Qingling Zhang | The Sublime in Cosmic Horror Films

Qingling Zhang | The Sublime in Cosmic Horror Films | University of Groningen | Promotor: Julian Hanich | 01 december 2022 – 30 november 2026 | zhang[at]rug.nl

Cosmic horror derived from Romantic literature at the end of the 18th century and reached its climax in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. By hybridizing scientific outer space with ancient cultural material, Lovecraft’s cosmic horror emphasizes the vastness of time and space, and in turn, it expresses the insignificance and inadequacy of human beings. Recently, an increasing number of films and tv series have been labeled Lovecraftian films or cosmic horror, like Color out of Space (2019) and Lovecraft Country (2020). Apart from films adapted from Lovecraft’s universe, cosmic horror is shown in a wide range of sci-fi and horror films, like Alien (1979), Arrival (2016), and Annihilation (2018). This project assumes that cosmic horror deserves more formal and rational attention and proposes to suggest its sublime aesthetics that was inherited from literature ancestors and has been amplified in the cinema world. By employing methodologies of phenomenology and cognitivism, this project assumes that cosmic horror sublimates the negative and evokes the emotion of the sublime. Sublime experience permeates Lovecraft’s weird tales like ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. However, as a cinematic expression inspired by sublime weird tales, cosmic horror films have not been systematically analyzed in this aesthetic category. This project would like to dig into these films and tv series which possibly are cosmic horror and link them to sublime aesthetics.