cosmic horror

A crew in Alien answers a distress call and brings the answer aboard. Solaris puts a psychologist on a station orbiting an ocean that reads his mind and returns his dead wife. 2001: A Space Odyssey ends somewhere its own characters cannot explain. The threat is not large. It is the wrong size, and it was never interested in you.

The sibling to keep it apart from is Psychological Horror, which works inward: the threat is the mind, the house, the other person, calibrated to a human scale of harm. Cosmic horror comes from outside and above, and characteristically declines to explain itself — the reveal, where there is one, makes things worse. The Thing and Nope carry both terms. A film whose ending domesticates the vast thing into a solvable problem has left the shelf, whatever its budget.