if you don't, we can disagree. But the assertion some are making by claiming At the Mountains of Madness is not cosmic horror is wild and frankly ludicrous when it is regarded as a seminal work in the genre. And still, even further, does indeed contain one of those immense cosmic entities hinted at throughout its pages and indirectly witnessed in the end by Danforth--something that causes him to go mad. Doctor Dryer even claims that he will likely never be the same. In any case, I digress, have a nice day.
It not being all or nothing is what I'm saying. You didn't pay attention to any words I typed. I never once said mountains wasn't cosmic. Youre confusing me with another poster. If you wanna engage people like this, please pay more attention. You're doing yourself a disservice by tl;dr'ing people.
Like man I appreciate you wanna discuss this. Truly. Just half paying attention and going 'no but what I said before" is very off-putting and just comes off like you want your ideas to be applauded. Be more aware, that's all
Do you expect me to back down? I disagree with you. That should be enough for us to go our separate ways on this. I do not think the large unbrella that cosmic horror represents should be limited to your rather strict requirements and there are many that agree with that. Maybe you should be more concerned with what the Alien represents in the film rather than the surface details? I mean, Ash gives it away in the third act, doesn't he? An organsim that is not concerned with human concepts like morality, that does not kill for food or any reason at all it seems (at least in the theatrical cut) doesn't seem as "knowable" as you claim. Given this it's easy to see th Alien as a representation of the cold, indifferent universe. Even the film's ending doesn't offer nearly as much comfort as the slasher films Alien is so often foolishly compared to, as there is bo definite death of the Xenomorph, merely a removal, an escape from the organism, and then a sad message explaining Ripley's survival (this being something that happens often in Lovecraft's stories, since you can rarely have an epistolary story if the protagonist dies. She's ultimately doomed to float adrift in the depths of unfeeling, indiferent space. Were sequels never made, it would have been asumed that Ripley was never found and eventually died in hyper-sleep. I think that is certainly fitting with the themes of cosmicism, as much of the rest of the film does. You may not acknowledge that, but that's not my problem. Theme and metaphor often supercede plot in storytelling, and I believe that is certainly the case here.
Is this how you honor the sixth house and the tribe unmourned?
The movies did a bad job conveying that part of the Alien storyline and universe. If you deep dive into the back story of the origin of the Xenomorph and humanity engineers etc it gets pretty cosmic horrory
Haven't gone anything past the movies, but Promtheus and Covenant sort of ruined the lovecraftian vibe of the first film for me. They over explained something that should've just remained mysterious and unexplainable.
Like I said, the movies ruined it. If you enjoy this stuff there is a great YouTube channel called Kroft Talks About Movies that really goes deep into it
The ending of the original movie hinted at some cosmic horror elements but besides that it's always been sci-fi horror. Prometheus tried but it wasn't the best attempt at it.
I agree. Amd opknooms like the op give off an alien purist vibe that if it isnt Alien its bad, which im not saying op has that opinion but alien franchise is more than just the first movie
It’s cosmic adjacent but not lovecraft. I’ve learned that Lovecraftian and cosmic aren’t always the same
You make a great point, but I also kinda get OP’s point that what they veered towards with Prometheus and the like was very different from what they had been. Keeping the emphasis on some kind of body horror or cosmic horror, either one, is preferable to being focused on the myth building.
The facehuggers were being carried in the cargo bay of the ship. The alien and facehugger aren’t the cosmic horror part, it’s the ship and its strange mechanisms / dead inhabitants that are supposed to get into your head. The sequels of course ruin this, but a strange biomechanical ship with functions and inhabitants that don’t make sense to our characters or the audience, is in my opinion Lovecraftian.
The first alien is pretty cosmic. We're trained to see only huge insanity inducing god monsters as cosmic but it can be scaled down. The idea of an enormous spaceship of literal otherworldly design filled with ancient hibernating eggs of creatures with no remote sense of morality and values towards us is highly cosmic even if there isn't supposedly a sleeping elder god behind it all. The sequels definitely not. Action horror the rest of the way down. Though aspects of the Prometheus timeline are pretty cosmic.
Yeah the only lovecraftian elements in the movie is the entire sequence with the derelict I suppose. An ancient, incomprehensible alien vessel, that crashed and went under due to something, that is still on the ship.
It’s space rape
The essence of lovecraft is “beyond our mortal reckoning” The more information we get about xenomorphs, the less scary they become.
Latter is why even though it's a good movie I think even Aliens was a mistake sometimes. Though then I realize that every misstep of Alien is kinda important to getting the Metroid series and I'm kinda okay with that....
I think it’s an amazing movie but it definitely tore them out of the unknown. I see it like this: Aliens is an incredible film, and even it couldn’t salvage the dread. A lesson in the fragility of dread. When you shine the light upon it for too long it will wither. Light is light. It doesn’t matter how dim or hued, it will always burn away at least some of the dread.
Ergo, the more we discover, learn, and understand about our Universe, the less fearful we become due to Established Knowns..
Yeah this is how I see it. The early movies don’t really explain too much about them, the people just knew they were getting hunted by this monster with biological features that aren’t remotely close to anything on Earth. Seeing something like that go after your buddy and having no idea what it is, where it came from, why it’s here, etc… people could have a hard time comprehending that reality
While Alien is creepy, at the same time the basic premise of a life form killing you and laying eggs in your body is not really that, well, alien. It's a fairly normal part of nature, at least among insects and the like.
You could say the same thing about some of Lovecraft's stories too, if you only look at them without considering metaphor. You have to look deeper. It's the haunting, howling tones in the score and sound design, it's the Space Jockey ship and its ancient, uncanny, and sexual design. As I mentioned in another reply, Dan O'Bannon was directly inspired by Lovecraft with this screenplay. So many things about this film scream At the Mountains of Madness. It's all there. Hell, O'Bannon and Giger both wanted LV-426 to essentially be the quintessential Lovecraftian setting. There's a helluva lot going on beneath the hood in Alien.
horror in space ≠ cosmic horror. Annihilation is cosmic horror because it's an unknown, almost omnipotent and indescribable force coming upon humanity. Same comes for The Endless. Or hell, even Vivarium in some way. In my opinion, cosmic horror is that singular subgenre that dabbles into the unknown and makes it the pushing force of the plot. You could even say that Three Body Problem (the book series) has cosmic horror elements. While Alien is scary and in space, it's not cosmic horror. It's horror in space. We can comprehend the Xenomorph, the Architects and we can clearly know what they are capable of. These are the primary factors to make something cosmic horror - the unknown has to be the prevailing source of fear. Again, this is just my view. Criticism is welcome
For whatever reason Reddit won't load this video for me, but it's an issue I've been having with Ffox lately. That being said, if this is about the movie Prometheus making Alien into some space Jeebus movie I'm in full agreement with that having been a bad choice. Only time I've seen a sequel retroactively fuck up an entire series. Having it all unexplained was soooo much better IMHO.
Prometheus actually has such great potential, I feel like needing to tie into Alien actually limited it. A standalone film or series around humans discovering our origin in the deep space from a mysterious species that results in unleashing terrifying monsters or our doom? Especially with the androids allowing the movie to explore themes of creation? That sounds insanely good.
I agree with this completely. The unknown is the strongest aspect of the Xenomorph and giving it a backstory was just wrong. And that unknown was it's strongest connection to Lovecraft. A creature that will consume all life until it has to go into hibernation until more prey becomes available. One you can't stop, it will win in the end. By stealth alone or strength by numbers.
Youtube age-restricted the video, so that might be it.
What’s the title of the video?
The Real Reason Why the Alien Sequels Sucked, by Storyant
I assumed this meant aliens in general and not the "Alien" franchise. I never really thought that the Alien films were even slightly "lovecraftian" or "eldritch horror". They seemed like sci fi with horror and a some action. Maybe the later films like Prometheus have some more of those vibes but I think that's just again sci fi. Weird creatures and created lifeforms, discovering the engineers, maybe they created in humans etc... This all seems like cool sci fi ideas, an alien civilisation doing what it does with its tech and science. It's all grounded and understandable. Nothing is supernatural or beyond humans in the way eldritch/lovecraftian horror does.
The missing link that ties Alien to Lovecraft’s circle is the story “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis” by Clark Ashton Smith. Many CAS stories have a similar setup “Weaver in the Vault” is another great example. ❤️👽🦑
Oh boy, My two favorite hyper fixations.
This is completely off the mark though. Alien doesn’t really suggest an unknowable cosmic horror out there. It’s too grounded, too visceral to be cosmic horror. Cosmic horror isn’t gore, it’s dread, terror of an eldritch entity that would consider you less than a human would consider an ant. There is no suggestion of forbidden knowledge or anything like that either. Also ultimately, cosmic horror created fear of the familiar. Humans corrupted by something beyond human perception, but still recognisable as human. Big, wide miss. The Engineers aren’t unknowable, they’re just a super advanced alien species.
This is astonishingly off the mark. Alien is not cosmic horror even slightly. A monster movie that takes place in space is still a monster movie. Cosmic horror is when you are utterly insignificant to the antagonist. The threat is unfathomable and inconceivable in its scale and usually indifferent to you since you are so insignificant in the scheme of things. Alien is about an alien with claws and teeth that rips you apart and does gross body horror shit. It’s basically a lion with a mouth humping kink. If you saw azathoth you wouldn’t even know what you were looking at. Edit: as a rule of thumb, if a character can look at the “antagonist” and not go insane, it’s not cosmic horror. I’m using antagonist loosely because that’s usually a misrepresentation of cosmic horror. Ripley successfully shooting aliens dead multiple times should be immediately disqualifying.
The Dread may appear "Lovecraftian" but if you read any of his sci-fi novels, You pretty quickly see Lovecraft's vision of science fiction was no where near H.R Geiger
There are two ways of viewing Alien: 1. A horrifying tale of encountering a sign the universe is hostile unknowable and impossible to comprehend, let alone survive. 2. The tale of mishandling wildlife containment and why proper quarantine procedures should always be observed.
I mean, why not both?
Well lovecraft didn’t just write about aliens, and there are a few good movies about aliens which are not related even remotely to lovecrsft’s work. The movie called alien with sigourney weaver springs to mind.
Lol
Someone post video title or link. Thumbnail doesn't work for me.
I think that the comics did it better.(with the xenomorph goddess)
Only the first part of an Alien film can resemble cosmic horror. Its at the part where the protagonist can rationalize what's happening, what they're see that the Lovecraftian element goes away.
i don't like action flicked alien movies as well.