Thanks for this insight, Ryou!
It reminds me of the concept of the Liminal, which isn’t horror in itself, because horror is–as you stated–more about a self-conscious awareness of unknowing, an invitation for monkey hindbrain scrabbling (especially for cosmic horror).
Liminality is almost the opposite, because it isn’t about the unknown directly, it’s about the subversion of some known (often mundane) environmental expectation. As Natalie Wynn discusses in her video essay on Liminality, it’s a complicated aesthetic to talk about because it encapsulates a lot of different feelings: lingering in a place that is intended to be transitional (the threshold); a present haunted by lost futures (the hauntological); the unfamiliar in the familiar (the uncanny); a collection of worlds that don’t belong together (the eerie); and potentially many other things (the nostalgic, the surreal, the weird, etc.)
My read on what you’re describing is very much Liminal, because you don’t seem focused on the aesthetics of decay, but on the transitional moment between unsinking and sinking; being and unbeing. It isn’t about an end state (dying, drowning, reaching the bottom), it’s about a perpetual state of in-between–existing in the threshold–a place only intended to be traversed, and never lingered in. The idea of being trapped there, or constantly reliving such a thing can be… unsettling. Hence the “The Backrooms” of internet fame.
Specifically, however, I think we’re talking about “the eerie.” Thalassophobia and the eerie are often companions because the ocean itself is a collision of worlds: what we can see and what we know vs. what we can’t see and what we can only imply, with a huge threshold of unsettling transition between them: The Liminal.
In Soulcreek, The Blackzones encapsulate this very well. Their borders already establish a threshold–a clear marker that “beyond this is parts unknown,” yes–but there is no visible indicator anything is wrong: The grass is still green; the trees are still healthy. We look at the familiar but understand there is something unfamiliar; we can intuit there is both something missing (people) and something present (demons), but precise agency eludes us; it is both uncanny and eerie. Unsettling. Liminal.
Consider this quote by Mark Fisher from “The Weird and the Eerie”:
“The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where they should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something.”
For example, an eerie presence would be a feeling of agency where there should be none, like the feeling of being watched. An eerie loneliness is wandering in a space where you expect people to be, but they aren’t. A ship in the process of sinking is eerie especially if we don’t know why it’s sinking, because ships aren’t supposed to do that. (Nor should we be there to see it.)
Wynn summarizes the concept as, “The eerie implies speculative questions about incomprehensible agency,” and thus, an unknown. Why is the ship sinking? Where is it going? Why are we there? And is at its most powerful when we are surrounded by the familiar.
Cosmic horror lives in the space where that implication becomes terrifying: essentially, the moment we become self-aware of the implications of that unknowing–when the safety of the familiar becomes uncertain. The more evidence we’re given–the more we step away from speculation into a more concrete sense of knowing there’s a lurker at the threshold–is when eerie begins to approach horror.
And as I think you astutely pointed out, that lurker needn’t be a monster. It just needs to be elementally unfathomable.
Like the Deep.