Control Resonant came out this week, and so far I'm enjoying it. But more than the gameplay, I love the vibe. The SCP Foundation-inspired world (redacted files, containment procedures, etc.) makes me happy in a dreadful way.

Creepypasta feels more mainstream, and I'm excited for where this might all go.

Existential horror is all about a feeling: that the galaxy is bigger, older and stranger than you are, and it doesn't particularly care that you're here. That feeling has a few names, and it's something worth sharing.

If you're into that kind of stuff, stick around.

How-To Feel Small

Cosmic horror, we call it. Or at least I do. H.P. Lovecraft gets the credit (and the baggage—don't look up his cat's name), and his big idea was that the scariest thing in the universe isn't a monster that hates you. It's a universe that doesn't care that you exist.

For me it didn't start with Lovecraft, though. It started with Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sentinel," a short story he wrote in 1948 that eventually grew up to be 2001: A Space Odyssey. Nothing in it tries to eat anybody. A survey team on the Moon spots a glint up on a mountainside, and someone climbs up to see what it is. They find an object that was planted long before any of us existed.

What gets you is the timescale. Whatever that thing is, it has been sitting up there patiently, long enough that the entire history of our species fits comfortably inside the wait. That's the feeling I've been chasing ever since: not that something is out there, but that something could be, lurking off in the nothing, and it was never in any hurry.

Big Empty Small Spaces

Then there's Backrooms. It's basically House of Leaves for people who were never going to read House of Leaves. A big part of the novel is about a family whose house measures a quarter inch bigger on the inside than the outside. Then a hallway shows up that wasn't there before, and it's dark, and cold, and it goes on a lot further than it has any right to. The book is also kind of a pain to read, mentally and physically.

Backrooms taps into that same feeling: the wrong kind of empty, a space that shouldn't exist and doesn't care that you're in it. My only hope is that they never go beyond that. The lack of a satisfying answer to the what or the why is far more interesting to me. I think it's a perfect entry point for someone looking for a different kind of dread.

Most horror films run on jump scares and gore. The loud noise, the face in the mirror, the memorable killer. That stuff's fine. It's a roller coaster. But it's rare to walk out of a horror movie with real foreboding, the slow existential kind that follows you home and sits with you in the dark.

It's as if an insect walking across a computer component one day just understood a sliver of our daily lives. A brief moment where it could see and understand these great, unknowable things. Then it went back to its small, insignificant existence. Doomed to madness. Doomed to nothing.

That's what I want pumped directly into my veins.

Here's some more stuff

So if you, like me, want some existential dread free of control or clean answers, check this stuff out.