10 Cosmic Horror Films To Scare You Into Oblivion

10. In the Mouth of Madness

This film is the third installment in John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy, which also includes The Thing and Prince of Darkness. Both these movies are cosmic horror classics in their own right, but no film pays homage to the genre’s Lovecraftian roots like In the Mouth of Madness.

Imagine that H. P. Lovecraft was a pulp horror novelist in the ‘90s that could bring about the apocalypse, and you’d be on the right track.

If The Thing explores body horror and the loss of our physical self, and Prince of Darkness delves into cults and the loss of our stable mind, then In the Mouth of Madness takes us to the next logical conclusion of cosmic horror – reality itself falling prey to extradimensional forces.

The insanity of the situation is contrasted with Sam Neill’s insurance investigator, John Trent. Trent acts as the skeptic throughout the film who is forced to the realisation that an impossible apocalypse is befalling the world.

The film displays classic Lovecraftian themes and motifs: the New England setting, gothic structures such as a black Byzantine church, and monstrous beings taking claim over humanity. Even the name of the film and the fictional book within it is a reference to one of Lovecraft’s works, At the Mountains of Madness.

This film wraps up Lovecraftian horror in a neat package and finishes off the Apocalypse Trilogy with its only logical conclusion: the end of the world.