THE VOID (2016) Review

Cosmic Horror ~ Nothing strikes existential dread and nihilism like looking up into the night sky and realizing how small humanity actually is. Founder and promoter of cosmic horror, H.P. Lovecraft once said, that his tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.

Few things scare me anymore, but cosmic horror is something that can truly get under my skin still to this day. The unknown is one of the scariest things.

It can be as simple as not knowing what is in the darkness, or what could be hiding under the bed. It’s a primal fear built on evolutionary advances to keep us safe. Those who weren’t afraid to sleep in the dark lion’s den died off, and those who feared it survived. Well if we are supposed to be afraid of the unknown, what’s more, unknown than the dark cosmos of space? Throughout all of human existence, we will never uncover all the secrets of the universe.

Good cosmic horror is supposed to tantalize the imagination without defining the horror. If it’s too well explained?... it’s not scary. If it has a tangible form, it’s not scary. That’s why cosmic horror works best in literature and usually has a hard time adapting to the screen.

Now there are great films that deal with cosmic horror such as Evil Dead, In the Mouth of Madness, From Beyond, Re-Animator, and so many more… but most of those films fail to really capture the essence of Lovecraft. Oddly enough, films that stray from Lovecraft’s stories tend to fair a bit better. Inspired by Lovecraft if you will. Movies like Event Horizon, Oculus, Alien, The Thing, and Spiral all master that existential dread that cosmic horror is known for. A sense of helplessness. A sense that no matter what we do, we don’t matter. Tonight’s film, The Void may be one of the best Cosmic Horror films that the genre has to offer.

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Graveyard Shift" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMfkymjljS0