12 Days of Monsters: Day 12
12 Days of Monsters is a series exploring the visual design of different monsters - looking at what makes them successful (or not), what trends they represent, and what they mean to me personally.
The Monster
Ebrietas
from the 2015 video game BLOODBORNE
Personal Context
2015's BLOODBORNE is one of my favorite games, and at first I nearly gave up on it. Part of it was that I was stuck: Despite being a fan of two of the developer's previous games (DARK SOULS and DARK SOULS 2), I didn't quite "get" BLOODBORNE, and slid off. But another part of it was that the game's setting just wasn't doing it for me at first. The beginning of the game is all torch-wielding mobs and werewolves and gothic architecture, and that's just not my jam.
A while later, while the game was sitting in a box collecting dust on my shelf, I happened across a fan-made image gallery detailing the lore of the monsters in BLOODBORNE. And the first image in that gallery was of Ebrietas - a monster that I had not yet encountered in the game. And I went "Hang on...there's cosmic horror in this gothic werewolf game?"
Ebrietas, “Daughter of the Cosmos”, as she is rendered in BLOODBORNE - and one of the main reasons I played what would become one of my favorite games
See, I have at least one friend who still makes fun of me for the fact that sometimes I don't check out good media until I find out there's a cool monster in it. I was curious to try out DARK SOULS largely after seeing the Gaping Dragon in a trailer. I didn't care about STRANGER THINGS until I saw fan art of the "Demogorgon". And I thought BLOODBORNE was going to be boring until I saw Ebrietas.
See, gothic werewolves and vampires and such might not be my jam, but Eldritch piles of tentacles and otherworldly abominations? I’m there.
The Set-up
A glimpse of madness
As far as this style of monster goes, Ebrietas has a pretty cool design. The first thing that stuck out to me is the "face" - by which I mean "the part of the head that appears to be facing us, because we can't even make out what's going on there". These days, it's "easy" to just make a pile of eyes/mouths/tentacles and call it a day, but Ebrietas has some little touches that endear me to her design a bit more.
I mean, who wouldn’t find this face endearing?
A tubeworm colony near a thermal vent on the ocean floor. Photo by Marvin Lilley
Like those tubular growths surrounding the middle area of her face, which at first glance reminded me of the mineral sheaths made by deep-sea-dwelling giant tubeworms (Riftia pachyptila). That's not a design element you see often, so it gets your attention, and adds a welcome bit of weirdness to it. It's clearly deliberate, but you're not immediately sure what it's supposed to be (unlike spikes, or tentacles, or mouths, or teeth, etc., which we can understand the function of somewhat more intuitively at first glance, even if they're in unusual places/arrangements). That's a good foundational element for the design of a creature that's supposed to be otherworldly and unknowable.
In between these tubes is an amorphous wad of pink flesh studded with eyes. At a distance, it looks a little like a starfield in a nebula - like there's a hole in her face through which you can see the cosmos - which is, again, exactly the sort of vibes you'd want to hit here. The sides of her face can "open up", which stretches that central area like a big gross wad of chewed gum. It's messy and disorienting. I love it.
Most of the rest of her body is slug-like - thick, limp, and slimy. it's broadly evocative of mollusks, without having any individual parts that too closely resemble any one particular animal. She's got a bunch of big tentacles too, to make her silhouette a bit weirder. Solid stuff. But as you look closer, a weird thing happens - she becomes less strange and alien, not more.
Take her body plan, for instance. Yes, she's technically a slug-like thing with a bunch of appendages, including arms, wings, and tentacles. But in practice, her design simplifies quite a bit: She has two arms - each with noticeable shoulder, elbow, and wrist joints positioned like a human's. Her neck and head emerge from the top of the chest between the shoulders, just like you'd expect. Her wings (which I'll get to) are just behind her shoulders. She does have 4 major tentacles (2 on each side), but they're also arranged behind her arms - and for most of her attacks during the battle, they just hang out behind her, typically only acting as follow-up hits when her arms swing at you.
Official design art of Ebrietas, giving a somewhat clearer look at her than you would otherwise get during gameplay (when you’re busy trying, unsuccessfully, not to die)
The profile view highlights the human qualities of this design - which tentacles are supposed to be the "arms", the way the lower body is supposed to look like legs, etc.
The extent of the anthropomorphizing here becomes even clearer when looking at the official design art for the character. These drawings highlight details that aren't normally very visible during gameplay, such as the fact that her slug-like lower body is full of contouring made to make it resemble a pair of legs in a kneeling position (so the the "bottom" of her body would be where her shins would be resting on the floor).
Now, on the sides of her face, she's got these two round green orbs - there's debate in fan communities over whether they are "true" eyes or "false" eyes, but whatever the "lore" technically is, visually, they are eyes: They're roughly the size of eyes, they're roughly in the place where eyes would be, and there's two of them. As a result, they function like eyes, when we are looking at her "face" - and, in a pretty stunning testament to just how strong the neural hardware for recognizing faces in our brains is, just the addition of those two eyes makes her face a whole lot more "manageable", visually.
But the part that bugs me the most isn't actually these human features - the part that does the most to make Ebrietas' otherwise alien design seem more "normal" is also the part where I think the intent comes through the clearest: her wings. Ebrietas doesn't fly during the fight, nor does she hit you with her wings - she appears to use them for lift when she hops to the side, but other than that, she just flexes them when doing other, unrelated attack animations. The fact that she would use them at all should be kind of weird, though, because her "wings" are basically just tons of thin tentacles in the shape of wings. Why would she have that? Why would this alien monstrosity have a bunch of appendages that AREN'T wings (or even wing-like), latticed together in such a way that they look so precisely like mundane bat wings?
Well, it's because Ebrietas is visually inspired by the design of Cthulhu.
And now we're getting to the underlying problem, and what I really wanted to go into here.
Angry Tangent
We need to talk about Cthulhu
A fairly standard modern depiction of Cthulhu. Illustration by Walter Brocca
Cthulhu is by far the most popular creation of early-1900s horror writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The sort of themes and imagery that he became most known for are now called "Lovecraftian" after him - and man, I wish we had another word for it, because Lovecraft himself really sucks. A lot. But this isn't about that.
"Lovecraftian horror" typically involves stories in which human protagonists are confronted by threats that are so great in scope and alien in nature that they might not even be aware of humanity in any meaningful sense. Frequent themes involve forbidden knowledge so beyond the ability of a human mind to comprehend that they drive people insane, great alien intellects and machinations before which humans are insignificant and powerless, and dark secret histories and cosmology which would upend our entire understanding of the universe.
Cthulhu, specifically, was first introduced in the 1926 short story, THE CALL OF CTHULHU. The story establishes that there is an enormous, malevolent, alien entity named Cthulhu lying dormant in a sunken city at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Cthulhu's influence subconsciously afflicts mankind globally with anxiety, disturbing visions, and a general sort of "madness" that in some cases inspires people to spontaneously form violent cults worshipping the entity and hoping for its awakening. When Cthulhu rises from his deathlike slumber, it would spell doom for mankind. THE CALL OF CTHULHU rings all the bells we associate with "Lovecraftian" horror: an ancient, malign, alien divinity; cosmic knowledge which induces madness in people that contact it; a horrible apocalypse waiting just under the surface of our world that we are powerless to stop; copious amounts of racism - the gang's all here.
It also gave a surprisingly direct visual description for the eponymous monster:
“...a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.”
This is technically a description of a carved idol apparently in Cthulhu's likeness, but the story seems to suggest that it's what the real Cthulhu looked like itself. Either way, every depiction of Cthulhu since then tends to follow that outline: Green (as we find out later), humanoid, claws, wings, octopus head.
And let's be real...it's kinda bad.
Well, that's too mean, it certainly became iconic. What I mean is that it's dumb.
Well, I mean I get where Lovecraft was coming from. What I mean is...
Actually, let's just get into it.
One of the things Lovecraft was trying to do in some of his writing (when he wasn't writing parables for why interracial unions were horrifying, or calling nonwhite people "savages" and "mongels", or...) was portray a universe in which humanity is small, powerless, and unable to comprehend the true nature of the world around it - just as an ant in my kitchen is unable to fathom the city in which I live.
“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
To show these themes, Lovecraft’s stories frequently featured god-like beings that were portrayed as more alien and strange than more commonly-known deities from real-world mythology and religion. Lovecraft frequently associated these beings with deep space (or the bottom of the sea, or both - like Cthulhu himself, who is both described as a "star spawn" and living beneath the depths of the Pacific) to emphasize their distance from the human world, and the vastness of the alien spaces they call home. Creatures like Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth were not only inhuman, they didn't even resemble living things at all. Even their names are sometimes said to be mere human approximations for sounds that our anatomy cannot accurate reproduce - or descriptors our minds cannot truly grasp. Together, this collection of tropes is often referred to as "cosmic horror".
And Cthulhu, through his popularity, is the poster boy of cosmic horror. Even though, as designed, he is possibly one of the worst examples of any of this stuff from among Lovecraft's own works.
At the end of the day, Cthulhu's visual design is extremely conventional. Deities or mythological figures with animal heads on humanoid bodies are extremely prevalent from mythology to pop-culture - whether it's the falcon-headed Ra, the elephant-headed and many-armed Ganesha, or the Ancient Greek Minotaur. Cthulhu is following in that well-trod path of highly anthropomorphic figures - he just picked a less common animal to have for a head.
But, as cool as tentacles coming out of your face are, even this isn't that "alien", conceptually. Converting the entire body of an octopus into the head of another being is, in a pretty real sense, simplifying the already-strange anatomy of actual octopi. Even the name "cephalopoda" (the class of mollusks which includes octopi and squids) reflects this tendency - it comes from the Ancient Greek words for "head" and "foot". The reality is that octopi are a lot weirder than this conception. On the back of their "head" is a portion which contains many of the animal's internal organs, so it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that the animal's "head" (at least, the part with its brain and eyes and mouth) is in between the limbs and the rest of the body. The nervous system is also extremely complex in a way that's hard for humans to visualize, with separate limbs being able to act independently and sometimes even having different personalities - so saying that the octopus' intellect resides entirely in its brain or head is also not quite right. And even if you think about the whole not-tentacles part of the octopus as just a big head, you'll notice that it's harder to orient the head than you might expect - as sometimes the octopus moves "head-first", and sometimes it moves the other way, and in both cases the eyes can "face" the way it's moving. Condensing that all down to "it's just a head, with eyes in one fixed place, and with the function of the tentacles reduced all the way down to just feelers" is actually far simpler than the animal that inspired the most iconic part of Cthulhu's look.
As for the rest of it? Well..."a humanoid with claws and bat wings" is possibly the most common existing depiction of an evil deific figure in the world. Instead of standing in stark contrast to the anthropomorphism of modern Christian iconography, it looks like Lovecraft just copied their homework.
You could Google "winged devil clipart" and "octopus clipart" and stick 'em together to get Cthulhu, is what I'm saying. (Oh, just don't forget to invert the color from red to green.)
Boring. Everyone knows this guy.
Original character DO NOT STEAL!!!
Other Visual Designs
Showing the unknowable
In some senses, I'm being too hard on Ebrietas and Cthulhu (but not on Lovecraft; fuck him). These designs are operating within the constraints of their media. It's one thing to say "I want to tell stories about incomprehensible, brain-breakingly-strange creatures!" - but it's another thing to actually depict those things.
Now, I'm not here just to point out the obvious paradox (that if you, the creator, can imagine what you are trying to depict, then it is not unimaginable, i.e. is not beyond human understanding), nor am I interested in the equally obvious solution to that paradox (just don't actually depict the thing - call it "indescribable" or keep it offscreen). I'm interested in how we can design these things to convey the core tropes of a genre like cosmic horror. Just like we don't need to know exactly how real dinosaurs looked and moved in order to depict compelling dinosaurs in movies, we don't need to actually create something that shatters a person's sanity just by looking at it in order to create a Lovecraftian monster.
(And also that's not how "sanity" works anyway. If you're going to create this stuff, then I implore you to actually think about why the the monsters/forbidden knowledge/whatever you're putting in your story affects people in the way it does. Don't just make it brain-kryptonite that magically turns people into outdated and harmful caricatures of mental illness, Howard.)
There's a couple of ways to approach showing the unknowable in your cosmic horror piece. I could probably write (multiple) whole essays on this topic alone, but I want to touch on just a few to illustrate some examples.
A portion of the titanic creature we see at the end of Jérémie Périn's music video. True to typical Lovecraftian tropes, when the human in the video looks upon this being, their eyes explode.
CONTENT WARNING: BODY HORROR, GORE - You can view the full video here.
One obvious approach is just not to show very much - and to make sure that the parts you do see are disorienting, contradictory, or otherwise confusing. This is easier to do in visual media than in the written word, and can be very effective. The first examples of this that come to my mind are music videos. The final moments of Jérémie Périn's (deliberately gruesome) music video for "Fantasy" by DyE is a slow tilt up that gradually reveals the figure of an enormous Lovecraftian monster, and cuts out before we finish seeing the whole thing or even get a very clear look at what we were shown. We mostly see a hazy silhouette, giving us the contours of a variety of tentacles and other flexing appendages.
One of many “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” shots of an impossible arthropod expanding its kaleidoscopic anatomy in 1st Avenue Machine’s inventive music video, viewable here
For a much less gory example, the music video done by effects studio 1st Avenue Machine for the song "Ted", by Clark, is just a series of shots of real insects, with some visual effects layered on to give them extra eyes, limbs, growths, etc. Each bug is only on-screen for a moment at a time, so the anatomy that was added to them is driven more by the aesthetics of the soundtrack. Still, there are a few cuts that still stick out in my mind, where a shot lasts just long enough for you to just barely get the impression of segmented limbs unfolding from a larger form - but not enough to see clearly what that form is.
This approach is a lot harder to pull off in a video game, though - particularly if you're going to have your player fighting this sort of creature directly. Games have an additional challenge for cosmic horror here: the mechanics of gameplay shed even more "light" on the ultimate design of your monster, and can collapse an otherwise complex visual concept into a simple, even boring, result. One great example of this is Iustitia, one of the bosses from the 2009 video game BAYONETTA. Iustitia is a heavenly entity composed almost entirely of wild arrangement of faces and tentacles (which end in more faces). When it first appears in cinematic cutscenes, it seems bewildering. However, the fight mostly consists of standing on a platform, where two fist-like tentacles on either side of a floating face pound at you while you try to punch the face. If you've played a decent amount of single-player action games, you've probably fought this sort of boss. A lot. And just like that, all the weirdness of Iustitia's visual design melts away.
Iustitia, one of the bosses you fight in BAYONETTA. Looks pretty wild, right?
But if you just end up fighting it like this…
…then it may as well look like this.
(This example of the “face and fists” boss comes from the 1994 game simply titled DONKEY KONG.)
This is a common trap for video game monsters - even ones who otherwise pull off the "otherworldly monstrosity" thing much better than BAYONETTA (the battle against the Hive Mind in 2008's DEAD SPACE, and the battle against the Former in 2019's CONTROL, both play in this space, for instance). So when designing this stuff for games, you need to consider not just what you say the monster looks like, but also how the player interacts with it.
Despite loving this genre and playing a decent amount of video games, I don't actually have a great example offhand of a game that successfully conveys otherworldliness or incomprehensibility mechanically through your interactions with a monster (I'm sure they're out there). But, even by omission, it does suggest an important tool for depicting this sort of horror: Subvert expectations. If what you are showing the audience feels familiar to them, then it doesn't matter how strange or spooky you tell them it is. Add elements to your designs that deliberately contradict what your audience would expect of it - or at least, do things that don't fit into an obvious, apparent mold.
The 2019 reboot of HELLBOY largely plays it safe when it comes to creature design, but for an exhilarating moment at the very end, there's a sequence where we get a handful of shots of demons rampaging across London - and some of their designs are great. (In fact, seeing them in the trailer is a lot of what got me to see the movie.) These are intended to be part of your usual fire-and-brimstone Christian demons, not Lovecraftian beings, but there's still gems there. One, for instance, has legs that are made of other legs, upon which sits a "torso" that has a cavity lined with non-teeth appendages and is adorned by a frill of human arms - beyond which hover, completely unattached, two giant arms. This guy's on screen for seconds, but he's almost worth the price of admission alone. The design is both intelligible (two arms, two legs, standing upright) and unexplained (floating limbs, crest of arms, what is going on with its chest). Less impressive, but still neat, is a shot of another demon which has a crown of veins floating above its head. What's going on with that? Who knows! By the time you see it, you're onto the next shot.
Behold, the two demons whose visually striking appearance suckered me into seeing 2019’s HELLBOY
Hideaki Anno - the mind behind NEON GENESIS EVANGELION and the 2016 film SHIN GODZILLA - is a master of this, too. A technique he likes to use involves having the monster do something unexpected with its anatomy, particularly in an action scene, which forces the heroes to react to it in a certain way. The frantic pace of the action, as well as the fact that we are getting new information in a moment where we won't get an explanation to accompany it, keeps us just that little bit destabilized. For example, in Evangelion, the heroes might be in the climax of an action-heavy battle with an angel when it suddenly grows a humanoid torso out of its eyeball and then attacks them with it - with no prior expectation or set-up for such a transformation. (Anno also does this sort of thing in a couple of excellent places in SHIN GODZILLA, which I refuse to spoil here).
If your design is getting the audience to ask questions that you don't answer (at least immediately), that disorientation can be an effective component of a good Lovecraftian monster.
Which brings us back to Cthulhu, and our girl Ebrietas.
Reflections
The piecing together of dissociated knowledge
Not only was Cthulhu's initial design pretty uninspired to begin with - that design has now become commonplace, and thus familiar. This poses a particular challenge for people wanting to make cosmic horror monsters: evoking the design of Cthulhu, who is the icon of the genre, works against the core themes of the genre that you would want your design to manifest (i.e. incomprehensibility, alienness, etc.).
You can see this effect on full display in, for example, the climax of the 2020 film UNDERWATER - where we finally get to see a major motion picture's swing at the iconic star spawn. And it's...fine. The most notable things they added are a couple of extra eyes, a prominently skull-like face (with stunning cheekbones), and a big toothy jaw that sits above his tentacles (rather than behind them). Sure, the mandibles are separated in the middle, that's nice I guess. While I appreciate that they tried to make their own spin on the character rather than just play the clipart version straight (which the 2005 film THE CALL OF CTHULHU does), this design doesn't really address the fundamental problems with Cthulhu as a design for a great alien monster. While his features are technically non-human, the overall design ultimately trends more toward the familiar. I loved that the movie included Cthulhu, but the particular depiction didn't exactly inspire me.
Cthulhu, as he appears in the finale of the 2020 movie UNDERWATER. Not terrible by any stretch, but we can do better.
In a wonderful piece in The New Yorker titled “Show The Monster”, director Guillermo del Toro describes a vision for Cthulhu that might appear in del Toro's adaptation of another Lovecraft story (if he can ever, finally, get it made) in which the big boss looks more like a tree, of all things, with a bevy of limbs radiating out from a central pillar - and that sort of thinking actually gets me very excited. It shows a willingness to move beyond the familiar and the recognizable, to plumb the depths of the concept for its core features and find weirder ways to evoke them.
And then you have Ebrietas, who for all my misgivings, was still ultimately an interesting enough critter to re-spark my interest in BLOODBORNE. To me, she represents a sort of transitional phase - like a missing link between the familiar and the new. The tubes growing out of her face, and the slurry of eyes and flesh between them, give me hope - even as those all-too-familiar wings drag us back a bit.
In BLOODBORNE's story, Ebrietas functions as a sort of conduit between mankind and the forbidden insights of the god-like creatures beyond our world - and that's kind of what I think of her as, design-wise. Looks like hers show an artist reaching beyond our normal world towards something more challenging, more confusing, more alien.
But unlike Lovecraft's pulp protagonists, I don't find the prospect of that exploration horrifying - I find it exciting. I can't wait to meet the monsters on the other side.
