Cosmic Horror and The Mind’s Defloration

I watched Altered States again a few nights ago and came to realize that in a way, the movie is a sort of Lovecraftian story, but without Lovecraft, and is all the better for the absence of monsters. What makes it Lovecraftian? What defines Lovecraftian?

What is cosmic horror?

To start with, I suppose I should replace the term “Lovecraftian” with the phrase cosmic horror. Lovecraft had nothing to do with the movie, so the name cannot rightfully be applied to it, but Lovecraft was a master of cosmic horror. Very few movies, though, have been able to get it right. Altered States is definitely a cosmic horror movie, and that is why it is so thrilling.

What makes cosmic horror work? It’s not the monsters. There are plenty of stories with monsters that do not present us with the feeling of cosmic horror. It's the feeling that the story invokes, which Lovecraft could do so well, but which movie-makers have failed time and again to reproduce on the screen.

The main element of cosmic horror is the breakdown of the concept of reality as we understand it. The veil, so to speak, is lifted, and we discover that the universe is entirely different from how we imagined it. The startling revelation causes us to think of our prior understanding of the universe as quaint, or innocent, or naïve compared to the revelations of the story.

Cosmic horror violates the virgin mind, and after this mental virginity is lost, we cannot go back to thinking of the world the way we did before. The mind has been stretched, contaminated, defiled. One contemplates a life of trying to unsee, trying to unknow what one has been exposed to. This is the hallmark of cosmic horror.  We seek the thrill of that first experience with a more complex, more complete reality, and the only way to relive that first time our eyes were seared open with vast knowledge is to move to a new story, to fresh ground that has never been trod before. The universe must be expanded in some way that has not been expanded before. After exposure to the cosmic horror, we slowly come to terms with it, and then consider ourselves to be somehow more complete, more knowledgeable, more urbane than the common man. They are like innocent children to us because they have never been there.

What are the main ingredients of cosmic horror? There are plenty of opinions out there, so I’ll stick with my own here.

Frontier

The first element is that there is always a frontier of some kind. It can be the edge of space. It can be the bottom of the ocean. It can be a lost chain of forgotten islands, forever shrouded by mist. It can be other dimensions or even the human mind. The frontier can even be the edge of life and death. The frontier must be remote enough so that we are unlikely to ever go there ourselves, but close enough so that we feel that it touches us in some way.

Protagonist

The protagonist usually approaches the frontier out of curiosity, hubris, or desperation. We expect the protagonist to have some quality that enables him to approach and pierce the frontier that would turn us away. Sometimes it is extreme bravery, but more often (especially with Lovecraftian stories) the protagonist is gifted with a slight taint of insanity: just a little weirdness, a harmless eccentricity, that imbues him with a sort of power that draws him, like a magnet, inexorably closer to the truth. Often, the protagonist has a form of genius, and is exploring new areas of science that were undiscovered. The protagonist also has questionable morality or judgment that causes him to continue forward when most morally upright, or down-to-earth types would turn around and leave, saying “This is too weird for me. I’m out of here!”

Revelation

The crucial moment in a cosmic horror story is the revelation that things are not what they seem. This revelation might be revealed in stages or all at once. The critical feature of the revelation is that there is no return journey. We cannot go back to thinking about things the way we were. The revelation therefore must somehow affect everyone in the universe, on a cosmic scale. This is why it is cosmic horror. Our conception of the universe is altered on a cosmic level. It does not matter how far the frontier is from our home, once the revelation is opened to us, we realize that the frontier is not so far, and that the world beyond is closer than we had previously imagined. A separate dimension might be poised right above our own, or even simultaneously inhabiting the same space, but for a minor glitch that keeps the nightmarish universe at bay. Perhaps it is only the strength of the barriers of the mind that prevent us from slipping into an infinite abyss of horror that was always there, ever-present, but undetectable to us because of our ignorance. Once the ignorance is washed away, we find ourselves teetering on the precipice of the bottomless, yawning pit of insanity. Oh yes: the revelation is never a pleasant one. It is never a discovery of a paradise wherein we can all expect to go when we die. The revelation is always sinister, malevolent, or empty.

Altered States

What makes Altered States a cosmic horror film is that it possesses all of these characteristics.

Our protagonist, Dr. Jessup, is a scientist who experiments with altered states of consciousness, with the belief that we possess genetic memories of our ancestors that can be brought forth into lucidity by the right concoction of drugs and sensory deprivation.

The frontier in this story is intriguing: this film presents multiple frontiers, not just one.

The first frontier is the mind. We explore the subconscious, religious symbolism, and the effects of psychedelic drugs. The mind is one of the richest environments for exploration, as anything can take place, and nothing has to mean anything. The subconscious brings forth visions and dreams of which the conscious mind struggles to make sense. We could spend an eternity trying to understand ourselves, but by nature of the conundrum of the mind trying to capture itself, it will always evade us. It is a limitless frontier. Also, it is a familiar frontier. We have all had dreams, and we have all thus tasted the boundaries of this land, though we may not have properly explored it. It is thus remote and familiar: alien, yet tantalizingly close.

There is also a temporal frontier, in which we explore the ancient past through the mind of the Jessup. He wants to push himself to the very limit of human existence, the first man, first woman, lost to eternity, but palpably touchable for someone with the right capabilities.  Although he does not travel back in time to the dawn of human existence, he was able to go there in his mind, through the magic of genetic memory. The first frontier opened the way to the second one.

The third frontier is the idea that the mind creates physical phenomena. The Jessup’s body physically changes into something primitive, and he leaves the isolation tank in a physical form that is totally different from the being that went in. The concept seems ridiculous in the telling, but the movie makes it seem real through the build-up. The idea plays upon the atavism of magical thinking that we all have, deep down, though we deny it in our waking mind: the idea that our mental states might have an effect on the real world, or that maybe there is no real world, and that our mental states can change the layout of our illusory world if we are given the right conditions. This leads to the underlying conjecture that there is no reality at all, but we live in a vast illusion, or a simulation. The possibilities then seem endless: can we bring things about by wanting them? By fearing them? To what extent is the world just an extension of our biases?

Throughout the journey, we are simultaneously intrigued and repulsed. We sense there is something to fear in what Jessup is doing. We recognize that he is pushing boundaries of human existence that should not be pushed. Yet, we share his curiosity. We want, as Jessup wants, to understand the origin of humanity. What is the essence of human nature? For eons, human prehistory, and later human history, have buried ultimate truth under layer after layer of misunderstanding, misinformation, miscommunication, bad translation. Jessup is like an archeologist, delving deeper and deeper into a virgin tomb, promising to get to the ultimate truth: which would allow us to finally understand ourselves on fundamental level previously impossible: to go back to the origin, stripping away all the clutter from our self-concept. The origin of the thing is the only reality that matters. Everything else is obfuscation.

At one point, Jessup describes his time the previous night, living as one of our primitive ancestors: no thoughts at all except for eating, sleeping, and surviving. He describes this time as the most gratifying and fulfilling time of his life. The idea opens up the conundrum of existential crisis:  maybe we think too much, and if we just had nothing to think about but survival, we would be more content with our lot. Maybe this is the ultimate truth? That we overthink everything, and that outside of human contemplation, the world is really much simpler, and this simpler form of existence is the sublime escape from our own mental prison.

The revelation was one step beyond the third frontier. Jessup regresses, both physically and mentally, all the way back to the origin of cellular life. He becomes a single flame, an ember of transient, delicate life, flickering on the very edge of life and non-life, which his wife pulls from the black-hole-like vortex of a primordial sea, and guides him back into the realm of normal existence. He has done it: gone all the way to the beginning of life itself, and then come back! What did he learn? We have witnessed his journey from without, but only he knows where his journey took him. He does not reveal what he discovered until the next evening, after he has had a chance to sleep through the day after his ordeal. He explains to her, with poignant anguish, that after all he had been through, his ultimate journey beyond time, to the origin of life itself, at the source of it all, there was nothing. The ultimate meaning to all life on our planet is nothing. Life came out of a cold, indifferent, absolute vacuum of nothingness. This is the quiet and catastrophic climax of the cosmic horror revelation. It was not the whirlpool or the man-ape running around the city, or the spontaneous decomposition and recombination of Jessup or the salvation of his wife. It was Jessup’s own words, where he traveled to the brink of existence, beyond all human expeditions, to the origin and true meaning of life itself, and found nothing but a void.