10 Indie Cosmic Horror Short Films

Some Underground Gems on Youtube

Really good horror films are tough to come by. Especially coming out of Hollywood. Good cosmic horror, despite a recent increase in popularity, is even rarer. I get it. It’s really a niche subgenre and it’s not easy to conceptualize, let alone figure out how to show it visually. Cosmic horror can absolutely be disturbing and gruesome. But at its core, it’s about the cerebral elements. Not that there’s a murderer stalking your house or angry ghosts haunting your house. It shows you how absolutely fragile the human mind is and what can happen if your understanding of reality itself is flipped upside down. Or how truly alien a thing from the deep reaches of space can be.

I adore cosmic horror. It’s probably my favorite genre and if you’re subbed here it’s probably a genre you enjoy as well. One thing I really love about it is how flexible it is. A cosmic horror story can be set in any time period, any location, any level of technology, and can have any degree of grotesque body horror or even none at all. It can blend into any genre and take any form like The Thing in John Carpenter’s movie. Other genres like slashers don’t have this power. They can only really do one thing and that’s why they’ve grown into absurd mockeries of themselves over the years. Jason and Freddy have been sent all over, resummoned in different time periods, sent into outer space, and even fought each other. And none of it has been any good because the genre itself is very limited. And once an IP gains commercial success, the corpos who get their claws into it ruin it.

In my book, I would gladly sacrifice the production of big box office films for something imaginative and authentic. I’ll take a little bit of DIY cheese if it has charm and heart. You can tell immediately when something is made from a place of love. I’m not some normoid who can only stomach mass-produced, over-polished McMovies like Marvel and Disney. Or the McMetalheads who only listen to the Big Four.

Give me the raw underground shit. Give me the low budget creations made by some obsessive creative who was possessed to breathe life into the vision that was gnawing at the inside of his skull. Give me the rough bits made by amateurs who don’t even understand the philosophies of tropes and motifs, they just wanted to make something cool and weird. Let me wade through the schlock so I may uncover unknown gems to share with my comrades in weird.

That being said, one of my favorite things to do is just to browse into the bowels of YouTube to find cosmic horror indie short films. And make no bones about it, most of them are terrible. But there are tons of them. It’s a whole movement going on. A true burst in cultural creation using the virtual highways of the internet as distribution.

Here are 5 short films that I thought were pretty darn cool. And if you’re reading this, you’re probably a nut like me who loves going down dark rabbit holes to find weird stuff. After this, you’ll probably go on your own quest for indie gems. And that’s exactly what I’m hoping to achieve. So here we go.

Sound from the Deep

This is one of the higher quality productions on the list. Sound from the Deep was made by Finnish film students and went on to win a bunch of awards at film festivals. It’s about a ship of oil surveyors (I think) who are searching for resource deposits on the ocean floor. They begin to pick up an otherworldly sound from under the sea and all manner of Lovecraftian weirdness ensues. There’s a part with some CG that looks a little cheesy. But it’s not that bad. Overall the film really rules. It totally captures the crawling pace and eerie mood of a Lovecraft yarn.

Upheaval

A 3D animated film from a creator named “Robin Zeeb”. I’m not sure who he or she is but it appears they made the whole thing themselves except the music. This is a masterful piece that has no dialogue and only a bit of poetic narration at the beginning and end. It’s about a hideous alien world where some type of entity is manufacturing humanoid clones out of some type of dark matter ichor for some type of army. It’s under 9 minutes.

Eldritch Dreams

I’ve been subbed to this tiny channel for a few years now. “Cosmic Films” is a youtube channel that is dedicated to making DIY cosmic and supernatural horror films. I’m pretty sure that it’s a dude and his wife. But, I really enjoy their content. They’re definitely working with small budgets because a lot of the props look either handmade or possibly ordered from Amazon. I’m not hating though. I like it. They really do a lot with very little and cook up some pretty cool flicks. A little bit of cheese but in a good way.

Eldritch Code

This one is kinda silly Cthulhu fan service. And I would generally dislike stuff like this as it’s usually ironic and subversive. But Eldritch Code is authentic in its attempt to try something new with the mythos. It’s about an IT guy who finds some eldritch weirdness in the computer system at his office job. It’s clearly set in the 90’s with early Windows OS UI on all the computers. It has a totally retro aesthetic and captures the vibes of the cheesy films of previous decades. Not my favorite on the list but an enjoyable watch.

The Gate

A little film made by some rando on YouTube. In the description, it says “Thank you to my wife for being supportive” meaning this dude just had to make this. And that he’s got a based wife who let him go nuts to bring his creation to life. Shout out to all the awesome wives who help us pursue our crazy ambitions. The Gate is totally DIY. It isn’t going to blow you away. The effects are very amateur, there’s a ton of exposition, the pacing is a little disjointed. But, I enjoyed it. The score has plenty of bassy sine warbles that give that ominous cosmic vibe and the fx are good enough that you can fill the gaps with your imagination. The Gate is about a dude who finds a weird artefact and cosmic beings reveal horrible truths to him. Not a mega masterpiece but definitely a charming DIY cosmic horror film with eerie vibes.

Zygote

Oats studios isn’t exactly a DIY underground indie project. They were featured on Netflix and have a larger company backing them. But, compared to the big Hollywood studios they’re relatively small. Consider them in the upper-middle-class of film. Zygote is my favorite of the collections they’ve made. It’s about a hideous amalgam monster in space that is subsuming humans to become a giant frankenbeast. It tears about the space station and hunts the last remaining survivors. It’s pretty dope.

While Mortals Sleep

A classic cosmic horror trope of a weird cult who birth a monstrous alien baby. Unlike some others, the acting in this is actually pretty darn good. Very reminiscent of Lovecraftian themes found in yarns like The Dunwich Horror and Colour out of Space. What’s cool about this is they use some really cool practical effects.

Peephole

Not an explicitly cosmic horror premise as there are no aliens or things from outer space. But one aspect of cosmic horror that many don’t really consider is that it doesn’t have to be. Cosmic horror has to do with the cosmos and the processes therein. Bizarre psychedelic phenomena can very easily be placed within the house of Lovecraft. Anything that bends time, space, and natural law is also very cosmic horror. Peephole is an excellent example of this. It’s under 4 minutes with no dialogue or exposition. Just an event of high weirdness.

Portrait of God

This is a banger. Portrait of God is about a girl who does an experiment or perhaps a school project exploring a sort of Rorschach effect that occurs with a mysterious painting. She goes into it with the desire to see God. She ends up seeing something unfathomable.

It Stares Back

Coming from an individual named Matt Sears who also produced “The Sky”. He makes some nice-looking stuff and has a few concept trailers on his channel that look ridiculously cool. It Stares Back is a take on the famous Nietzsche quote about the abyss staring back. For us in these spaces, it’s a little bit cliche. But, most people don’t read Nietzsche or even know who he is. So, to them, it’s pretty profound. That being said, It Stares Back is about a woman who worships some cosmic being and after a crisis of faith demands to see a sign. Well, she gets what she asks for.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can spend hours watching an endless stream of awesome indie horror shorts in every genre. There were a few I really wanted to list but couldn’t remember what they were called. And a few others that weren’t quite cosmic enough to be put on. There are also a ton of really creative self-made AI films that are coming onto the scene and as AI gets better we’ll see an explosion in indie filmmaking. Hollywood is crashing and burning. But underground art is exploding. And everything from rough-cut DIY gems to polished professional productions is coming out of the woodwork.

The future of weird is very bright my friends.