Editorials
How ‘Bloodborne’ Does Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror Right
The very first note in Bloodborne reads, “Seek the Paleblood to transcend the hunt.” Given the fact that hulking beasts roam the dreary Victorian streets, most people fixate on the hunt portion of that note. While this is representative of a lot of the experience of Bloodborne, it’s the word “transcend” that clues you in to the game’s true nature: a Lovecraftian tale of mankind experimenting with forbidden knowledge. Could they have shown their hand from the beginning and still drawn people in? Probably, but discovering this twist is such a wonderful feeling that’s integral to the experience, as well as being in line with the structure of many of Lovecraft’s stories.
There’s a distinct point in the game where the story starts to take a turn. In the beginning, it seems to be about a simple plague that turns villagers into violent creatures. You hunt them through the streets and into the woods until you stumble upon Byrgenwerth. Here you find even stranger creatures: a giant centipede-scorpion hybrid, a human-fly with a bulbous head covered in eyes and students seemingly melting into a puddle of goo.
The most jarring part of Byrgenwerth is the boss fight with Rom, The Vacuous Spider. After exploring the school and finding the head scholar immobile on a balcony, you dive off and transport into a brightly-lit lake that goes on forever. It’s a stunning image that contrasts harshly with the dimly-lit city and night-drenched forest you’ve been traversing thus far. When Rom shows up, she’s almost sad. Her giant body rolls around trying to attack while summoning meteors from the heavens and sending smaller spiderlings after you. It’s not the most fun boss fight in the game, but it is the first one that gives you the sense that there is something grander, more cosmic going on in Yharnam than you’re led to believe.
The phrase “eyes on the inside” becomes an important one to understanding the story of Bloodborne. In the fiction, it’s a colloquial way of talking about the game mechanic of insight (in-sight, get it?) and refers to being able to understand the incomprehensible nature of the universe. Much like in the work of Lovecraft, there is always something lurking just beyond our perception that would drive a normal person mad to discover. This knowledge is being researched by several parties throughout the game, all who have conflicting ideas about how to elevate mankind to their next stage of existence.
Eyes are an important symbol with a lot of the enemies and can help say a lot about the creature’s relationship with arcane knowledge. For example, the Witch of Hemwick takes the eye metaphor literally, removing eyes with a hooked tool, theoretically in an attempt to gain knowledge. Similarly, the description of the Accursed Brew item mentions the practice of forcibly searching the inside of a skull for eyes.
The Insight stat itself doesn’t seem to have any impact on the game early on. Some actions use it as a currency, but there are other more subtle things that it does as it goes up. The lanterns held by the Church Servants are revealed to be covered with glowing eyes, Mad Ones spawn in specific locations, and the giant Amygdalas show up hanging from the buildings in Yharnham. While it’s not called a “Sanity Meter” like in so many other games, it manages to capture the concept in a more Lovecraftian manner than other games.
One especially Lovecraftian enemy in the game is the Winter Lantern, which will cause your Frenzy Meter, another variant on sanity, to raise just by looking at it. So many Lovecraft protagonists end up losing their minds just by gazing upon some inhuman horror, making this the perfect type of monster for the theme. The more Insight your character has, the quicker a Winter Lantern will raise your Frenzy, reinforcing an idea of the genre: knowledge of the forbidden is dangerous.
My favorite part about Bloodborne is that while it explores all of these very Lovecraft-influenced ideas, it does so without using the mythology. Sure, there are lots of tentacled creatures or the occasional fish-man, but it never uses Cthulhu proper, despite the fact that it’s public domain and could have been used. In creating its own mythology, it’s able to explore the ideas of cosmic horror in its own ways that don’t come with the baggage of Lovecraft, making it so much more unique.
By not telling us about the cosmic horror story from the get-go, it gave players the experience of a Lovecraft protagonist’s, slowly unraveling mysteries around them while losing more of their mind in the process. This melds perfectly with the storytelling of the Souls games, forcing you to actively hunt down and piece together the information yourself. It’s the perfect combination of theme and genre, and while I don’t think I’d ever need to see an explicit sequel, I would love to see From Software do something similar again.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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