Cosmic Horror Story / Other Media

Fan Works

• Alexwarlorn has written a number of these, many of which involve Meta elements played for horror, such as what happens to one-shot villains when they no longer matter and from a shown the fanbase despises but having no idea what's going on. While many have a happy ending, they're certainly this trope.
• The Slender Man fic By the Fire's Light ends up being about how The Slender Man reclaims the Earth for Eldritch Abominations at large.
• The Deltarune fancomic Eldritchrune, as the name implies, is an only slightly Lighter and Softer take on a world full of eldritch monsters the protagonist becomes trapped in. They can befriend these monsters, but they do so with full intent to wreak havoc on the Earth when they return.
• Challenge of the Super Friends: The End, where the Legion of Doom travel to a horrific Lovecraftian universe and begin winding up like victims in the Event Horizon and Hellraiser films.
• In Total Drama fanfic The Doctor Will See You Now Chapter four has several sequences that hint at the return of something more powerful and terrifying than humans can logically comprehend. It's not just the dead coming back to life or the animals fleeing, it's some unknown Thing breaking its way into a reality it is foreign to, and appears to have absolute power. The closest thing to an interaction between a force like this and a human, between #409 and Gwen, shows just how hopelessly helpless humanity is to these forces. Many of the descriptions and themes feel akin to those of cosmic horror pioneer H.P. Lovecraft. Not shocking, when you consider that the author acknowledges Lovecraft as a major influence, to the point where he said in the opening notes, “no Lovecraft, no this story. That's how much influence his works have on this story.”
• Friendship is Optimal eventually turns into a cosmic horror story when exploring the ramifications of a mostly benevolent A.I. whose safeguards and restrictions are only right most of the time.
• In the Touhou Project fanfiction Imperfect Metamorphosis not even the most powerful denizens of Gensoukyou, working together and using their most potent attacks, do more than inconvenience either Yuuka or the Shadow Youkai, some of them barely surviving the encounters, with retribution being swift and terrible. Yukari casually notes that she deals with similar - though not quite as bad - situations on a regular basis, and several characters, including Yuuka herself, state that there are far worse things out there.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy fanfiction Johnny. Not surprising, considering it has to top its already very disturbing predecessor, Eddward. The short version is that Double Dee's murders of most of the children in the previous story summon an entity known as The Darkness. And since killing off almost the entire cast destroyed the balance of the world and the show, it consumes everything.
• The Doctor Who fanfic The Last Great Time War. Filled with Eldritch Abominations, Temporal Paradoxes, and Eldritch Locations caused by two nigh-omnipotent civilizations clashing.
• Metacortechs is an Alternate Reality Game set in The Matrix. To players and main characters, the true nature of reality is the Awful Truth their investigations are building towards. Glitches in the Matrix, in particular, are rendered as Mind Screws that dismantle reality and put it back together wrong.
• Naruto fanfiction Obscuro is this, but it uses a different set of Eldritch Abominations - rather, demons and the like are the incomprehensible monsters.
• Of Sheep and Battle Chicken full stop. While not much more apparent in the first installment than in canon Mass Effect, the sequel pieces, and the additional information document Fear Unrelenting, Seen Darkly ratchets up the Cosmic Horror hard. What would drive powerful, reality warping machines such as the Reapers, to recoil in pure terror?
• Out of the Corner of the Eye is a crossover between Jackie Chan Adventures and the Cthulhu Mythos, so it's naturally one of these. It's a slow burn at first, but once the Mythos elements start taking center stage, the heroes quickly learn how out of their depths they are, which ends up lampshaded by one of the antagonists:
  Ephraim: The universe cannot care about you, it never did, it never will.
• The Shape of the Nightmare to Come takes regular Warhammer 40,000 and cranks up the Cosmic Horror elements to max. The Ophilim Kiasoz destroys entire star systems simply by passing through them, and no one knows just what it is. The Nex, of which virtually nothing is known, drives people mad by just mentioning it. The former God-Emperor becomes the Chaos God of Order. And before all of that, the New Devourer (the descendants of the Tyranid/Ork superhybrid) eats more than one third of all life in the galaxy. The whole 1st segment reads like it was written by Lovecraft himself.
• Sonic X: Dark Chaos. There are vast empires beyond the galaxy led by omnipotent and unfettered Physical Gods. Maledict and Allysion use the entire universe as their sandbox, waging the Eternal War against each other while concocting up schemes alien to human minds and regarding their creations as their playthings. Between them is the Shroud, a sentient all-consuming and intelligent parasitic virus that devours worlds on a regular basis. And then there's the Forerunners, an entire race of Eldritch Abominations prophesied to return and destroy the entire universe which is exactly what happens in the epilogue. The background lore takes this even further - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were apparently founded due to the influence of said Lovecraftian horrors on humanity.
• The Stars Will Aid Their Escape is a crossover between My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and the Cthulhu Mythos, and as such is filled with ponies being killed and Mind Raped by Eldritch Abominations. Ultimately closer to Lovecraft Lite, as even though the Mane Cast are all left mentally scarred, with Twilight on the verge of complete insanity, Nyarlathotep is defeated and the world saved.
• A Statement In The Ice a Lovecraft-meets-Watchmen pastiche in which Cthulhu bears down on New York city rather than the custom-made Eldritch Abomination Veidt unleashed in canon.
• The Thanks, It's the Trauma series at first looks like a series of one-shots focusing on Spider-Man Noir from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. However, as it goes on, it's soon revealed that Noir's - Pete's - world is inhabited by Eldritch Abominations beyond human comprehension, and that people can Reach to them for power, losing their souls and humanity in exchange for power.
  Pete: The thing that has me…is old. It’s older than civilizations, than anything I’ve ever come in contact with before. And I’ve seen the things that are out there. I’ve seen them when I close my eyes at night and try and sleep. They don’t care about us, not really. Sometimes they get bored, but most of the time we’re beneath their notice.
• Ultraman Moedari starts off as a lighthearted fanfic before developing into a universe where a god is insane in the future, causing monsters and time warps and all sorts of madness, the Great Names, lovecraftian and indescribable horrors, lurk on the edge of existence, the main protagonist is powerless and the powerful beings fight regarding the omniverse while ignoring humanity.

Music

• In an interview with William S. Burroughs, David Bowie gave this as a possible interpretation of his album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars:
  The time is five years to go before the end of the earth. It has been announced that the world will end because of lack of natural resources. Ziggy is in a position where all the kids have access to things that they thought they wanted. The older people have lost all touch with reality and the kids are left on their own to plunder anything. Ziggy was in a rock-and-roll band and the kids no longer want rock-and-roll. There's no electricity to play it. Ziggy's adviser tells him to collect news and sing it, 'cause there is no news. So Ziggy does this and there is terrible news. "All The Young Dudes" is a song about this news. It's no hymn to the youth as people thought. It is completely the opposite...The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I've made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage...Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a Starman, so he writes "Starman", which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately...The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village. They don't have a care in the world and are of no possible use to us. They just happened to stumble into our universe by black hole jumping. Their whole life is travelling from universe to universe. In the stage show, one of them resembles Brando, another one is a Black New Yorker. I even have one called Queenie, the Infinite Fox... Now Ziggy starts to believe in all this himself and thinks himself a prophet of the future starmen. He takes himself up to the incredible spiritual heights and is kept alive by his disciples. When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make them real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world. And they tear him to pieces on stage during the song "Rock 'N' Roll Suicide". As soon as Ziggy dies on stage the infinites take his elements and make themselves visible.
• In a massive case of Soundtrack Dissonance, musician DyE's music video for the song "Fantasy" (which contains NSFW scenes) mutates (almost literally) into cosmic horror when the teens at the pool start to turn into monsters. One girl manages to escape when the bottom of the pool turns into a portal, but this only leads her to the Eldritch Abomination responsible for the terror, and the sheer incomprehensibility of what she sees causes her eyes to explode.
• The Nine Inch Nails album Year Zero and its accompanying Alternate Reality Game plays with this genre, when the involvement of the ghostly alien race "The Presence" comes into play that will wipe out humanity if they don't change their ways — apparently, they succeed.
• The Prayer by German psychedelic trance duo Electric Universe. It invokes the feeling of cosmic horror by mixing an actual Hindi prayer with exceptionally dark trance samples.
• Regal Pinion's album, Lunatic Crossing, tells the story of a small town that is tormented by Eldritch Abominations after being released from a box by a young man. And it goes downhill from there...
• PSY's Urbanite music video throws in a workaholic being supressed by social pressures, business screwups and finally in fear of getting replaced by Ridiculously Human Robots or Artificial Humans in this grayscaled Crapsack World. Sounds like this will be a reality soon...

Mythology & Religion

• Aztec Mythology. If humans ever stop sacrificing each other, the Gods will become too weak to keep the universe running. Entropy will take over, the sky will tear itself apart, skeletal snake-woman monsters will descend from on high and everything will perish. Again. Except, presumably, the Gods, who have already survived five or six apocalypses in the past, pretty much all of which were entirely their fault.
• Classical Mythology would merely be a Low Fantasy if the Greeks weren't obsessed with personifying everything^note even though most Anthropomorphic Personifications don't appear in any myths, Hesiod mentions them and so they are "canon", so to speak but the fact that every abstract concept is personified as a deity means that Fate, which is completely unstoppable, is in fact a sentient being (which was actually worshipped by some mystery religions) and is thus making the world crapsack entirely for her own amusement, and there is nothing that mortals or even gods can do to get her to stop being a Troll.
• Gnosticism. The entire physical universe was created by a tyrannical, infantile creator called the demiurge, who mistakenly believes himself to be the one and true God. In fact, he was actually birthed by a higher divinity called Sophia. The goal of Gnosticism is to divorce oneself from the physical realm, which is inherently malevolent, and instead embrace the spiritual realm, which is divine.
• Mesopotamian Mythology. The world is populated with Eldritch Abominations like Nammu/Tiamat and Kur, Humanoid Abomination Jerkass Gods who may occasionally Pet the Dog, weird monsters like the Aqrabuamelu and Sirrush, and Always Chaotic Evil demons who cause plagues, infertility, and famine just For the Evulz. Meanwhile, humans are nothing more than a Servant Race and the afterlife is a place of stasis and darkness where everyone goes no matter what kind of life they lived.
• Norse Mythology. Wolves large enough to eat heavenly bodies? A snake so large it encircles the earth? A dragon large enough to eat away at the foundations of the universe? Beings refered to as "giants" (or "jötun" which means "devourer") that are (mostly) sinister primordial personifications of nature that existed even before the universe? The god who runs the show is a scary death-deity that really is not in control of the universe as much as trying to keep it balanced but knows that in the end it will all come tumbling down? An even older race of giants that embody fire and heat and live in a place literary called "Home of the Worlddestroyers" that only wish to burn the entire universe? The fact that they are predestined to succeed in the end and that the dragon that eats away at the foundations of the universe will survive this event?

Podcast

• Ain't Slayed Nobody is set in the "Down Darker Trails" setting of the Call of Cthulhu tabletop game, and stars a ragtag posse setting out to bring a notorious outlaw to justice only to both find themselves the unwitting pawns of cosmic entities beyond mortal comprehension.
• Blake Skye Private Eye includes many cosmic horror story elements, set against a film noir backdrop.
• The Magnus Archives: As the eponymous institute takes in statements from people who have encountered the supernatural, it becomes increasingly clear that humanity is a plaything for ancient and incomprehensible entities dwelling beyond the universe, which feed on/embody the fears of every living thing on the planet. They defy all attempts at rational analysis; even their own servants, human and otherwise, admit to not understanding what they are or why they do things. These Entities cannot be defeated or even meaningfully fought, any more than you could punch the concept of arachnophobia, and at any moment they might arbitrarily single you out for torment or death because you would be the right kind of afraid while it happens.
• Malevolent is set in the world of Call of Cthulhu, with all the horrors that entails. Cults worshipping strange outer gods? Check. Creatures that defy explanation and logic? Check. Powerful beings beyond our comprehension who are indifferent to our existence, viewing us the same way a human may view an ant? Check. All what the two main characters can do time and time again is count their losses and try to survive another day in an otherworldly universe that seems to keep going out of its way to try to kill them. It just gets worse when it its revealed that one of said main characters' is actually a fragment of the King in Yellow, his mere existence and his newfound humanity nothing but an accident. And now the King wants his missing piece back.
• Old Gods of Appalachia: Appalachia is right at the center of one. Ancient, powerful beings older than humanity? Check. These beings awaking when humans Dug Too Deep? Yep. A general sense of futility in the face of such horrors? You bet.

Radio

• Played with in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). Each version of the story literally begins with Earth being obliterated by indifferent aliens to make way for a hyperspace bypass, and would have completely driven mankind to extinction if Arthur Dent and Trillian hadn't conveniently befriended aliens who took them offworld before the disaster happened. (However, in a twist, it is revealed that the Earth was actually a gigantic super-computer designed to figure out the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, and it was destroyed five minutes before the program was to be completed, essentially making Arthur Dent the most important person in the entire universe.) A major plot thread, at least in the radio series, involves the "Total Perspective Vortex", a torture device which consists of forcing prisoners to glimpse the entirety of the universe with a tiny, microscopic marker reading "You are here", the idea being that the victim's brain snaps as a result of being unable to comprehend their insignificance. Ironically this helped Zaphod, who survived because it made him realize that his ego was literally as big as the universe. Well that and he was in an artificial universe but that's another matter altogether.
• The Pleasant Green Universe is either this, or possibly a very pessimistic Lovecraft Lite, depending on the direction that creator Julian Simpson chooses to go in any possible future stories. The various heroic characters have managed to turn back the immediate end of the world - or at least disrupt the plans of the people who are trying to bring it about - a few times, at great cost to themselves, but the threat that Azathoth will succeed in entering our universe, thanks to Nyarlathotep's machinations remains omnipresent, one character is missing, presumed dead (except by their partner, who is still looking for them) after tangling with an Eldritch Location, shadowy government agency "The Department Of Works" aren't even sure themselves if they're the good guys, and the definitely-not-the-good-guys Ancient Conspiracy is presumed to still be active. ...and then there was Who Is Aldrich Kemp?, which is mostly a Martini-flavoured spy caper into which one of the characters from the Cosmic Horror stories pops for just long enough to absolutely confirm that it's all the same universe, and where some sort of Magitek appears to be at play. Your guess is as good as anyone else's at this point.

Theatre

• In Little Shop of Horrors, the main antagonist "Audrey II" is a Botanical Abomination that came from outer space to drive Seymour mad and destroy humanity (although it displays surprisingly human psychology, speech, and behavior, and it breaks Seymour's sanity through subtle mind games and not by being mind-shatteringly eldritch). At the end of the play (and especially at the end of the Director's Cut of the 1986 movie), it's pretty clear that we don't stand a chance against this extraterrestrial threat, and that Seymour really shouldn't have meddled in things he wasn't meant to know. On the other hand, the movie's theatrical ending became closer to Lovecraft Lite via a Focus Group Ending.

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