Eldritch Abominations

What makes an Eldritch Abomination for you?

Personally, I think stuff like the Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion are far more eldritch than most of the tentacled baddies out there. Most “eldritch” beings aren’t that incomprehensible nowadays. They are mostly just evil, instead of alien.

The Fae from mythology and GRRM’s Others (different from the White Walkers of the show) are some of the best abominations I’ve seen recently.

What do you think?

 

If you're talking eldritch like the Lovecraftian genre, it was never really about their appearance.
A lot of those creatures are inspired by creatures who live in the deep seas and are meant to be seen as unsettling and not immediately comprehensible.

However, the point is the existential horror they brought in.
For instance, the worse part of the typical Cthulhu narratives is that no matter what, the protagonist lost.
A human, despite all arcane potential, cannot win and has already long lost against a being of such immensity.
Kind of how a young person realizes that they are just a single insignificant mass of cells in a large ever changing cosmos that has and will exist well beyond them.

For them being more evil these days in media well it's easier.
The writer and audience have an easier time battling an "evil" rather than having to design and write a complex sense of dread into the narrative that leaves the audience feeling vulnerable and unsure of the world about them.

 

What do you think about the following one ? Is it Eldritch-like ?

Gödel's incompletude.

It's about proving truth based on logic and is really about language. But can it also be considered it's about truth in reality/physics in some sense ? At least, discussing and proving truth in reality/physics ?
I think about Leonid Levin's theorem regarding the probability of picking a statement that is true and undecidable at the same time going to 1 as the complexity of the statement goes to infinity. I'm thinking about using this in a novel to justify the existence of something so complex it's beyond your understanding (as in unfathomable, "can't be described by words", etc).
It kinda sounds like Eldritch to me, but I'd like to know other opinions.

 

As has already been stated, the thing that makes something eldritch is not appearance, but lack of comprehension or ability to react. While a large amount of the aesthetics of the Cthulu mythos were driven by Lovecraft's fear of the ocean, at the time of initial writing, large amounts of said ocean were unexplored, and the wildlife in the deeper parts of it largely unknown about. When filtering a description of something unknown to many, through a medium such as writing whereby the reader creates the image for themselves based off said description, it works rather well.

And the thing that makes The Others from ASOIAF seem eldritch is also a matter of that lack of comprehension. When we are first introduced they make symbols out of bodies, have a language that cannot be comprehended, and use tools that are not understood. Even their names have some level of allusion to this. They are The Others, the people in the setting know so little about them that they do not have a term for them apart from one that says "they are not like us".

 

I have to say, eldritch horror has never done it for me. I mean, I get the whole "it's so powerful, you are a microscopic speck compared to it" thing seems overblown to me. Some people might go mad, but I don't see why everyone would. Neil Armstrong didn't go mad when he viewed the cosmos up close, and that's the kind of thing that really makes you realise how insignificant you as an individual are (the Pale Blue Dot photo makes me feel the same way, and I'm as sane as the next unicorn).

Give me the horrors that come out of nightmares - the nurses from Silent Hill, the Cenobites, etc.

 

If you want to talk effective creatures in a Lovecraft film the ones that disturbed me the most were the villagers from Dagon. Totally nightmare-inducing. To be honest though, so did the actor who played the old drunk, completely human but he was supposed to have the same genetics as the villagers, before they started mutating into into sea-creatures. The Innsmouth stories (Shadow over Innsmouth, Dagon, and The Thing on the Doorstep), all of which went into the movie of Dagon, were based on Lovecraft's fear of strange and almost inhuman-seeming races. The people of the ancient fishing village of Innsmouth, (called Imboca in the movie) were described as having strange bulging eyes set too wide and a few other fish-like attributes. They found a Spanish actor who embodied that look and even his natural voice and accent were disturbing (to me at least). In some ways he was the most disturbing part of the movie, but the whole thing gave me the heebie-jeebies. Including the ruined interiors of the hotel. One of the most disturbing movies I've seen, at least in the horror genre.

 

Honestly, I personally like the shapeless, tentaculous, gory, visceral, many-eyed and blah blah blah blah etc. aesthetics for bad guys in general,
doesn't matter if they are supposed to be eldritch or not. I just love myself some good old-school monsters

But talking about eldritch, I think they should be simply different, they should be something not neccesarily evil nor hostile, but different. And it matters to what point they are different.
Humans have their typical mindset, but if you really want something alien, something eldritch, you should make it different, make it act how no person would ever reacted, beyond mroality, beyond consequence. They have evolved differently, they may live in completely different environment and they may even have different culture. It is not how they look or what powers they are, those aspects work on kids, but the true horror is from somewhere else.

Combine (Oh, how I love them, my most favorite alien race in terms of being really alien, period) would be the best example. They came here, they took us in 7 flipping hours and then they left, leaving only small force in here. Now, what do we have here: Tall metallic spire, completely devoid of any beauty, it being completely utilitarian, armored and monastic. Because they have no sense of beauty, everything for them is a resource. Their servants, synths are living breathing creatures, but they are not bred or implanted after they are born, no, they are made, they are made from different organic and biomechanic components on an assembly line. Then humans are being changed into these almost techno-zombies called Stalkers, which basically serve as operators, they are not even strong enough to carry any weight or so, they are there just to operate consoles. Other humans are taken, given augmentations, steroids and then turned into soldiers through brainwashing. Resource. Their maintenance drones, Striders, are 13 meters tall, three-legged creatures that look frail, but climb and traverse all around the conqured area, plugging in cables and watching other lesser units. And when the hell goes loose, they are also their strongest current troop on the battlefield (because their main force is busy with conquering other worlds). A stupid maintenance drone that whistands 7 RPG hits. Neato, right?
Combine have walls that move and destroy everything in their path, crushing buildings and slowly expanding their area of influence. A walking wall that doesn't give a damn and goes.
And their terminals? Their terminals (as well as the rest of their technology) are incorporating biomechanical components, but not organs or mindless tissue, no, whole living creatures. In one instance there was a terminal that had 3 cylinders with organic tissue that conveyed energy and in one cylinder there was visible remain of rat head, that seemed to twitch and spasm when the energy was flowing through. Everything is resource for them, they simply don't care about morality or other stuff, they just expand.
Aaah yes, I said they don't have to be necessarily evil only to give you an evil example...

Thing is, many authors and creators probably think that horror cannot be invoked without hostility, so I was unable to find a non-hostile example. Maybe there was that one movie about aliens and communication (forgot its name) where aliens were also totally different, their language and culture out of the stars. That is also a good example.

So for me, it is not their hostility or ugliness (though always a neat bonus, TENTACLES), but their different natures that make them interesting and eldritch to me. But I should say, that I alone a unable to feel the cosmic horror, that dread, I am just used to it, I am totally fine with being a smudge. I just to look at them and to study them.

 

It is definitely eldritch to me if it has killed the commonplace eldritch.

 

Tentacle monsters makes me think of one thing, but that's probably because of too much anime.

I want a Cthulhu vs Alien movie.

 

To expand a bit on what others are saying.

The lovecraftian Old Ones were terrifying not in their malice to us, but that they were indifferent to us, we screamed into the void, and it did not warrant an answer.

Edit: I'd also like to throw my tinfoil hat in the ring on the "beyond description" idea of eldritch terrors. I dont think the tentacle look of Cthulu or the eye monster in (Dunwich I think?) Are actually meant to be described that way. I think the idea is that they truly cannot be understood by us mortals, like being asked to describe a black hole. I think the tentacle and eye imagery is more so meant to convey the protagonist's cracked psyche desperately trying to liken the black hole type horror into something that at least means something, no matter how much they know that is not what it is.
But that is just my theory from reading Lovecraft, would love to hear anyone else's thoughts.

 

Which film was this? Sounds good, it may have skipped my bit of the globe.

You hit almost every example I could think of and introduced some more I'm not familiar with, thanks!

 

I wrote something about this in my blog a few years ago, but to me eldritch horror is beings that are so far beyond what we are that they can't even comprehend our ideas. The movie Arrival had some elements of this IMO. The aliens...

Spoiler

The aliens were able to think outside of what we consider linear time. The station that I got off at was where they were able to teach humans to do so. Dogs can't speak French. Dogs don't have a sufficiently developed part of their brain to speak French. Or English, or whatever. Dogs will, barring evolution or uplift, never be able to grasp more than the tiniest surface meaning of a human conversation, and never be able to participate in any way more significant than tail-wagging, barking, biting, or cuddling. Is it biologically possible that there are beings out there with brain functions that allow them to do things that we can't comprehend? I think so, and those are the eldritch horrors.

To the collective intelligence of an anthill, such as it may be, this art is eldritch horror:

 

I mean, in a way the protagonists do win though. Cthulhu and the Great Ones are not actually shown to succeed. In The Call of Cthulhu the sailor Johansen survives and even manages to temporarily burst Cthulhu's body before he reforms. And while the ending is ominous with the potential for the narrator to be assassinated, he gets the answers he was looking for and isn't dead yet. Furthermore in The Dunwich Horror the monster is completely defeated and any rituals stopped. Lovecraft's mythos implies he would be out of our depth facing the horrors head on, but rarely is it so and also there are benevolent gods, rarely mentioned, in the mythos would could prevent anything too cataclysmic, although they are portrayed as relatively inhuman and distant.
I think too strong of a "oh god, mankind is helpless before the dark cosmos" can be bad. It can reduce stakes and make conflict less meaningful if the outcome is inevitable, although it does give the conflict extra desperation, and it also could come of as kind of fake-deep or edgy. I think it's good to have an element of that if you want eldritch, but don't make it too focused on that, the ambiguity of whether it/they could be beaten I would argue would help the eldritch feeling of mystery.

 

Remember the Vorlons in Babylon 5? By all criteria, they really should fit the description of eldritch horrors.

 

It's just called Dagon, made by the old Lovecraftian team of Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon, who also made ReAnimator 1 & 2 and From Beyond and I think a couple more (not sure if any more were Lovecraft films though). I believe it was made inthe 90's, doubtless during that period when horror movies featured unrelatable protagonists, at least for my part I couldn't really identify with the MC or with his girlfriend, though after they get into the ancient fishing village she did get a lot better briefly. I'm not sure if he was intended to be unrelatable or not though. I read somewhere or maybe it was in some behind the scenes stuff, that he largely based his portrayal of the character on silent film comedian Harold Lloyd, especially once he put on a pair of glasses and found the character through them. Buyt for me he comes across as too cynical and sarcastic for th4 most part. But aside from that, I agree with Seven Crowns that it's an extremely effective Lovecraft movie, in many ways the most effective I've ever seen, but it does have it's schlock factor at times. It gets deeply disturbing.

 

Hi,

Loved Dagon myself. But I'm not sure the movie is horror so much as just plain creepy with a bit of gross thrown in.

For me there's two things being mixed in together here in trying to define Eldritch (which I always assumed just meant sort of fae). You've got the idea of the incomprehensibility of the being, and the fear of what it will do / has done. To me just being alien and incomprehensible inspires a certain fear in itself. I mean say you're walking down a street and come across a wild dog. It scares you on a simple level because you know what it's going to do - eg bite. But now replace that dog with an alien creature, which not only have you never seen before, but which makes absolutely no sense. Now your fear has changed. You're still afraid, but now not because of what it might / could do, but because of the simple fact that you have absolutely no idea what it could do. You don't even know if it'll do anything at all - but you're scared anyway.

It's my belief that when we do finally reach the stars and encounter "alien" it's going to be a psychological nightmare for many.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Dagon him-(It)self is pretty Eldritch, though unfortunately the low-grade CGI pretty much killed that aspect, and of course as is appropriate for mind-destroying Eldritch beings, it's only shown very briefly. I apologize for going a bit off track, but I was responding more to the talk about Lovecraft movies. I had to bust it out and watch it last night, and I had forgotten, but you need to watch with subtitles on for when the old drunk is talking. Ok, back to topic...

 

The Angels of Evangelion, especially in the Rebuild series, are my favorite abominations. Especially Ramiel and Zeruel.

 

Hi,

Actually, I was just thinking, if you want alien (which is sort of the same) you could try that movie "Monsters". Damn its creatures are freakily wierd, and yet sometimes have an alien beauty.

Cheers, Greg.

 

^ I just finished the story that movie is based on (Story of Your Life, by Ted Chiang). It's far better than the movie. Yes, I was thinking the Heptapods are rather Eldritch, being essentially tentacle-creatures, and the description in the book definitely reminded me of Lovecraft's Old Ones, a barrel-shaped body with radial symmetry and just an orifice on the top and one on the bottom.