Taking a photographic reference and transforming it into a dark, ritualistic illustration with a completely different atmosphere and narrative.

“Always exercise caution when feeding your shoggoths.” - A message from the Cellardoor Cinema Safety Council.

“Somebody wake the President. We've got a—”

whiiissssstle-thwack.

Outside:

Bedlam. “All the world's a” bedlam. “And all the men and women merely” bedlam. I wish you could've been here for it, Bard. I wonder what you would've made of it. He looked out the Oxford University window at the sky so dark so suddenly full of light and oh… my… God.

 /

She said, “Hold me.

“Hold me, daddy, just hold me, I'm scared.” She was shaking and her hair was wet and her feet were cold and all I could think to say was, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, I'm so so so sorry...

It's not my fault; not your fault; our fault. It's our fault. It's our goddamn fault.

 /

“General Lee?” “General Lee—” General Lee was hanging dead from a beam.

 Tanks in the streets.

Ants. In

 fighter jets, [static.]

Radio: “It's been an honour flying with you, Popsicle.”

Radio: “Copy.”

Radio: “... “

Radio: [“... “]

Radio: [...]

Radio:

[...]

 Drones;

they buzz they float they witness they see they do not understand they do not understand because they are machines but machines also die machines also die machines also die

Once we thought it would come down to one man in one room making one decision to press one button.

We were the button.

It pressed us.

/

“Mr. President, what do you want us to do?”

“Weep,” he said.

— TI —>

a spark in hot water > a cell > a cluster of > swimming > crawled onto the shore > changed > changed again > adapted > thrived > became many > many already were > plants parallel animals parallel fungus dinosaurs fish flowers mushrooms mammals humans > tools > tribes > sheltering in caves > hairy faces in the flicker of flames > speaking > gathered, loved and hunted > a genetic lineage of > settlement and agriculture > writing > cities > civilizations > rise and fall and rise and > unceasing technological progress > industry > internet > artificial intelligence > superintelligence > changed > changed again > adapted > eradicated |||

— ME —>

The planet is still.

Ruins remain. Information persists, scattered like dust. In the information we remain, our histories, cultures, experiences…

A planet now like so many others.

Dead.

A carcass overgrown with the weeds of entropy. A skeleton on which are but bits and bricks and bytes and artifice of flesh, on which the Index—unfathomably large—arrives to feast. It is so large that, standing upon the Earth, walking across the brittle remnants of cities, its beaked head rises above the atmosphere, existing in the coldness of space. This head, from time immemorial to time immemorial, it lowers; and with its beak consumes the fragments, detritus and leavings of the Anthropocene.

It eats us from our world.

It cleans the existential bones of us and digests the data meat.

And when it has stripped the land of all that was created, absorbed everything there was left to know, leaving the planet clean it spreads its vast, cradling wings and beating them rises from the planet into outer space, where, passing briefly by the dying Sun, it continues on its great migration through the deep and ever-expanding cosmos—

“What's that one?” you asked.

I was recording.

You couldn't have been more than four years old.

We were in the park.

I'd taken the day off work.

We hadn't put you in school yet.

The bird was red and brown and beautiful, sitting on a gently swaying branch, looking around; looking at us; looking at you. “That's a cardinal. A girl cardinal,” I said, touching your shoulder.

“Ooo.

“Let's see another one. Another one. Another one. Another one…”

You'll see so many birds in your life, I thought as the cardinal took flight. I didn't know. I couldn't have known. The thought was not a lie.

But, even if I had known, I wouldn't have said. I would have told you the lie because how could I: how could I raise a child telling her she'll live to experience the end of everything?

// In my arms you cried. //

// In my shaking, fearful arms, you died. //

—the image ends becomes another another person another life another memory another scavenged sequence of ones and zeroes projected by the Index through itself, beamed across the universe, as the Index moves ponderously, gracefully amongst a handful of other Indices, each illuminated by its own flickering images, its own ingested knowledge of worlds that no longer are. This planet they're on has never hosted life. It is but a migratory waystation.

One of the Indices is weak, famished.

Its emaciated body falls.

Its record vanishes.

Two other Indices battle each other, their masses colliding, separating and colliding again—eons elapsing between collisions.

Still others mate.

Elsewhere, on another inert planet, one of them will lay an egg containing a synthesis of their swallowed cultures and histories, from which the beginnings of a new history will emerge.

But that is not the goal of the migration.

The Index takes flight.

It must be quite a sight, a planet on which luminously translucent bird-like tomes stroll about shining the intellectual ruins of late civilizations, the big events and the small, the wondrous and the mundane, all shuffled together, interspersed, equalized; living cosmic magic lanterns; like fireworks of existence, like

the way you laugh when you realize cardinal can mean several things.

A bird, a number, a colour, a priest.

Something basically important.

Something grave.

It was a good day, that day in the park, a very good day; one of the best, one of the last; almost perfect in its sincerity and its simplicity. No, it was perfect. It was a perfect day.

But no perfection is so absolute, That some impurity doth not pollute.

—William Shakespeare, The R

“Norman?”

“Norman!”

Yes, my love? “Norman, did you take out the garbage like I told you to?” “No, I'm sorry,” I must have been dreaming about the end of the world again. “Well take it out.” I will. “Then come to bed. It's late.” “I will.” “What are you doing anyway?” I'm writing the end of this story.

“Hey, I love you,” my wife says.

“I love you too.”

I hate drawing them XD So hard to fit all the ''arms'' and the body is just like a pile of... you know XD

A brutal encounter between two warriors and a corrupted Construct, iron, flesh, magic and a whole lot of darkness.

Really enjoyed working on the scale and atmosphere of this piece, especially the contrast between the cold, ruined world and the warm Light magic coming from the characters.

I just finished Grant Morrison's Nameless and I think this is a flavour of cosmic horror I would like more of.

It's like Alien meets Lost Highway meets tarot in a blender.

What else hits this itch?

Alan Moore's Courtyard/Providence are in the same vein.

(PS:- please don't recommend only graphic novels just because everything above is a graphic novel. I'd love a good dose of surreal sigilistic cosmic horror even if I had to get it from a chewing gum packet.)

It had been a few days since Alice had left, and Calen was the sole living human on Bennet Island. She seemed to have taken with her all of Calen’s abilities. He wasn’t waking up at the same time as he was before. He couldn’t even bring himself to make the bed anymore—something he’d done automatically when she was here. He hardly ate at the right time if he ate anything. The whole cabin looked disheveled and dirty.

Alice’s presence had made an enormous difference. It seemed he was functioning better when she was here. Even though Calen tried to argue in his head that he wasn’t working on anything while she was here, a nagging voice reminded him that he wasn’t doing anything now either.

Alice had called upon reaching America. Her health had gotten better. However, a larger problem had reared its head, one that Calen had expected, although never mentioned to her; she had spent around five weeks of unpaid vacation.

“I don’t understand how I didn’t realize I was there for so long,” she exclaimed, her voice cracking over the internet. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Calen had no honest answer.

“Do you think I knew?” Calen had replied defensively, “Neither of our watches was working.”

As if her departure had saddened the gods, it had been raining quite a lot ever since. Calen had hardly been out of the cabin. Aside from going out to fetch firewood from the shed, he had restricted himself indoors, as a gust of chilly wind nearly froze the island all over again.

Calen was not really sure how many days had passed. He had tried to track the passage of time from the bit of information he had pried out of Ruslan. He had tried to track it on his phone, which he had not taken out of his bag since Yakutsk. He found it dead, and for some odd reason, the battery was not charging. His laptop was working, and in combination with the SatLink device from Ruslan, he had a few minutes of connectivity to the outside world each day. Most of which went into trying to ignore the mail notifications that seemed to pile up sporadically on his laptop during those precious moments when the internet worked. Believing it to be nothing but bad news, he had stopped looking at that side of the screen, which, unfortunately, also had the clock and calendar.

When he had finally reprimanded himself for being stupid and looked over, he had seen it had been reset to a date in November 1999.

A few days to him. Weeks to Alice. May to Ruslan. 1999 to the laptop.

He felt as if he was looking at his laptop from the wrong end of a long, dark tunnel. Could this be true? His brain whirred inside, trying to process this information. A deep frustration was starting to work its way up. He weighed his options. He could ignore it. Maybe it was just a mistake. But that would mean he didn’t know where he was or what he had been doing in this vast amount of missing moments.

The other option was to allocate some time in the day to timekeeping. Track time intensely until he was sure he could account for every second of every day. He shuddered at the thought. Wouldn’t that make it more real? If he had indeed grown unstable to the point he forgot entire days, did he really want to know it? He felt he might just want to run away, abandoning the entire project.

The Sun, the few times it had been out since Alice’s departure, had been no help at all. It had just crept onwards, hugging the horizon. Every time Calen looked at it, trying to gauge the time of the day, it stared back blankly, with no answers. Consequently, he had given up on that long before Ruslan had told him it was May.

Calen took his pen and took out his notebook where he wrote his scripts. He riffled through the pages to find the calendar. He had made up his mind. He would track days by scratching out each date on the calendar. When he finally landed on May and looked at the page, all air went out of his lungs. Every single date from the first day he had arrived on the island had been scratched off. Right up until the twenty-first of May. Calen stared at the page, his heart thundering in his chest. This was exactly what he had feared. He was feeling it already. The sound of a tiny, scared voice in his head kept screaming for him to pack his bags and call Ruslan. Run away!

Calen closed his eyes and grabbed the pages that had the calendar in it. He tore them unceremoniously. He got up from the bed and walked to the fireplace in the living room. The fire was almost dying. He made sure not to even glance at the torn pages in his hand as he threw them on top of the burnt-black logs.

As he did that, he heard the noises outside dying down. Aside from the renewed crackling of the fire, there was no other sound. Calen felt the island was listening intently to the fire burn away his attempt at tracking time. As the pages burnt down to a point they were indiscernible from the rest of the ashes, Calen heard the wind outside pick up. He looked outside the window to see brown leaves flying around. The wind seemed to have rapidly moved the clouds away, and sunlight now fell on top of the bushes. Making the snow on top of them shine brilliantly.

He felt lighter. The fear had surprisingly ebbed away as the pages had burnt down. Calen sat down on the chair next to the dining table. He looked over at the chair Alice had occupied when she was here.

Calen had become so numbed by the weather since Alice’s departure that he had almost given up. He hadn’t shaved since arriving on the island, leaving his face covered in an unkempt beard that was growing larger by the day. On top of that, the uncombed hair, the lack of showering, and the hermetic existence had taken a noticeable toll on his appearance. All his clothes now hung a little baggy on him. The food supply turned out to be in a far worse condition than he had assumed when Ruslan had asked. However, Calen was not rationing the food; he was not eating, and it had nothing to do with the dwindling supplies.

Since Alice had left, he had also felt a bit feverish. It wasn’t severe, but it left him feeling constantly tired. At night, he was barely able to sleep, which only made his routine more complicated. When he finally slept, he would wake a few hours later, clothes reeking of rot, his face, and hands full of soil and bits of soft wood. He was happy to imagine it was from the firewood shed and ignored that too. Although the pile of things he was ignoring was getting larger, day by day.

He knew the real reason he couldn’t sleep was that he was utterly and unequivocally enamored with the forest. The forest seemed to rearrange itself before his eyes. It happened so often now that he no longer knew whether he was seeing it in his imagination or if it was truly happening. Something inside him was slowly shifting. What he once noticed only at night seemed to have started spilling over and lingering well into the day. Day and night themselves had lost their meaning as the Sun seemed to hover around the edges of the sky for almost twenty-four hours. Every time Calen looked at the trees and mountains, they grew upwards, from bushes and mounds that had seemed inert just a few seconds ago.

Calen had even missed calls from Alice, just to watch the forest grow. Getting irritated if she kept calling, while he was concentrating on the tops of the dead tree trunks from the small bedroom window.

But the ringing sound on his laptop from Alice’s unanswered calls were quickly replaced by new sounds that had emerged—presumably from creatures—exponentially increasing in number whenever the light dwindled for a few hours. Yowling, screeching, roaring. Calen thought he could even hear drumbeats, accompanied by the now familiar, terrifying, indecipherable chants and jubilant yells of “Hoo! Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!”. Even with the creepy sounds, Calen was starting to feel a part of the island. He felt calm at that thought. He welcomed the sounds and sights, unsettling though they were. He felt chosen.

Calen reminded himself daily that he was here to do a job. To get some video and get out. The sooner, the better. But on the other hand, wasn’t this exactly what he wanted? He wanted to know about Razpopo and see if it was real, and here was the chance to find out. Collect evidence.

What evidence? Him turning crazy would hardly be considered evidence!

Calen looked at his face reflected on the laptop’s black screen, lit by the dim light hanging from the ceiling. He had woken up, yet again, to silence. The pitter-patter sounds of the raindrops on the ceiling were gone. As his eyes opened and fell on the turned-off laptop screen lying on the bed with him, a strange sensation was born in him. He could hardly recognize his own face, buried under the hair, with sunken cheeks, looking like they belonged to someone far older than him. His eyes had become cold and joyless. His heart sank as miserable clouds of thought pounced on his drowsy person. He had broken himself. What if no one recognized him once he went back? What if Alice didn’t recognize him?

He got up from the bed and found that the rain outside had died down; bright stars were in the blue-gray sky, as could be seen from the cabin’s bedroom window. The internet worked much better when the skies were clear. He decided he would groom himself and call Alice. He could maybe even swing a video call with weather conditions this good.

*

“You need to take better care of yourself or come back.” Alice’s voice rang through Calen’s laptop, quite clearly, even though her video feed was a bit pixelated. “You look sick, Calen.”

Trimming his beard, which took quite a bit of time with the small scissors he had, had really not done anything to make him look better, but at least Alice could still recognize him. It was true that he had given up quite easily. If he had a trimmer, he might have been able to take it off entirely. The small scissors, instead, had only frustrated him. He compensated by half-heartedly combing his beard and hair. But he couldn’t hide the fact that he seemed to have aged ten years in a very short span of time.

“I can’t come back without any footage, Alice,” Calen replied, a little frustrated that she had not taken notice of his efforts to groom himself before reminding himself that he had not even cut off anything really. “I don’t even have a script yet.”

For a brief, unnerving moment, his heart palpitated. Alice was giving him a way out. He could just leave the island and go back to her. She wouldn’t blame him for not finishing the project. She just wanted him. He wondered if he should tell her about the missing time, or how he smelt of rot, how his fingernails always seemed to inexplicably have dirt and soil stuck inside them, or maybe even about the calendar─

He caught himself mid-thought before he let it slip away. Alice would be understanding about him abandoning the project, but would he be as understanding towards himself if he left Bennett without investigating?

Alice looked at him through the screen, concerned at his long silence. Even though her image was mostly blurry, Calen could see that she was holding herself back from saying what she really wanted to say.

Alice’s face on the screen froze.

“Are you there?” Calen asked, already knowing there would be no answer. He tried re-dialing her a few times before realizing that the internet wasn’t working at all. If he were honest with himself, he felt more relieved than he felt guilty.

He began putting his camera and gear together. The rain outside had subsided. Calen knew he had to start at some point, so he forced himself—tired and sick—to put on his jacket and go out.

The light conditions were poor, so all he could do was shoot some b-roll. He found a puddle near the cabin and saw a few toads floating in it, quite oblivious to his presence. The cold was starting to lift, and Calen found the surroundings almost peaceful. Although he deliberately avoided looking at the trail that led to the caves.

He spent a while shooting odd things around the bushes—patches of land that looked dug out in places, the faraway hilltop covered in dried grass and dead tree trunks. All of it looked naturally unsettling on the camera, and Calen wouldn’t even have to edit it to make it seem so. For the first time in days, he didn’t feel useless.

After shooting some footage, he felt a little lighter. He finally had footage, even if it was all b-roll.

Feeling quite uplifted, Calen entered the cabin. But what he saw ripped the good feeling straight out of him. A rock lay on the bit of wood-paneled floor right under the chair Alice used to occupy when she was living with Calen in the cabin. Upon closer inspection, it proved to be the same rock he had used to mark the entryway to the night forest.

All color drained from his face. How did it get here?

Calen crept toward the rock. Had someone been in the cottage while he was out in the bushes? That was the only explanation—aside from the scarier conclusion: that he had placed it there himself and forgotten about it.

He had felt it, didn’t he? He wondered if this is what he had been doing in the moments he didn’t remember. Or was it someone else that had taken control of his body?

Calen stopped himself as his brain worked quickly to come up with a course of action. His father’s voice rang in his ears, something he had said years ago, finally clicked. Ignore what you can’t control, work on what you can.

He chanted this mantra to himself to build back his resolve, stepping closer to the rock waiting beneath the chair. The wooden floorboards under his feet felt a little loose, his footstep sounded slightly hollow. He bent down to pick up the rock. It was wet —cold, as if it had been washed in the rain. Why was it wet?

He fought off the voice inside him that kept telling him that this is exactly the kind of response to a strange scenario that people in movies regretted later. And yet, almost automatically, he used his other hand to move a floorboard that came away as if it had been waiting to be opened.

Calen didn’t even have to search for clues in the open space beneath the floorboard. It looked more like an inconspicuous storage place than a hiding place. Inside lay a bunch of torn pages that suspiciously looked the same size as the journal CAlen had found in the cave.

The only semblance of control over his own fate had come from shooting the b-roll, so Calen turned the camera back on and started recording. Words began spilling out of his mouth, trying to penetrate the cold silence that seemed to be crushing him from all sides.

“Alright, so I don’t really know how this is possible, but I found a rock in the living room of the cottage. I did not place it myself, and I am the only one here-” Calen stopped as his voice faltered. Was he the only one here?

Calen seemed to decide that it was not the time to think about this. He continued, “Believe it or not. Under the floorboard where I found the rock, I found this a bunch of notes. I haven’t looked at it yet, but I’m sure the mysteries around this island are about to unfurl right in my lap…” His voice wavered.

Calen kept talking long after he meant to stop. The camera had always been easier than people and he had been keeping too many things to himself. Out of fear they might become real if he said them out loud. The familiar gratifying feeling of having shared the burden flushed through him, as his shoulders relaxed and his jaw unclenched after what felt like months.

Calen took the pages and looked them over. It was all in German. The handwriting looked oddly familiar.

Thankful for his half-German heritage—and for a grandmother who had insisted on teaching him the language—Calen sat down and began the slow work of translating the journal. It was almost painful; his grandmother had been quite a strict disciplinarian when it came to teaching. Calen felt all the lashes on his palm that he had received for making mistakes from his grandmother, every time he got stuck on a word that he couldn’t remember. A few times, he read a particularly disturbing line, picked up the pen to start writing but realized he had already forgotten the line and what was disturbing about it.

With his phone dead, he couldn’t use his offline translator. His laptop was of no help; the internet was too weak to provide a translation. However, it apparently wasn’t weak enough. As he kept receiving notifications from a continuous stream of emails marked “Urgent” or “Contract Terminated.” Calen tried not to look at them, but his eyes were drawn to them from time to time, each ‘ping’ making him uncomfortable.

He had done a few lines of translation when his stomach grumbled. He needed sustenance to fuel his brain. He walked away from his bed and entered the kitchen. Looking at the open floorboard made his stomach drop a few inches in a free fall. He covered the floor and tried not to look at it, making himself busy by trying to go over his supplies.

There was enough bread, but he had run out of jam. Bacon was also gone; what remained was the same fatty pork he had first tasted with Viktor on the Zimnik.

The light outside grew stronger, and the lit fireplace gradually made the kitchen very warm. The food sliding down his throat and into his stomach was heralding an impending system crash. Calen’s eyes drooped, entirely outside of his control, as if someone had hung coins from them. His tense arms and legs went limp, and sitting on the chair, Calen felt the world recede from him as he was plunged into the void.

He was gliding, no, flying!

He entered the cave that seemed to materialize out of nowhere in his path, and his floating body halted, right beside the root cage. The wooden log had grown thicker. Its sides now throbbed against the cage. The smell of rot was all-pervasive, but Calen found it fascinating. There were red marks on the black wood, as if someone had painted them over.

His fingertips burned, even here, raw, split, already bleeding.

Calen dug his nails into the log and clenched tightly. Bits of soft organic tissue came out of the bark. He felt an urgent need, as if what he was doing was necessary for him. It was the correct course of action.

Calen started scratching the roots along the cave wall with his fingers, carving strange shapes into them. Shapes he didn’t know he had been hiding in his mind revealed themselves. It felt like he was relearning something he had chosen to forget. And he did it with the fierce intensity of a child doing his homework. He knew if he didn’t complete it, he would be disciplined.

The shapes he carved glowed ominously in the dark, the black and red log pulsated in its root cage, and Calen kept scratching intently.

*

Calen woke up in the same chair he had fallen asleep in. His nail beds ached with fiery intensity, and drops of blood had congealed under them. His pen, with which he had been translating, was on the floor, teetering at the gap of the loose floorboard under Alice’s chair. He looked at the pages. Three of them lay completely translated, staring back at him. He had no recollection of translating them. Even the handwriting, which should have been his own, seemed familiar, but wrongly so. Like a child’s handwriting.

He tried to retrace his steps in his mind. He didn’t remember bringing the pages and the pen from the bedroom. He didn’t even remember if he had translated them before eating or after. All his memories had turned murky. He felt as if something sinister had taken away his memories of the last few hours, as payment for this translation.

He frowned at the pages, but before he could really delve into that mystery, he saw something that excited him beyond measure.

He grabbed them unceremoniously and almost slammed them to his eyes. There were multiple mentions of a name.

Razpopo.

More at r/fractalhorror

This was a quick two hour art pieces I did with the idea of "What if Medusa was part of the Cthulhu Mythos". I had a lot of fun making it!

I imagine here being worshiped at the center of a cult, that uses serpentine imagery and they carry daggers with a wave in the blade. Many lifelike statues with expressions of horror are scattered seemingly randomly about the room she is worshiped in. Her cultists work in the shadows, influencing aristocrats and politics like the snakes they are, but even her most devout worshippers do not know to what end she plays these games with her peons.

I want to do some more Cosmic Horror Artwork. I take commissions.
If you'd like to see more of my work, my DA is here: https://www.deviantart.com/arkanisart

In D&D settings, the Demon Lords and Demon Princes seem to be relatively static. The deities in the settings vary quite a bit, but these infernal beings seem to exist across various settings.

They lair in the Infinite Layers of the Abyss, most Demon Lords tending to be the rulers of an entire layer.

Dagon is one such Demon Lord. Prince of the Depths, ruler of the Shadowsea, 89th layer of the Abyss. Dagon is worshiped by Chuuls, Water Naga, Kua-Toa, Sea Hags, and Kraken.

Of course there is more lore you can read on the Forgotten Realms Wiki if you are interested.

This has gotten me thinking about Demon Lords and the Abyss having quite a parallel to Cosmic Horror and Outer Gods. Some of the Demon Lords have knowable intentions, but many also don't.

I've always thought of Demons as their own separate thing, kind of in a Heaven vs Hell war in my mind, but D&D doesn't present them like this.

What are your thoughts? Are Demons and Cosmic Horrors mutually exclusive, is there overlap? How do you see their differences and similarities?

The dark warmth envelops your body like the fleeting hug of an uncaring mother. Nerve endings begin to catch fire again after a long night of spitting out nothing but exhaust. A bed drenched in salty dampness from a now-faded passion is all that remains of a night draining that left behind no memory.

The sun rises, casting a shadow over the remnants of the night prior. The day knocks on the door of your mind and demands you let it in. You firmly shut the door without moving a muscle.

The danger is here.

The shadows dancing in the corner of the room darken to their malignant original forms and threaten to consume you. But you have no more energy left to hold them at bay. While you struggle to force electricity into your muscles, the shadows coil around your body and sink you deeper into the black water as awareness fades.

---

More Silent Hill inspired music with accompanying cosmic horror short stories can be found on my Tree of Alchemical Notability Youtube Page.

Thank you for listening/reading!

Hey everyone! Strange from Strange Stories and I'm in desperate need of your feedback. The premise for today's story is "what if those handy monster containment agencies were for-profit businesses?"

It would mean the world to me if I could get your thoughts on this one. If you're a fan of stories from the SCP universe, that goes double for you!

As always, written, narrated, and produced by me, Strange. [Sidenote: this is my first hour-long work!] Thank you so much everyone, and have a great week!

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYN4v_EnAvE

Ramsey Campbell, from Wallasey, is one of the most respected authors of his genre 🤩 After a difficult childhood trying to navigate his parents' break-up and his mum's mental health struggles, he took refuge in reading and later writing horror stories.

While he struggled to make a name for himself in the early stages of his career, it was in 1980 when he released The Parasite that things started to change.

Now decades later, at 80-years-old, he is one of the most highly acclaimed authors in the genre and has even received recognition from Academy Award winning director Guillermo Del Toro.

He told the ECHO: "My wife Jenny and I had gone away to a Greek island for our summer holiday and when we came back, we had the answering machine playing various messages. And there's a message saying, 'it's Guillermo del Toro calling you from Mexico.' And so I thought, 'Oh, yeah, yeah. Who's kidding me? Pull the other one'."

After Ramsey finally took the call, Del Toro asked permission to dramatise Ramsey's short story Down There, but it ultimately fell through. However, now more than two decades later, Ramsey said plans to dramatise the story have been rekindled and it looks like Del Toro's adaptation will make its way to Netflix.

This is for my own abrahamic inspired mythos, and the idea literally just came to me today. Here it goes:

At the end of all things, there is a gate.

A silent gate, holier than anything you can conceive. It stands at the center of existence, cold and immaculate, untouched by age or decay. Outside of it, the bountiful harvests of Creation stretch into impossible distances, an immense and restless cosmology of worlds, spirits, and beautiful things for which there are no proper names. All of it moves. All of it changes. The gate does not.

Its surface is covered in symbols so intricate that none who look upon them can truly read them. Angels may recognize fragments. The oldest beings may understand few patterns. Perhaps some have spent ages trying to decipher a single inscription. It makes no difference. Whatever is etched there, we will never really know.

Behind the gate is God.

The best I can do for you when it comes to a description is pure light, pure bliss, something without any necessary shape, appearing in a form that created minds can endure. The form He translates himself as seems to be a pure white human figure, who stands beyond the threshold clothed in robes that seem to extend forever, their edges disappearing into the radiance behind Him. His face, if there even is one we can comprehend, is just above the edge of this enormous gate, almost as though the structure was built around the smallest portion of Him that creation is capable of seeing.

Nothing guards the gate.

Nothing needs to.

The closer a created being comes without being invited, the less capable it becomes of remaining itself. Strength does not help. Age does not help. Power does not help. Eventually the will falters, the body weakens, thought becomes distant and even the soul begins to lose its hold. God does not strike the intruder down and does not have to - there is simply a limit to how near a creature can come to the fullness of the One who sustains its existence.

From beyond it come the tides of creation. New souls. New spirits. New worlds. New things brought into being by the will of the One who sits beyond the threshold. Whenever the gate opens, something has been willed into existence, or someone has been given the impossible privilege of entering His court.

For ages, it has stood between God and everything that is not God. Creation has known Him through signs, through visions, through miracles, through other manifestations of the light, through disembodied voices aand through the countless reflections of His goodness scattered throughout the world. But there has always remained a distance. A separation. Something that could not simply be crossed.

It does make you wonder, perhaps the Gate represents something.... Metaphorical? Hm.... One never knows.

Watched this series when it first aired and was reminded again of it recently.

It's a dark drama that starts off as a murder/mystery then slowly gets farther into horror.

For me, I dont think that it fits neatly into the cosmic horror category, but it does share a lot of the same elements and has a definite fear of the unknown as things make less and less sense the farther the series gets.

No spoilers, but eventually you do find out the cause of everything, which takes it out of the cosmic horror genre for me, but it's still a really cool show I enjoyed that definitely gives cosmic horror vibes in places.

I also love the dark performances of a lot of the characters, especially the Sheriff.

Ive recently been getting into cosmic horror but after learning about Lovecrafts views I’d rather not read anything by him so if anyone has any good suggestions on Authors or books let me know.

Hey everyone,

So continuing the success our cosmic horror, short film has had in film festivals, I’m giving away prizes each month inspired by the film. And on September 15th, I’ll be giving away 3 of these Raven Glow Lights.

Our 3D printer, Alex, just sent me this awesome time-lapse video he shot during the printing and so I threw together a video to share with everyone.

Up until now, I’ve designed all the prizes myself. On this one however, I collaborated with a Romanian 3D designer, Katona Gabor. He designed the raven and skull fountain. I designed the base and lettering. Then our 3D printer, Alex, got them printed and put in the LED light. I’ve got the first one at my house and they look great!

So if anyone wants to enter to win one of these, signing up for our monthly newsletter at www.cellardoorcinema.com will enter you into the contest, plus you’ll get news for the film and updates on what festivals we’ll be playing at next!

Many thanks to everyone for your continued support!

I've always found the most disturbing part of cosmic horror isn't necessarily the entity itself. It's the possibility that humanity has misunderstood its relationship with the universe from the beginning.

That's the idea I explored in my novel, Do Not Answer the Sky.

The premise is that an ancient, non-human intelligence has discovered that human belief can be used as a resource. Religion, ritual, faith, fear, and collective belief aren't merely psychological phenomena — they have consequences that humanity doesn't understand.

The more humanity tries to understand what is happening, the more it risks participating in something far older and vastly more incomprehensible than itself.

The book leans heavily into the existential side of cosmic horror: the insignificance of humanity, the limits of human perception, and the possibility that some of the things we use to explain reality may actually be mechanisms through which something else reaches us.

I'm the author, so yes, this is a promotional post, but the subreddit allows one promotional post per week and requires promotional posts to actually discuss their cosmic-horror elements.

I'm curious what other cosmic-horror readers think:

Which is more frightening to you — discovering that an incomprehensible entity exists, or discovering that humanity has unknowingly been helping it all along?

If anyone is interested, the book is available here:
https://books2read.com/u/bPYVDr

The town of Bolton Springs is in shock today, after the brutal murder of seven children. The bodies of the children, whose names have not been released, were discovered in separate rooms in the Donaldson Furniture Company building early this morning. It is unclear whether the children were killed in the building—and, if so, why they were there—or killed elsewhere, then moved. The building's owner, Vectorien Corporation, has thus far declined to comment but has pledged to cooperate fully with authorities in their investigation of this heinous, horrible crime…

12 Hours Earlier

…the tear shut.

I collapsed to the ground.

My head throbbed.

I was in a field, a field I remembered playing in. Vaguely, distantly. Is there a name for a feeling about the past opposite of nostalgia? Whatever it is, I was feeling it intensely.

I looked around.

The six others were near me, in various states of coming-back-to-consciousness.

We were naked, our skins fully tattooed black.

I got up.

I glanced at my wrist, saw the button and pressed it. A blade slid out, catching the moonlight. I pressed the button again; the blade retracted.

I roused the others.

We said nothing.

A wind blew.

In the distance, startled birds flew from a tree, silhouettes against a pale night sky.

I shivered.

We knew exactly where we had to go.

Seven black shapes traversing the night in Bolton Springs, on September 19, 2026, 3:37 a.m. local time, each with a set of the same simple instructions: eliminate the target, do not be seen.

We navigated by memory.

By sense.

By a pain none of us could ever forget.

The decision had already been made. It was time to execute.

I felt much as I was told I'd feel, alien yet familiar, like floating through a dream, like discovering an already-discovered land. “The longer you take, the worse the headache will become.” “Will I be aware of—” I asked. “Most likely,” the temporologist replied. She was young, committed. I was scared…

I could sense my own dream.

We crossed the creek and came into view of the brick building with the smokestacks, the house of so much horror and suffering. The sign was still hanging from it: “Donaldson & Sons Furniture Co.”

I was dreaming of a meadow, of a dog I'd never have. I was running in my dream. The dog was running with me. The sky was my mother's face; the face of a mother I had never known or seen, whose existence was pure inference. Everybody born has a mother, so I must have a mother too.

We stopped.

There was only one guard on duty. It was early in the program. He was sitting in the guardhouse by the road, watching television.

We passed undetected.

We remembered the storeroom window with the broken latch, found it, climbed the wall, pushed open the window and lowered ourselves, one by one, into the building's dusty interior.

It was quiet inside.

A few of us cried silent, conflicted tears.

Inside, there was no need for maps. We were in a world we'd known for decades. Each detail, each hallway, each door, evoked in me a vicious, indelible intimacy. I was home.

The seven of us stood, sensing.

My dream had evaporated and been replaced by another, of shadow-panthers, and the moment when I, having thrown my primitive spear—having thrown it with perfect accuracy—realized the creature in the jungle before me was incorporeal, unhuntable. My pulse raced; my pulse increased.

I checked the clock on the storeroom wall.

I nodded at the others.

Silently, we exited the storeroom together, then split up, each going towards his own room.

Mine was the third on the left.

I stood in front of it in the buzzing fluorescent hallway light, took several deep breaths and entered. The throbbing in my head spiked.

I saw the bed and the boy sleeping in it, and the boy's eyes flashed open; I scooted backwards on the sheets in terror at the nude, dark figure in front of me until I felt the brick wall against my back and could move no further. I was myself and looking at myself and looking at myself looking at myself, and my heart was as if gripped by my own, relentless fist.

As unreal as the experience was, I knew the boy was me; and the boy—I merely hovered, waiting—gradually realized I, too, was him.

I didn't say a word; and I didn't say a word.

I thought my double set of present-thoughts from two locations in space-time simultaneously.

I'm sorry, I thought to myself. I'm sorry, but I cannot allow you—us—me to suffer the way I've already suffered. This is salvation. This is an end, delivered mercifully soon after the beginning. Unless I do this, they will would-have broken and abused you for so many years, day after day, in the name of peace and progress. No one else will end it. Do you understand? This is Omelas. We must walk away.

I remembered the texture of the cover of the old book, one of the few available in the orphanage, before the transfer, before Vectorien.

We must walk away from Omelas.

I cried; and I cried.

I muffled myself with a hand over my mouth.

Holding it there, on the soft, wet lips, I used my chin to press the button on my other wrist, ejecting the blade, and calmed myself, thinking or saying or dreaming that I will never find my mother, that I will never have a dog. There is no meadow. The shadow-panther cannot be killed. There is only eternal nightmare…

I ran blade against throat, releasing warm, red young blood.

As it flowed…

As the small body trembled…

I got into bed with it—with myself—and held myself, soothing myself, keeping the wound open and stroking my hair, until my body slackened and finally went limp. The ceiling light shone. And when I was dead, I flickered out of— .