What's cosmic horror "done right"?

And is it possible without tentacles and body horror?

synechdoche new york

The League of Gentlemen: Apocalypse

>seriously you guys it's lovecraft and kafka and dante all in one but it's a comedy so you'll say pleb

twin peaks season 3

To be fair, TLoG stuff is pretty terrible and mind altering.

Cosmic horror is extremely hard to do in general. Its a horror we cant really wrap our head around, so many just chock it up to tentacles and body horror.

I cant think of a movie that has done it (I haven't seen the new IT yet), but the book IT seemed to get close. The deadlights being larger than the universe and being made of an orange light and a tangle of slithering parts. It really chilled me when Bill was screaming that the only thing protecting him somewhat (the turtle) was dead.

found this movie to be unbearable. am i a brainlet or is it ok to not share le jewish sensibility for boring neurotypical bullshit?

You are not a brainlet. I think the movie is brilliant but personally experienced zero emotional response to it like some do. It certainly just takes a certain type of person to enjoy

Bloodborne.

Any argument with this stems from either ignorance or stupidity.

My nigga.

why did they fuck up the lock on system from previous games?

prince of darkness

I had no problems with it whatsoever

Yes. Particularly the finale.

True, but it did have tentacles and body horror though.

it's also not a movie

The Mothman Prophecies. I am dead serious, it's a cosmic horror story done totally straight. A small, personal experience of a nigh-incomprehensible force that affected our world in a strange for just a moment, whose existence those witness to it will never get an explanation for and have to deal with the knowledge of. It's got quite stark and dream-like, as if something is off about the world around them.

Anyone who holds Bloodborne up as an example of genuine cosmic horror are post-millennial anime freaks who haven't read lovecraft and aren't comfortable with accepting that it is simply an enjoyable hack-n-slash that where players traverse environments that are stunning renditions of gothic and lovecraftian imagery.

I watched this when it first came out, but I wasn't quite old enough to really appreciate it I think. My brother watched it recently and said it's actually pretty great. I'm gonna have to give it another go.

I've read all of Lovecraft's work, and Bloodborne is a good example of cosmic horror done right.

Wait, you seriously don't think Bloodborne is cosmic horror? Even with its themes of human ignorance, limitation, evils of the past, hereditary horror and lineage, loss of humanity and identity? Because absolutely all of that is present with gorgeous gothic window dressing.

You're right, I'm sorry.

I'll outline it if you want, won't be the first time.

Sure, I'm waiting for my brother to land so I need some reading material.

Different user here, google "The Paleblood Hunt" if you want a good write up of the story/lore of Bloodborne in PDF form.

Unitonically true detective season 1

Good answer.

I'd count Dirk Gently too, with an asterisk. Dirk is too gonzo, it's got too much 'cosmic wonder'.

This, some of the visuals in Season 3 also seem heavily inspired by René Magritte's paintings (like OP's picture)

Human ignorance and it's limitations are encapsulated in the whole ascension deal Byrgenwerth and the Church are about. "Evolution without courage will be the ruin of our race". That's our limitations, our thinking on the basest of planes. Our ignorance, and to a further extent, our arrogance, is to be found in everything that went wrong. Willem turning into a vegetable, Choir experimentation, Frenzy - in reality, we don't know what we're doing, this is forbidden knowledge, it's purely incompatible with us.

Evils of the past is all Pthumeru, and the Hamlet Massacre (which then begets hereditary and lineage horror), this bizarre, alien, prehuman ancient stuff dredged up into the modern day, spreading its own madness and downfall on another civilization. Pthumeru is an explicitly sinister, strange place, the source of the whole problem. Everything in Lovecraft came from the past, or had ancient roots. It's only fitting the root of all of Bloodborne's problems is an ancient prehuman civilization.

The hereditary horror and lineage is all to do with the Hunter's Nightmare and the curse (the dead but dreaming) Mother Kos laid upon the hunters after Burgertown decided to cave in everyone's heads in search of eyes. The hunters in Bloodborne are doomed to become blood-drunk and end up in an ironic hell where they'll hunt forever and ever, little more than beasts themselves. Simon's dialogue about secrets and how it just isn't fair, so what if our forefathers sinned, the horror of lineage of being a fishman or related to colonial wizards is found in Lovecraft's terror of his own lineage. He believed he'd go mad like his parents. Just how the hunters will go mad.

Loss of human identity, well, that's the whole deal of beasthood, but also more importantly, kinhood - becoming an alien. Those blue mushroom guys were people once. Our hunter has to forsake their own humanity to ascend and end the nightmare, becoming a squid. But at what cost? And what does it mean?

I'd take Paleblood Hunt with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, much of Bloodborne's story and background is left vague for player interpretation - it's part of the fun of it all, piecing together this world you're thrust into. Paleblood Hunt is simply one guy's interpretation. Perfectly valid, but by no means the be all and end all. He reaches in a few places, as do we all. If you want a good lore discussion, the Bloodborne general on /vg/ love to lorefag.

Bloodborne

I've always like art like this. but how am I suppose to get "it"? Like how are you suppose to get art?

Idk, it looks cool? Plus, can you imagine seeing something like that in real life? It makes you think.

>Le 2deep4u reddit horror that's soooo difficult to pull off

Just look at it and see how it makes you feel, don't need to put it in to words, that's why they're images after all

It never makes me think though. I just get a feeling. I can't explain. Maybe I'm just a brainlet.

No, I know exactly what you mean. I can put words to movies very easily, and music and books somewhat easily, but paintings its just hard. But don't worry about it, trying to tie down art that is transcendent and abstract with humanly words just diminishes it in some aspects

...

>It never makes me think though. I just get a feeling. I can't explain.
that means you're doing it right
the whole point of art is to convey something visually that you couldn't get across otherwise
if it were easy to explain or put into words it wouldn't be using its full potential

Ahh i see. I guess I'll just stick to those feels.

Does The Ninth Gate count?

I would always see people "explaining" art in the museum and wondered how'd they came to those conclusions.

It's not so much that it's thought provoking, it's that a lot of his painting depict something impossible or otherworldly, but are rendered and shaded very realistically.

yep

Art is almost purely subjective. For me, it conveys emotions, likely it does you, too. Something about a painting just appeals to something in you. Maybe try find out what that something is, study the image and what's going on it, find out what about it is neat. Is it the colours? Lack of colours? Figures, how they're positioned? Maybe there's an overall aesthetic that's pulled off really well.

Take Francis Bacon's paintings. There's all kinds of autobiographical shit, sure, but his sense of horror and surreal imagery appeals to me. His Figures for the Base of a Crucifixion are really weird and creepy, or his Portrait of Velasquez, the screaming pope thing, he just knows how to make spooky shit really well and I appreciate that because I like horror. He hits horror stuff in a really visceral way.

also if you saw the end of Inland Empire this theatre was recreated exactly as Laura Dern went up the stairs

The comics are fantastic. It could have been top notch movies

That's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, user, he means League of Gentlemen, that fucking weird British show.

>this is a local shop, for local people, there's nothing for you here

>look this up
>its a videogame

why are these manchildren allowed on my site

In terms of atmosphere, True Detective S1 is probably as good as we can expect from a drama.

> it conveys emotions
You're right. Edward Hopper's works invokes a feeling of loneliness which is strange because I hardly ever feel like that.
This one that I posted is one of my favorites it pretty much describes some parts of my life.

I like this one

You can enjoy art like the people who enjoy contemporary art, but it does require you to know a bit about art history and art culture. For example Yoko Ono is quite big in the contemporary art scene, she has a piece which is an apple on a column. An apple on a column is usually not that interesting, but Yoko is part of the 'fluxus' movement where the public is supposed to interact with the art.

But how do people interact with an apple? There are no instructions and if people bite into it (as people eventually do) then they get in trouble with the gallery staff and ruin the piece for everyone else. Yoko Ono seems visibly upset that people bite the piece. Are people supposed to leave it alone? Then why is it pretty much her only piece that is like that? And why is the apple so easily accessible and always fresh?

In reality it is a pretty exciting piece because someone might know Yoko Ono's work, but not this particular piece so people wait until someone does the obvious and bites into it and get into trouble with the gallery staff which might be pissed off because they let someone bite it. Some art is like this, you need a certain amount of background knowledge, but other art are just supposed to be pretty and so on.

Interesting. I'm guessing it represents rules of society or some shit?

americans with Hopper alone win the painting race in the whole XX century. makes all the surrealist scene look like a medieval joke, guy was so ahead of the game.

Nice. I like this one as well. Not only does it gives me a sense of loneliness it also just seems to make things "quiet" like his art just is just soundless.

"performative art" is brainlet tier, right up with videoart.

Cosmic horror done right is cosmic horror that effects on a personal level.
Check out Resolution from 2012
I just saw the latest film by the same guys that also involve cults that aren't exactly what they seem
The Endless.

Even satan agrees.

The Man Who Sleeps is more Kafkaesque than Lovecraftian desu

That's Satanic horror, not cosmic horror.

Lovecraftian so amazing

>It's got quite stark and dream-like, as if something is off about the world around them.
Agree. There's barely any horror and nothing really happens but I felt uneasy the entire time.

It CAN do and usually are with conceptual work. For example Marcel Duchamp's "the fountain" was basically a signed urinal. It was the world's first shitpost. But other conceptual art like "one and three chairs" by joseph kosuth (Google it) clearly works by playing with how the word "chair" is used. How it looks don't matter as much or at all.

There can be fun performance pieces as well. I can't remember the artist, but I remember it was in the Tate gallery where they had a group of actors that repeated their same role every 10 or 30 minutes and they just played normal people visiting the gallery. But they all had something that brought attention to themselves (for example they dropped something or touched an art piece and got yelled at by the guard) but only the people in on it knew the performance was happening and slowly after a few times people was weirded out and eventually figured out it was a performance. I think the same artist did the same thing in a random Starbucks, where people did the exact same thing every time, but different people every time and it was normal stuff like a conversation that didn't seem out of place and somebody who had exact change when buying something, but the same thing happened again and again with different people. Must have been confusing and very interesting to witness slowly and trying to figure out what happens. Making everyday normal actions and activities seem strange and bizarre. Performative art can be very cool.

Watched this when I was a kid, I was too scared to look out my window at night for weeks

This film has an extremely tight script, very underrated

More than likely they're just pseudo intellectuals claiming their interpretations are what the author intended.

>actors doing zany things
*groans*

dunno, my man, all this McArt stuff is very American, in other countries they would get shot if they try that "quirky" shit, and itd be totally justified.

...

breddy goot

This thread is gold. What a nice break from all the shit posting and nerd culture shit.

That's what I think as well. They're all sound so full of themselves and are pretentious as fuck.

Black Mountain Side is a neato movie with cosmic horror elements. It's very reminiscent of The Thing and I wholeheartedly recommend it.

>tfw everyone specifies the year here because nobody's ever heard of the movie

>I can't remember the artist

Tino Sehgal

Actually lots of exciting and risky performance art rose during the 60s and 70s in politically turbulent countries like Brazil; a more cold and conceptual approach developed in Europe, specifically in France and Germany

Gonna check it out

I just assumed it was something foreign too, looks really good. Surprised I haven't heard of it.

>This thread
If only every shitposter could appreciate and see how this is what Sup Forums could be like.

Holy crap

spoopy VHS future self

The Void was pretty ok, the effects were nice

...

Not strictly cosmic horror, but I think Resurrect Dead captures the whole "falling down a rabbithole" feeling perfectly.

Yeah, but lots of body horror and not that much of non-euclidean madness

What about Von Trier's Melancholia? Cosmic theme of impending doom...
Also The Last Wave, with Mr. Richard Chamberlain, fine movie

Is it worth a watch? Satanic apocalypse stuff is always interesting to me. Just the low scores makes me wonder why it's brought up as much as it is.

Looks great, now just to find where the hell I could watch it

>Depp
It's not good, but it's kinda comfy
In the Mouth of Madness is better, but less comfier

Well, Canadian.
There is a lot of time fuckery in both films and my jaw dropped when I saw the house from the first movie in Endless.
It made enough of an impression then that it carried over.
Endless isn't a sequel though. It's more of a story that's sort of concurrent.
Also, when you go into it you are sort of convinced (due to the characters ) that you are entering a sort of Heavens Gate scenario. Later this proves wrong. It's actually coming out in March but seriously, give Resolution a chance. They are both quite different but both of them have a strong sense of manipulation by what might be described as a "Higher Power"

Sounds about right, i'll give it a shot anyways thanks.

Maybe primewire?

You're living in it.

Its one of my favorite movies of all time. But never let anyone tell you that you're stupid for not liking it. But also watch it again and watch as a dark comedy about death

moment of appreciation for what this thread has become, RIP good ol' Sup Forums

>Prince of Darkness
I'd like to think this kind of counts, even with the references to Satan and Christ and all that. It gets the feelings of looming dread and despair down.

Meh. It was too half-baked

>Dude there's an artifact here... Built by a civilisation who would never live so far north... And it goes down for miles and miles! Let's never bring it up again!

>Dude, his arm is morphing in a strange way, and even though I'm just an average medical doctor I somehow know it's changing into "Cephalopod DNA"' (get it because tentacles lmao) let's never bring this up again either!

And then the rest of the movie is just "everyone goes crazy and kills each other"

look at this deep art

>guy posting Hopper art itt
My nigga. Idk if you're still here but he's one of my favorites, I don't really dig the other realists/Ashcan School guys either. Damn it's been too long since I've been to an art museum, been back home a few months now in the middle of nowhere.

I'm still here buddy. Any favorite works?

That arrow looks pretty deep

BRRRAAAAArt