Dark Narratives: Thalassophobia and the Horrors of the Deep Dark Sea
Plus, a read-along book club and other horror news from the margins!
Happy New Year, fellow monsters! I hope you were able to find some rest in the midst of this dark winter (or balmy summer, for those of you south of the equator), and that the new year is off to a good start. Mine has been a bit of a chaotic adventure so far, but I’m determined to push through all the same.
Lots of good stuff this month, so let’s just dig in.
The new year means a new convention season! You can view the line-up over on HorrorCons.com to start planning your year. If you know of others, drop them down in the comments.
Cemetery Gates is accepting submissions for novels and novellas. If you’ve got something ready, chuck it their way!
The Kickstarter for the No Trouble At All: An Anthology of Polite Horrors, edited and assembled by Eric Raglin, is ready! Go throw your support!
Over on Wattpad, this year’s Open Novella Contest (ONC) is ready to kick off in a few weeks. This is a community event where writers are challenged to complete a 20-40k word story following some specific prompts and guidance. If that sounds like your jam, go scope it out on Wattpad.
Horror icon Laird Barron is currently battling severe illness and a lack of health insurance. If you’re able to pitch in to the GoFundMe to help offset some costs, you can do so here.
Here’s a new feature this year! I’m hosting a pretty free-form book club on my Discord server, with a new theme each month. The theme for January was Book by a Trans Author.
My picks for the month:
Transmuted by Eve Harms. When a video game streamer must spend her donated facial feminization surgery fund on a family emergency, she opts to save face (literally) through an experimental procedure that has some intriguing yet horrifying results. This is good pulpy fun and reminds me in some ways of a favorite Japanese classic of body horror, Horrors of Malformed Men. If you know, you know.
No Gods for Drowning by Hailey Piper. This is my second Piper book (I read The Worm and His Kings last year) and, as of writing this, I’m just barely digging in. But I cannot think of a better segue into this month’s deep dive…
Thalassophobia: The fear of deep bodies of water.
People with this fear are not concerned with water itself. They will happily bathe and drink and dance in the rain. It’s the depth that concerns them. The vast, dark reaches of the sea, the stillness under the surface of pools with no visible floor. They fear that endless expansive abyss, and the things that might be lurking there, sight unseen, just waiting for you to come within reach…
The question is not so much why people fear the ocean, but rather…why wouldn’t you?
Our Most Primal Fears
A fear of the ocean is common enough across cultures and throughout the world that it might be considered universal. Even — perhaps even especially — among seafaring cultures, there are anxieties about what might be dwelling in the deep.
After all, it makes sense to fear the sea. As primates, we are poorly designed for the water. We are not especially buoyant or streamlined. We cannot breathe underwater nor hold our breath for very long. Salt water is poison to us, disrupting the delicate balance of fluid and electrolytes that keeps our biological systems alive. We require special equipment and pressurization suits to venture deep underwater, and even then, returning to the surface too quickly becomes deadly.
Why shouldn’t we fear the sea? We clearly do not belong there. It is indifferent, if not actively hostile, toward our wellbeing.
There are other primal fears bundled into thalassophobia as well. The fear of darkness. The fear of isolation. The fear of the unknown. The ocean is nearly as vast and just as unfathomable as space. It takes up over 70% of the planet, and of that, 80% is unexplored.
Who knows what might really be down there?
Here There Be Monsters
Ancient mariners often swapped tales of uncanny, monstrous things out at sea. Maps would designate unexplored areas with warnings and embellishments reflecting these tales. Indeed, some of our most ancient mythology, from the Biblical tale of the Leviathan to the Babylonian Tiamat, to the many sea monsters of Ancient Greece and Japan.
Where would mythology be without Charybdis and her swirling, gaping maw, or Scylla and her many gasping mouths? The Maori tell of a giant sea dragon called the Taniwha. The Philippines have a similar giant sea serpent, Bakunawa, who eats the moon and is responsible for many natural phenomena. Norse mythology places the unfathomably huge Jörmungandr in the world sea, circling all of creation.
With so many sea monsters and gods dwelling in the deeps, it’s not exactly hard to imagine where H.P. Lovecraft acquired inspiration for his Cthulhu mythos. The sea, home to so many primal terrors and regarded with wonder and awe by those who dared to traverse her depths, is as good a home as any to the unspeakable cosmic horrors of the universe.
But perhaps the most terrifying thought of all is that these monsters may be more than myth…
The Truth Stranger Than Fiction
Our primal fear of the ocean influences even how oceanographers name its regions. The lowest depths, the abyssal and hadal zones, are named in reference to hell. And, for vulnerable hairless apes, it may as well be.
The deepest zone of the ocean is an extreme environment. It is highly pressurized, 200 to 600 times as much as at sea level. It’s cold, hovering just barely above freezing, and completely dark at a depth beyond where the sun can penetrate. For a frame of reference, sunlight can pierce about 200 meters; the ocean floor can rest 6,000 meters or more below sea level. Put another way, if Mount Everest were lowered into the Marianas Trench, its peak would still be 2,000 meters below the surface.
It’s not a hospitable place.
But like all extreme environments in the world, the deepest waters host highly adapted, specialized lifeforms.
Many of these fish are bioluminescent, emitting their own pale ghostly light in the dark. Others camouflage themselves with bodies of vanta black — a shade so dark it absorbs all light, rendering them mobile voids. Others are pale to the point of translucent, with milky blind eyes long since left behind by evolution. Some come equipped with jaws that can unhinge or shoot out to better capture prey in the dark. Others have their own lures so they can patiently wait for dinner to come to them. Many of these creatures have only just recently been discovered by humans, and there are doubtless many more who exist down there, completely unknown to us.
As you move your way up through the depths, you’d encounter all sorts of other strange creatures, some of which have occasionally crossed paths with humans for millennia. Every so often, a giant squid or a basking shark or a massive undulating oarfish may find their way up to the surface, tangled in a fishing net or washed ashore, and it’s theorized that these creatures may have inspired the lore of our ancestors.
What is a 36-foot-long oarfish if not a sea serpent? Sure, it doesn’t breathe fire, and it’s side-facing eyes and upward-tilted snub nose make it look a bit goofier than the regal Leviathan. But beggars cannot be choosers, can they?
Monsters in the Gaps of Our Knowledge
It must be acknowledged that, for all the screaming horrors of the deep dark sea, many are figments of our imagination. Or, rather, that the deep sea fish we see and shudder to think about are not an especially realistic depiction.
Just as ancient people may have looked upon an oarfish or giant squid and imagined a fearsome leviathan or cunning kraken, the popular image of most deep sea creatures is inaccurate, incomplete, and fueled by human fascination in the grotesque.
Here’s the thing: Because humans cannot easily explore the deepest parts of the ocean, our ability to see deep sea fish in their living, natural state is minimal. The specimens we’ve seen are usually ones that have been dredged up to the surface. In some instances, photographs and videos you may have seen of these creatures ghostily drifting across the screen are made with dead specimens tugged along by gravity.
Imagine that for a moment. Imagine that an alien lifeform plucked you from your natural environment, brought you into the vacuum of space, and then used string and camera tricks to reanimate the visage of your desiccated, depressurized corpse for their amusement. And you are the monster in that scenario?!
Consider for example the poor blobfish, subject of the century’s greatest glow-up. For a long time, it was assumed that the blobfish’s natural state was a pink, globular, sagging body with a drooping mouth and beady eyes. It won the dubious distinction of world’s ugliest animal based upon this image.
But that was a supposition drawn only from dead specimens.
When a blobfish (which naturally lives between 600 and 1,2000 meters below sea level) is alive in its habitat, it is a perfectly normal looking fish — broad across the head, a gunmetal gray in color, covered in small sensitive spines.
I think it’s safe to assume that other deep sea fish suffer a similar level of bad PR. Are they really angular, bony monsters with bulging eyes and ragged jutting teeth? Or are they just necrotic horrors, a nightmare story we tell ourselves, like every other oceanic myth in our arsenal?
Don’t Go Into the Water
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). The film, based on a contemporary novel by Peter Benchley, single-handedly invented the concept of the modern blockbuster. It laid down a formula for horror on the big screen. And it instilled in a nation a deep-seated and irrational fear of sharks that continues half a century later.
The story of Jaws, if you somehow have never seen it, centers upon a great white shark that terrorizes a New England beach town. The shark is unusually large, seems to possess some unnatural level of cunning, and has a definite taste for human flesh.
History is full of stories of “maneaters,” a concept that has fascinated us for ages — and which deserves its own separate look. But Jaws was special because it was modern. The people being eaten alive by the monstrous shark were regular tourists and beach-faring locals of a civilized and affluent community, not backwater villagers in some faraway locale or hidden back in dusty history.
And if something bad could happen to them, well, surely it could happen to us as well.
There are an average of just 72 shark attacks worldwide each year. Of those, less than 10 result in fatalities. Sharks are, by and large, simply not that interested in eating people. By comparison, humans kill approximately 100 million sharks per year. If we were at war, surely we would be winning.
And yet.
Even knowing this.
Aren’t we still afraid to go into the water?
A Brief Dive Into Oceanic Horror Films
Jaws was such a tremendous success, and captured so many imaginations (and moviegoer dollars), that filmmakers rushed to try to repeat that same success. The 1970s and 80s saw a glut of fish-based horrors of varying qualities, from increasingly absurd Jaws sequels to forgettable cash-grabs and absurd cult classics.
Many oceanic horrors follow the Jaws route by pitting humans against unusually nasty oceanic creatures. Think Piranha (1978), Barracuda (1978), and Alligator (1980), or more modern versions like The Meg (2018).
Others take the isolation route by pitting a survivor against long odds — films like 47 Meters Down (2017) or The Shallows (2016) or even The Perfect Storm (2000) are not so much about uniquely terrifying marine life as the struggle for survival in an inhospitable environment.
Occasionally you will see oceanic horror built upon the premise of the sea’s uncanniness, in the Lovecraftian tradition. This includes Lovecraft adaptations like Dagon (2001) and more unusual takes like Dark Water (2002). Other times, the underwater setting is merely used as a vessel for creating isolation and added stakes in crime capers — see Into the Blue (2005) and Deep Rising (1998) for a taste of that.
At the end of the day, despite drowning in ocean-based horror stories, I would argue that the vast majority of these films fail to truly capture the terror of the deep. In part because the setting demands such specificity. It’s hard to get human characters out into the water unless under specific conditions — scientific study, oil venture, military submarine — or else risk some goofiness by bringing the monsters to the surface. Horror films struggle to capture the simple terror of the ocean’s vastness, its depthlessness, the existential terror of its untold secrets.
Man-eating sharks and sea serpents are well and good, but they are not the most frightening thing about the ocean.
The things we fear most are monsters of our own creation. The sea serpents and animated, toothy corpses, fictions larger and more strange than the reality. What we fear is the product of our own ignorance — the nightmares we conjure to fill the darkness where we cannot see.
Because the real horror lurks not in the unknown depths of the ocean…but in the depths of our own minds.
Stay dry out there.