An Unexpected Horror: When Cyberpunk Becomes Cosmic

Cyberpunk and cosmic horror might seem like two incompatible genres. One is intimate, grounded in human-machine interfaces, corporate oppression, and urban grime. The other is vast, existential, a terror rooted in the incomprehensible. Cyberpunk thrives on the personal: a hacker selling out their last shred of autonomy for an upgrade, a corpo enforcer questioning whether their memories are real, a city where identity is just another commodity. Cosmic horror, on the other hand, is about the obliteration of identity entirely—a deep, spiritual compression and release, that moment of awe upon seeing the ocean for the first time, only to realize it stretches endlessly beyond human understanding.

But these two horrors are not so different. Both deal with loss of control. Cyberpunk keeps it at street level, personal, the horror of knowing that your thoughts, your body, your future don’t belong to you. Cosmic horror zooms out, forcing you to confront how little you mattered to begin with. And sometimes, one bleeds into the other. The shift can be seamless. A cyberpunk story might start with a megacorp wiring neural implants into its workforce to increase productivity. But what if the signal starts picking up something else? What if the software update isn’t from Earth? What if the company didn’t create this technology—they found it?

This is where cyberpunk cracks open into something bigger, something terrifying. Cyberpunk horror often starts with the self: identity loss, bodily corruption, corporate enslavement. But when it expands outward, when it starts questioning the systems themselves, it becomes something more. If a faceless corporation sees human lives as disposable resources, how different is it from an ancient, indifferent god? What if the true horror of the megacorp isn’t just that it owns you, but that it never had a choice in the matter either? What if, long ago, it made a deal with something beyond understanding, and now its executives are merely the next hosts, the next flesh-bound algorithms running on an eldritch operating system?

The best cyberpunk stories that touch cosmic horror understand this. Blame! takes transhumanism to its breaking point, stretching it across an infinite, decayed megastructure where human influence is a forgotten whisper. SOMA plays with identity and existential dread, where technology doesn’t just change humanity but erases it. Even something like The Thing could easily be reframed as cyberpunk—a biotech corporation sends a research team to the Arctic, only to realize their experiment has already rewritten them on a cellular level. And when they try to return home? The company already owns their replacements.

Cyberpunk doesn’t need ancient gods to become cosmic horror. A malfunctioning AI can be just as unknowable. A neural implant that picks up transmissions from another dimension is no different than an old book bound in human skin. A corporate experiment to simulate reality could, in a moment of horrifying clarity, reveal that reality itself is the simulation. The horror of cyberpunk is in the struggle—fighting against control, against an omnipresent system that dictates your every move. But sometimes, escaping that control means stepping into something much worse. In the end, maybe there was never a system. Maybe it was always something older, something patient, something watching through the screen.

And this is what makes the fusion of cyberpunk and cosmic horror so compelling—the slow realization that what we think of as an oppressive system is just a mask for something worse. Consider a megacorp whose primary purpose isn’t profit, but placation. It keeps people drugged, entertained, augmented, not to make money but to keep them from noticing something moving behind the veil of reality. Maybe they didn’t create the tech that built the city—maybe they inherited it. Maybe the algorithms predicting behavior, the AIs managing infrastructure, are just puppets for something else. Something that does not need wealth, does not need power, only a world full of willing, unwitting participants to feed on.

A good example of this hybrid horror can be found in Event Horizon, a film that is primarily a sci-fi horror with strong cosmic horror undertones, teeters on the line between cyberpunk and cosmic terror. The spaceship is a marvel of human engineering, built to fold space and break the boundaries of physics itself. But in doing so, it breaks something else. It rips a hole in reality, allowing something incomprehensible to seep through. The crew, engineers and scientists, experience it not as divine revelation but as personal, creeping madness. What starts as a scientific breakthrough turns into a descent into something eternal and malevolent. Go past the end of the movie (either ending), what becomes of Weir? The movie is missing some surface cyberpunk aesthetics and a few genre elements, but it was tech that gets us there. It could have been pushed in that direction.

The potential for blending cyberpunk and cosmic horror is immense. Imagine a noir detective in a neon-lit slum chasing down missing persons cases, only to realize that the city itself is feeding them to something beyond time (almost a variation of Dark City). A corporation, under the guise of human augmentation, might be hollowing out bodies for extradimensional beings to wear like suits. Hackers who think they are fighting for freedom might be playing right into the hands of something waiting to rewrite them from the inside out. Yes, there are elements of both genres that are perhaps mutually exclusive, however, the cross-genre execution of an idea is possible within the commonalities of each genre.

The crucial element in all of this is perspective. Cyberpunk’s horror is deeply human—the loss of agency, the fight against the machine. Cosmic horror obliterates that fight entirely. The best stories in this cross-genre dimension make the transition seamless. Start with the street-level grit of cyberpunk, the personal horror of being trapped in a system, then pull the camera back until the characters realize the system was never the true enemy. That the skyscrapers weren’t built by human hands. That the grid was never meant for commerce but for containment. That the flickering advertisements aren’t trying to sell anything—they’re warnings, written in a language long forgotten. And by the time they understand, it’s already too late.

If this sounds interesting, you might like Exile Machine by Alex Mharcei. The story is a cross-genre post-apocalyptic sci-fi mixed with cosmic horror. It was elements of cyberpunk and space western as well. The new book goes on preorder very soon (release 3/1/25).