HAPPY STRANGER THINGS DAY!!! In honor of the long-awaited arrival of season 4 of one of my favorite shows of all time, I wanted to write about the genre this work of art calls home: Lovecraftian horror. What is it, where did it come from, and how do you write it?
Fair warning, this post will contain some very minor spoilers for seasons 1-3 of Stranger Things, but I haven’t even seen season 4 yet, so no chance of me spoiling that. Fear not.
What is Lovecraftian horror?
As the name would suggest, we’re talking about the subgenre of horror (or sometimes sci-fi, depend on who you ask) pioneered by H.P. Lovecraft in the early 20th century. Also sometimes known as cosmic horror, it’s typically characterized by the presence of otherworldly, eldritch monsters of a squid-like inclination, surreal alternate dimensions, occasional cult activity, and descent-into-madness character arcs. A barrel of fun!
Lovecraftian horror has a checkered past, largely due to the fact that Lovecraft himself had some strong and disturbing views on white supremacy that crept into his writing, making it (much like Cthulhu itself) difficult to behold without feeling your sanity quickly draining away. Thankfully, other writers have since pounced on Lovecraft’s less problematic ideas and taken the genre into their own hands. Today, Lovecraftian horror has spread far and wide across literature and film, with Stranger Things being an excellent example. It’s also a much-beloved niche of gaming, dating all the way back to the 1981 tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu. Bloodborne, the highly successful 2015 release from FromSoftware, is a more recent example of the genre’s tremendous success in this arena. The genre is visceral and unnerving, but often highly cerebral and philosophical at the same time.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about some of the most common tropes in Lovecraftian horror, and how to weave them into your story.
How do Lovecraftian monsters work?
We usually think of Lovecraftian monsters of being big, inter-dimensional, tentacle-covered entities so far beyond the realm of human comprehension that to look upon them is to lose your mind, but these lovable eldritch abominations also share a few broader characteristics that are easy to apply to many different kinds of antagonists to give your story anywhere from a dash to a fatal dose of Lovecraftian horror. And the greatest culprit? Apathy.
Lovecraftian monsters aren’t necessarily evil – they just don’t care about you. Just like you probably didn’t think too hard about the life goals and pathological fears of the last spider you removed from your house, your friendly neighborhood eldritch god doesn’t give two farts about the goals, motivations, fears, and emotions of your lowly human characters. It’s common for characters to conflate apathy and evil when faced with such a monster – that spider, for instance, probably thought you were a real jerk for removing them unceremoniously from their home and tossing them out into an unfamiliar wilderness of patio furniture – but was there really any malice behind that action? Or was your agenda simply too far beyond the spider’s level of intellect for it to comprehend?
This setup is typically behind some of the central themes of Lovecraftian horror, with the motivations of the antagonists tending to be accordingly vague and unknowable. The point isn’t why they want what they want, but what they’re going to do to get it.
Stranger Things actually makes a very cool distinction here between the motivations of the human antagonists and the motivations of creatures like the Demigorgon or the Mind Flayer. Questions like “Why is the lab hunting Eleven?” or “Why is the mayor acting so shifty?” typically have clear, concrete answers with understandable human motivations behind them, giving us a pleasing sense of closure, and a solvable mystery to keep the plot churning forward. In contrast, the Mind Flayer’s reasons for wanting to take over the world or the reasons for Will’s kidnapping tend to be squishier, and eventually trace back to something we can’t understand – perhaps shouldn’t even try to. That closure from earlier is now balanced with enough ambiguity to fuel the tone of the target genre and keep the audience asking questions.
Forbidden knowledge
Lovecraftian horror almost always has something in it that people aren’t supposed to know, or maybe even aren’t supposed to think about. The idea of “eldritch madness,” meaning insanity brought on by trying to comprehend something too complex for the human brain simply isn’t able to grasp, originated here. There’s almost always some fact or truth or perspective that humans simply aren’t supposed to have access to, with dire consequences for anyone who grasps at it.
This trope is usually coupled with the existence of some type of in-group that either has access to this knowledge and has simply accepted the consequences (or is in deep, deep denial of them), or is seeking that knowledge without regard for what will happen to them or the wider world. Cults, secret labs, shady government organizations, close-knit small towns, and secret-laden families are all staples of the Lovecraftian genre. Examples from Stranger Things include the Hawkins Lab, that weird gang Eleven briefly hangs out with in season 2, and even the Russian military in season 3.
The function of these organizations in the anatomy of the story is to give the protagonists an opposing force they can relate to, and even potentially reason with. It grounds the story, raising the stakes in a more tangible way than a mysterious squid thing in the sky that’s too horrifying to even describe, while also serving as a potential avenue for hope, answers, and perhaps even salvation.
Agency
So, what about Lovcraftian character arcs? Well, a common driving theme behind a lot of them is character agency. This goes back to that idea of the world being suddenly filled with these unthinkably ancient, incomprehensibly powerful cosmic beings that want things we can’t wrap our brains around and come from a plane of reality we can’t even perceive. As any Bloodborne player will tell you, when you’re facing down one of these things, you don’t really have a whole lot of say in what happens to you, and fighting back is… well, not always feasible, to put it nicely.
Character arcs that are driven by fluctuations in agency, or plot points centered around dramatic changes in a particular character’s level of agency, are common and highly effective in Lovecraftian fiction. To keep our examples on-theme, one case of this in Stranger Things is Eleven learning to control her powers. Her agency in much of the story is tied to her ability to harness, contain, and successfully manipulate the mysterious forces she has control over. Not to understand why she has these powers, or where they came from – just to control them, and get better at using them. This is looped in with her overall growth in a big way, with her low points coming at moments where she loses control and her high points corresponding to moments where she is fully in control of what’s happening to her, and is able to get herself and her friends out of trouble because of this.
And there are a million variations on this! You can have characters moving towards either an eventual loss or acquisition of agency. You can tie agency to something mysterious, like Eleven’s powers, or something very concrete, as we see when Joyce Byers takes the search for Will into her own hands. You can even tie the two together, like the writers did with Billy. His struggle against the Mind Flayer is inherently tied to his need to process and move past his traumatic childhood, both of which involve feelings of being disempowered and robbed of agency. You can probably also see how the classic Lovecraftian descent-into-madness arc would fit in well here, and why this is a staple of the genre. But the idea of agency is such a broad theme that you can really stick it in just about anywhere, using it to generate a wide variety of unique and highly impactful character arcs, plot twists, literary devices, and imagery.
I want to point out quickly that almost all horror features loss of agency to some degree. It’s explicitly called out here because Lovecraftian horror utilizes a unique brand of loss of agency. Where a typical horror story might draw this loss from something concrete and objective, like a serial killer chasing you or something (in other words, something uncontrollable but certainly understandable), Lovecraftian horror is drawing it from things that are cosmic rather than earthly, and totally beyond the scope of the characters’ understanding — forget about control. It’s drawing on fear of the unknown, another common theme in Lovecraftian horror. Lean into that, and you’ve got this down.
Location, location, location
You’ll hear people say sometimes that Lovecraftian fiction is its setting. And while I’m a big believer in the notion that any genre can be layered onto any time and place, there’s certainly no denying that Lovecraftian fiction does tend to slot itself very neatly into specific kinds of settings. Basically, you’re going for something that will allow you to generate feelings of unease, a sense of secret-keeping, and the claustrophobic emptiness of helpless isolation. If you’re stumped, don’t worry – there are a few classic choices that should set you on the right path.
- Settings that evoke disturbing sensory experiences. Cold/temperate coastal or oceanic settings, popularized in large part by some of Lovecraft’s own stories, are a popular choice here. You get to talk about things dripping, seeping, and slipping, and you’ll probably find an excuse or two to use the word “moist” – nice and revolting.
- Small towns. This was another one Lovecraft popularized, but good ol’ Hawkins, Indiana is another fabulous example. Tiny, insular communities provide a ripe breeding ground for dark secrets, and the isolation of middle-of-nowhere-type settings gives you another way to amp up those feelings of loss of agency, since it lessens the resources characters have available when they need to ask for help, recruit backup, or fight back, or flee.
- Surreal, unearthly landscapes. Often this one is combined with one of the above, and it can take many forms, from an alien planet to an alternate dimension. It’s a setting where the normal rules of our world don’t apply in one way or another. This can be as simple as weird flora and fauna, or as complicated as a complete breakdown of the laws of physics as we know them. In Stranger Things, this would be the Upside Down, which is an alternate dimension – a common and effective choice. The one constant is that whatever your monster is, it feels at home here in a way the humans don’t. Sometimes writers will go for something completely alien, but it’s often more effective to pull a Stranger Things and make this setting just like our world, but a little to the left: the uncanny valley of settings.
Hawkins works as a setting for Stranger Things for a couple of reasons. It’s a small, middle-of-nowhere town with a mysterious lab lurking in the woods – classic. But it goes a step further by juxtaposing the inherent creepiness of this setting with an almost crushing sense of normalcy. Hawkins is initially sold to us as Anywhere, USA, and critics and audiences have long touted the nostalgia of its depiction of early 1980s American life. It’s wholesome and familiar, and we want to believe it’s safe. But the moment we’re shown it’s not? Well, that’s when you start to remember what you used to know instinctively about small, middle-of-nowhere towns with mysterious labs lurking in the woods. And that’s when you get scared.
And that’s it! There’s your starter kit for writing Lovecraftian horror – no assembly or tentacle monsters required. And you can probably see how much room there is within what I’ve laid out here to stretch your creativity. It’s no small wonder this genre has attracted such a diverse and dedicated following, and found so much success across so many different mediums. And now you have the tools to take it in your own, fresh direction.
Go forth now, and invent something unknowable.
Happy writing!