H.P. Lovecraft, the infamous father of a particular kind of cosmic horror storytelling, said that the oldest and stronger emotion of humanity is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is that of the unknown. While this sort of idea meshes well with the thematic thrust of his cosmic horror stories and their supernatural and/or extraterrestrial entities like the telepathic, dreaming Cthulhu, it is philosophically false. No specific category of emotion is automatically stronger than another, such as fear over anger or happiness over grief, because emotions are objectively subjective in their intensity (and why would fear have existed before other emotions, as Lovecraft assumes?). There is also no specific manifestation of the exact same fundamental emotion, such as fear, that is automatically more intense than another kind.
What is unknown is not necessarily terrifying because it is unknown. I cannot know beyond my mere perceptions if grass really is green. This does not frighten me in the slightest, although epistemological limitations themselves and certain other unknown truths (like whether or not morality exists or which of the many possible afterlives, if any, await me) can. Also, what is known can be absolutely dread-inducing on a subjective level and logically worthy of such an emotional response. For instance, a person can be terrified of a mental health condition that they can rationalistically know with absolute certainty, for introspective states of mind are directly experienced and cannot be illusory wherever one makes no assumptions. Someone could alternatively/also be horrified by the fact that truths like logical axioms, which can be known with absolute certainty, do not depend on their whims or convenience or feelings whatsoever.
Lovecraft's own stories do address deeper philosophical substance (as stupid as he himself and his worldview of atheism, scientism, and hyper-racism are) than many, and thus emphasize metaphysical and epistemological issues that could instill deeper fear than others. They still do not even begin to explore the most severe forms of cosmic horror. Human powerlessness and implied moral nihilism are tied to the grounding of the horror in Lovecraftian narratives: the nature of reality itself is the source of the terror. Apocalyptic cataclysms connected with superhuman beings next to which we are like miniscule ants is one thing, however. The ultimately illusory Lovecraftian afterlife of something like Stephen King's Revival [1] far exceeds, as far as objective worthiness of fear goes, the mere awakening of Cthulhu or the overwhelmed reaction of a character to the scale, power, or eldritch appearance of the other such beings in Lovecraft's writings. The most fear-worthy kinds of Lovecraftian horror go far beyond what he himself utilized.
Even then, someone might not find such things especially fearful in a subjective sense, though they can nonetheless recognize the objective significance of them and how, if anything, their nature would merit the utmost fear out of the scores of logically possible things which can neither be proven nor disproven by humans. Though he cannot have truly known anything as a non-rationalist who did not start with proper recognition of the real nature of logical axioms and other necessary truths (free of all assumptions), Lovecraft was right that fear can be immense and overwhelming, and that this could be directed towards that which is unknown or, for humans, unknowable. No emotion, however, is by necessity stronger across people than others in spite of how some things people could be afraid of are plainly more deserving of it; also, the way fear is experienced by a given person could fluctuate and is in all cases felt subjectively.
[1]. See here for additional exploration of this:
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