Had it not been for the sudden pandemic, 2020 would have seen the release of three cosmic horror movies with rather diverse settings and stories: Underwater, The Empty Man, and Eternals. The release of Eternals shifted to the following year, but Underwater had its theatrical release, as did The Empty Man. Besides tackling elements of cosmic horror, all three have in common the characteristic of not seeming like cosmic horror stories at first. All three have points past which it is clear that, even if they were not marketed or strictly identified by the directors as such, they are indeed delving into cosmic horor. The aspects of this subgenre are manifested in each film through narrative ties to a grand being that serves as the ultimate antagonist, or at least as the most powerful entity portrayed thus far in each of these fictional universes.
In Underwater, the Behemoth creature that appears in the end is actually Cthulhu himself, an eldritch, Lovecraftian extraterrestrial with the power to annihilate humanity--unless the extraterrestrial or more explicitly supernatural aspects of the character were omitted for this version. In The Empty Man, the titular entity is a deity that has created the entire universe and all life in it so that it is metaphysically dependent on him as a contingent manifestation of his power (some characters say nothing exists other than the implied exception of the Empty Man, but this is logically impossible since the necessary laws of logic and matterless space would also have to exist with or without any deity). While no one in The Empty Man distinguishes between the necessary existence of logical truths and the lesser but still immutable existence of empty space (though space only exists because it is logically possible and necessary, not because of its own self-necessity), the notion of the entire external world being a mere mental construct is explored--something that is actually quite similar to the relationship between God and matter in Christian theology. Then, in Eternals, the cosmic horror is derived from the Prime Celestial Arishem and how it is his will to allow humanity to perish for the sake of birthing a new Celestial.
It is somewhat unusual for a PG-13 aquatic horror movie, an R-rated horror movie, and a Marvel film released in the same two year window to share something like this among them, but all three films are not only thematically similar to at least some small extent (Underwater does not reveal Cthulhu until very close to the end, however, so the cosmic horror is withheld for much of the runtime), as they also handle their cosmic horror rather well. Together, they also illustrate how cosmic horror can break into other genres and demonstrate just how diverse the former can be. Underwater only hints at some sort of giant entity until it is almost over, The Empty Man seems to deal more with a local legend until the stakes turn out to have extreme metaphysical and epistemological significance, and Eternals wrestles with what it means to resist a stand-in for God himself in Arishem. Of course, the Empty Man is presented as God as well, but less ambiguously than Arishem in some ways since he is directly said to have created everything besides himself (though this is impossible for the specific reasons mentioned earlier). None of these cosmic horror beings are purely interchangeable, highlighting how the subgenre is not as limited as some might think.
Of the three, Underwater leans into cosmic horror the least. The others much more persistently integrate it into their stories and themes even if it is not apparent immediately. It takes time to reach this point, but The Empty Man is the only movie I can think of that explores anti-realism--without the characters, like most people one could actually talk to, ever doing more than making assertions, plenty of them still express the belief that nothing or almost nothing truly exists. There are layers upon layers of impossibilities in these ideas. For one, the necessary laws of logic cannot not exist and have the supreme form of independence from all other things [1], with empty space also existing in the absence of a cosmos or a divine creator of the universe [2], though space can only exist due to logical possibility and necessity like anything else that would also exist. Second, even if things like the existence of an external world of matter were pure illusions, it is not as if someone could prove this, and thus they would have no justification to believe it, but it actually can be proven that some sort of matter exists [3]. Third, even in the film, it is the case that the Empty Man exists as a theistic entity that creates physical objects and other minds as it pleases, so at best, according to its own proposed ideas, the film would deal with theistic anti-realism where only God truly exists, but even then, the universe is still supposed to be real, just sustained by the Empty Man's wishes and power, and the aforementioned logically necessary existents more importantly still could not not exist.
Arishem the Judge, the Prime Celestial who is not confirmed to be or not be the uncaused cause in the MCU, is still a pseudo-theistic entity at least in his role in the story. The cosmic horror of Eternals is unique in its religious analogies, dealing with what it means to dread or oppose the will of what might literally be God, the only possible being with moral authority that is not derived from submission to the moral nature of a being higher than itself. In their diverging ways, The Empty Man and Eternals have already served as examples of theistic cosmic horror, a deep irony in that Lovecraft's philosophy behind his original cosmic horror was thoroughly atheistic and yet the world of the short stories still featured an uncaused cause, at least according to some supposed versions of his fictional cosmology, called Azathoth. The Empty Man and Arishem, presented as God and at minimum a symbolic stand-in for God respectively, only make the still-theistic ramifications of cosmic horror more apparent than before. In actuality, the metaphysical and epistemological emphasis within cosmic horror very easily lends itself to theistic and even religious themes, and some cosmic horror works of the past decade have capitalized on this, such as the movie Prometheus and the video game Agony.
Cosmic horror certainly does not need to feature tentacled aliens with supernatural powers to lean deeply into the core tenets of the genre. Such things are happenstance or secondary characteristics of Lovecraftian cosmic horror at most. As I first wrote here back in 2020, religious cosmic horror is a very natural pairing of ideas because if certain religions are either true or false, there is much that certain people have to fear; even non-religious theistic cosmic horror still honors a similar truth even if that was not the intent of the storytellers. Though Underwater is a more subtle cosmic horror film without as much intellectual weight, The Empty Man and Eternals are far more bold and direct with their themes. Because of this, they embody some of the best aspects of cosmic horror. That this genre/subgenre is now more mainstream means that there is more potential than ever for diverse stories with this kind of existential focus to be created and distributed to the public, including those of a visual nature as with films and video games. The aforementioned recent cosmic horror films are a testament to this.
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