Cosmic Horror

By Leo Gura - August 22, 2025

Cosmic horror is a fascinating notion.

“Cosmic Horror is the realization that the universe is more vast and complicated than you will ever begin to comprehend, and nothing you, or even the entirety of civilization will do will ever make a big enough mark to matter. You’re not special, and anything that happens to you is just random happenstance with no reason behind it because the beings we consider gods are so beyond our understanding that they don’t even acknowledge our existence. The bacteria that die coming into contact with your body have more significance to you than the entirety of human civilization does to something like Chthulu.

Something so horrific that it’s out of our realm or universe of understanding. Cosmic horror is about taking a peek just beyond the edges of reality, and getting a glimpse of that which cannot be understood by our limited knowledge.

It’s realizing that nature is so big and so old that: you can’t understand it. It doesn’t need you and could destroy you without noticing. It’s the realization that you don’t matter and that you can’t understand why. Picture a gold fish born in an aquarium in a pet shop. It’s all it’s ever known, it’s not in control, and doesn’t even have the capacity and the software to begin to understand why. That’s us, on Earth, in relation to the rest of the universe.

The core of cosmic horror puts a horror spin on the idea that humans (and Earth) are a speck of dust in the vastness of space and time, that we do not matter in the universe. It personifies that with beings so immense and alien that we are like ants to them. Also, I think, a lot of the ‘knowledge that makes you mad’ is in a way, the idea of ignorance is bliss, but in a horror context. Learning this thing ruins you. There are other elements too, generally involving bending reality and physics, extra dimensions, messing with perceptions, etc.

The horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible.

A character is defeated when their enemy is the embodiment of the fear of the cosmos. It appears as a girl with her brains hanging out of her gaping skull who only says ‘Halloween’ but to this character she manifests in the form of a librarian of a library with an unfathomable number of books containing EVERYTHING. This cosmic horror then dumps the entire library and knowledge into her head until all she can say is ‘Halloween’ from the sheer weight of just knowing literally everything.” — Reddit

There is a whole game based on cosmic horror, it’s called Look Outside.

Why do I mention this at all? Because cosmic horror captures an otherwise ineffable aspect of Infinity. The vastness of Infinity is terrifying and difficult to communicate. Cosmic horror gives us some handle on it.

I have awoken to states of consciousness so alien, so incomprehensible, that they make human existence, all scientific knowledge, and even all human spirituality irrelevant. There exist states of consciousness that reveal the human experience of reality to be as small as that of bacteria. And then you have to live with knowing that.

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