The 16 Best Cosmic Horror Movies To Fill You With Existential Dread

It's natural to feel some trepidation about darkness. It's a survival instinct, rooted in the need to protect ourselves from very real predators. Cosmic horror is a little different: The only present danger the blackness of space presents is its inhospitable nature, and that only matters to the scientists (and billionaires) going up there. And yet, we still look at the blackness of space and find things to be afraid of. That's where cosmic horror, the genre pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft, comes from.

We like to think of humanity as being the center of the universe. As far as we can tell thus far, we are. Not in that the Earth is the center around which the universe spins, but in that we haven't yet found any confirmed signs of life and, thus, can really only worry about ourselves. Cosmic horror wonders at our insignificance against the vastness of space--millions of stars, billions of planets, and an almost infinite opportunity for other life to thrive. That life could be larger, older, and more powerful than us. It could be so large, so unfathomably ancient to our comparatively short-lived civilization, that we're as significant to it as ants are to us.

Cosmic horror is also equal parts fascinated and terrified by scientific discovery and the curse of knowledge. It fears the potential of knowing the unknowable and being unable to forget it, and what that can do to the human mind. It's fascinated with madness, superstition, and existential dread.

I would be remiss in discussing cosmic horror without noting the legacy of Lovecraft himself. He did much to establish the cosmic-horror genre but is remembered these days for being extraordinarily racist, even for the time in which he lived. It can be difficult to separate the author and his work, and his beliefs often surface in that work. Consuming cosmic horror from other sources and through film adaptations allows us to step away from Lovecraft himself and approach them for their qualities rather than the original author's legacy.

Cosmic-horror movies, then, can often be quite different from other kinds of horror, offering us more abstractly terrifying ideas than slasher movies, body horror, and supernatural tales. It's easy to do cosmic horror poorly, but it's rewarding when done well--and hardly predictable. Here are some of our favorite cosmic horror movies. For a look at the wider genre, check out the best horror movies to watch right now.

The life that lurks out in space might be nothing like us, or it could be more like us than we think. The xenomorphs of the Alien series are bipedal and might even have their origins in humanity depending on which movies you take to be canon. But one thing is for sure: There's very little you can do other than get as far away from them as possible. While other Alien movies tend toward action, the original Alien has Ellen Ripley fighting just to escape, and there's nothing she can do to fight back against this unknown creature.

Based on Roadside Picnic, the book by Russian authors Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, it's hard to describe this movie as good or bad so much as that it's a major vibe. With that said, the British Film Institute ranks the film among its top movies of all time. The story is set in the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event called The Visitation, which people enter illegally to find and extract extraterrestrial technology. The adaptation is quite loose but captures the sense of being in a place where people know they're staring into the unknown and can only hope to evade the unknown and often invisible dangers and survive.

A group of researchers isolated in an Arctic research facility take in a dog, only to find themselves beset by a parasitic creature that can perfectly mimic any lifeform it binds to. John Carpenter's horror masterpiece bombed at release, but is an ice-cold classic even now. Claustrophobia, paranoia, and masculinity all collide as the men try to suss out who among them is not actually one of them.

Like The Thing, In the Mouth of Madness was directed and scored by John Carpenter. The film, starring Sam Neill, hews closely to the ideas and themes of Lovecraft's stories. It follows John Trent (Neill) as he tracks down a missing author to recover his manuscript, increasingly suspecting that the lines between fiction and reality are blurring as the author's story bleeds out into real life.

Black holes have long been one of the most intriguing ideas in astronomy. Sure, we haven't actually been to any other planets, but we know what they look like, and we can imagine what they might be like. But we have no idea what might be on the other side of a black hole, if anything at all. Event Horizon, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil), tells the story of a group of scientists sent on a rescue mission as a missing ship reappears after having disappeared years earlier. Of course, the ship didn't come back empty. As with Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon stars Sam Neill in a powerful horror performance.

This independent movie stands out for being a silent film released in 2005. It's a short one, clocking in at less than 50 minutes. A dying professor leaves his grand-nephew with documents about the Cult of Cthulhu, and the nephew picks up his great-uncle's research where he left off--and begins questioning his own sanity in the process. The film has received mostly positive reviews from critics since its release and is one of a small number of direct adaptations of Lovecraft's work.

In this film, based on Stephen King's novella of the same name, a group of strangers become trapped in a supermarket when a strange mist descends on a small town (if you know Stephen King stories, you can guess roughly where the supermarket is located). Mistrust and paranoia take over as attempts to leave end with escapees being killed by otherworldly creatures. The ending to this movie is particularly devastating (unless, like someone did on YouTube, you set it to a Smash Mouth song).

The horror movie business has a cycle to it: Someone does something new that takes the movie world by storm. Dozens of movies copy the idea with their own takes on it. And then someone picks it apart to hilarious (and ideally still scary) effect. Evil Dead is perhaps the best known "cabin in the woods" movie, but the 2011 movie literally called Cabin in the Woods is a sendup of this trope and others. A group of teenagers is headed to a cabin in the woods while an office of analysts watches their every move--and begins sending every horror movie monster you can think of after them. There's something more going on here, and I don't want to spoil it--the final act of the movie is so good that it left horror movie script writers wondering where they could possibly go from there.

Cosmic horror can often be grand and powerful, but Under the Skin is a great example of how it can be personal and intimate but no less disturbing. Under the Skin follows an unnamed woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, as she travels around Scotland, preying on lonely men so that she can take them back to her flat--a pitch-black expanse of nothingness--to, well, it's hard to say. Is she feeding? Collecting? We don't know.

Cosmic horror is often as intimate as it is grand--you have to go really, really big, or stay so small that the big stuff is outside the frame of the camera. Indie movies can be a great fit for cosmic horror because the limited resources push the cast and crew to be creative with what they have. Black Mountain Side follows a group of archaeologists finding an ancient structure in the arctic and what happens to them as they begin to explore it. Critics called the movie a "beautifully shot, creepy love letter to John Carpenter's The Thing and has taken home a number of horror movie festival awards.

Annihilation is based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, but diverges quite heavily from the source material, leaving viewers pretty divided in response to the film. The book is the first of a trilogy, but only the first was out when the movie was being written, and director Alex Garland (Devs, Ex Machina) adapted that first novel as a standalone novel. The film follows four scientists who travel into the Shimmer, an expanding area surrounding a fallen meteorite, in which life has begun to mutate in strange ways. The four scientists are forced to question each other and themselves as they encounter increasingly strange mutations. The movie's visual effects capture the idea of one form of life trying to imitate another without fully understanding the original, and the strangeness that comes from that.

Nicolas Cage is a wildly unpredictable actor. You know he's going to commit fully, but you can never tell what kind of performance you're going to get. Color Out of Space is an adaptation of the H.P. Lovecraft story of the same name and hews closely to the source material for the most part. The director, Richard Stanley, planned for it to be the first of a Lovecraft trilogy but was subsequently dropped by the production company behind the movie following abuse allegations; the trilogy hasn't happened and it seems like it won't. However, this film is well-regarded by critics, holding an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, and is worth checking out.

Isolation and fear of the unknown are two staples of cosmic horror. The supernatural isn't a fact here the way it is in many of these movies, but more a sign of the fraying sanity of the two men (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) who operate this early-1800s lighthouse and struggle to keep their grip on reality as they become increasingly hostile to one another.

Underwater is a Lovecraft-inspired riff on Alien. It doesn't reach the heights of that classic, and in fact the similarities work against it in terms of critical response. Even so, it's a fun monster movie about the horrors that lurk deep beneath the ocean floor and what might happen if we're unfortunate enough to disturb them.

What would you do if you found what appears to be a gloryhole inside a rest-stop bathroom, only to learn that it is inhabited not by someone looking for a secret thrill but instead a demigod who wants to save humanity from its father? That's the question Wes, a heartbroken man in the middle of a bender, has to answer before he's allowed to leave the stall. JK Simmons is the voice of the demigod, which immediately lends some fun to this absurd premise. Glorious is one of a short list of "bottle" films--films that take place in a single room--that makes its premise work.

The Empty Man was a major flop when it released, but you can hardly blame it--it was October 2020, perhaps the height of people staying inside and avoiding big gatherings. In other words, theatrical releases weren't on peoples' dockets at that time. Since then, the movie has become somewhat of a cult classic and has been reappraised since its release as being a fun movie. It starts from the kinds of scary stories we all heard as a kid that involve whispering a spooky name into the dark, but things get darker as people suddenly turn on and kill their friends. An ex-cop investigates a cult around The Empty Man and begins to question his own judgment.