Last week, I took the federal holiday as a chance to leaf through one of my favorite works of horror, House of Leaves (pun intended). It is a fantastic, albeit highly confusing, book that I put off reading for years simply because it is impossible to read on my Kindle. As I was reading it-- fresh out of a re-read of Lovecraft's The Statement of Randolph Carter-- I also realized it was once of the few works of modern cosmic horror I've read.

According to Wikipedia, cosmic horror is a "subgenre of horror that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible." It is commonly descibed as the fear or horror of the unknown. However, this is misleading; practically all horror concerns itself with the unknown. Cosmic horror, in contrast, is chiefly concerned with that which is impossible to know or understand, at least from a human reference frame.

This distinction is frequently blurry. After all, the less information you know about something, the less of an educated guess you can make as to if it is understandable. The Mist, which is sometimes given as a modern example of Lovecraftian horror, lives in this literary no man's land. Neither the character nor the reader understand why a mist has enshrouded Earth and with it gross, twisted beings, but is it truly unknowable? The movie answers this in the negative. Skinamarink also lies in this in-between zone. By communicating so clearly with the characters, it seems to betray a limited sense of fathomability, but its actions so radically violate the rules of causality that the viewer is left wondering if the children are interacting with a presence in the literal sense.

To rubber-stamp these works as cosmic horror cheapens the category not because these works are not terrifying--- they are!--- but because they spend so much time fleshing out what is comprehensible about them. It is the tenacity of a small group of survivors to find the rules and use them to continue on that makes The Mist compelling in addition to just being scary.

Skinamarink, though, resists this easy declassification because of the distinction between the viewer and the children. If the children are real, the being terrorizing them is incomprehensible to them. Their maturity and the potential for it to be a dream-like state precludes the possibility of full understanding of the movie's events. The viewer experiences, through a thick veneer of atmospheric horror, a mystery. It may be an eldritch being terrorizing the children, but subtle clues and our contextual understanding of our own reality suggests a different explanation for the eerie phenomena.

This two-tiered totem of comprehensibility can also be used to classify works of horror which otherwise rely on the unknown. In a "microcosmic" work, we are viewing a universe which does not contain complete self-knowledge. In other words, from the perspective of the protagonists, there is something intrinsically unknowable. However, while the viewer may not fully understand or be able to explain the events, the narrative provides some level of structure with which to build a scaffolding of comprehension. Were they able to "poke around" into this fictional dimension, they could learn more and discover a set of rules which explain the events of the film or novel.

"Macrocosmic" works do not share this embedded structure. There is no blurry looking-glass which can be wiped to get a better view. The reader or viewer is smaller than the fictional universe, and their detached perspective does nothing to illuminate the powers that be. In Lovecraft's work, it is explicitly stated that the beings are beyond comprehension, and he makes no attempt to flesh out any details of the monsters' existences. A large portion of the horror is that there is nothing to figure out, no puzzle to solve, just sheer insanity out of the proportion of your life.

In short: a microcosmic monster can assimilated into your knowledge and incapacitated with a rational overview of its capabilities and causes. A macrocosmic monster is just as unknowable to fictional characters as it is to us. It exists in a universe which exceeds the scope of our own.

This is all very abstract, so take House of Leaves (minor spoiler alert!). The layered narratives make it difficult to determine what is real, but we have three separate characters who try to probe its depths, whether it be literally or literarily. Much like in Lovecraft's work, they all end up insane to varying degrees. We learn much about Johnny, Zampano and Navidson through their respective explorations, but very little about the labyrinth itself and nothing about its true nature. It is a trans-literary beast, and it shows its capability to jump through three levels of reality and potentially snap its jaws directly at the reader.

Typically, the marker of a microcosmic work is some form of extended communication with the entity which betrays the fact that it is a being in the same sense as we are. Cosmic deities, in the Lovecraftian sense, view us and our mental capabilities as ants, and any communication is rudimentary and conveys nothing about the speaker except that their awareness is enormous compared to our own. I read the best explanation of how humans interact with these beings a few months back on a message board; they used a parable of how we interact with ants. How one interacts with an ant has almost nothing to do with the meeting between man and ant everything to do with the context that the ant cannot even begin to understand. An ant outside is a curiosity, but an ant inside is an annoyance. Even when seeing an ant outside, people--- and children specifically--- will sometimes go out of their way to kill it without even really meaning to. The ant, of course, has not a clue about any of this. Sometimes, they see the shoe before it hits them; most of the time, I assume, they do not.

The important point to take out of this is you would never have the relationship with an ant that a horror villain has with their work's protagonist. This is why entities like the one in Smile, It Follows, Sinister, and even Skinamarink do not qualify as macrocosmic horror. The entity's primary focus is on the events of the story, meaning it is nearly encapsulated by its motive.

Some of these works may qualify as microcosmic horror--- and I would posit that It Follows does--- because any motive that the viewer observes is only there because of the framing of the moving. From the character perspective, the entity simply follows. The viewer, however, can notice this is not entirely true and that the entity is far more complicated than the characters assume. Even for the viewer, there is no evidence that it relishes in its kills, but its singular focus on the characters proves that it is not a truly cosmic entity. In Skinamarink, this argument only holds if we give credence to the immaturity of the kids and how that shapes their reality into something where the communication is their own mind's best manifestation of the horror they are encountering.

All the other movies I mentioned do not even qualify as microcosmic horror because the entities intentionally communicate with the protagonists. I won't spoil all of them, but this ranges from speech to a blatantly sadistic modus operandi. The litmus test here is if the villain can truly interact as a character, or if they operate as more of a force within the movie.

This distinction is important because of how entrenched the "hidden monster" has become in horror media. Early monsters, such as Dracula, Frankenstein, or even Mr. Hyde, were scary by virtue of the challenge they posed to their contemporaneous zeitgeist . Modern horror writers learned that the scariest villains were those that remained hidden and poorly understood.

The larger effect of this trend is nearly every horror movie has some aspect of cosmic-like horror via the decision to conceal the villain from the viewer. This makes recognizing these subgenres challenging. I plan to write another piece on why genre distinction is important, but at minimum it allows you to piece out which literary traditions the work is drawing from. At the very least, it'll let you make good predictions to your friends about what happens in the next scene.