John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness may well be the greatest pure cosmic horror film of all time.
As a difficult genre to pin down by definition, cosmic horror (sometimes called weird fiction) often features the emergence of vast, powerful, sometimes reality-altering forces into our world, usually provoking an apocalyptic-grade threat. Much of cosmic horror is traced to the early 20th century writers H. P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers and their influence on authors like Stephen King, Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, or Laird Barron is crystal clear. But on the big screen, you could say cosmic horror’s biggest influences began with John Carpenter’s The Thing.
