The fear of gigantic things.

It’s a fear that I find fascinating in no small part due to its variety. There’s a great many things that if you make them huge, they suddenly become terrifying. Like this scene from the movie ‘Kong.’ Just to warn you, it does involve a swarm of horrifically large insects. And yes, they are as awful as they sound.

I think most people would be afraid of a terrifically large lifeform, especially one that wouldn’t normally be very large. It’s been a common trope since a movie called ‘Them!’ came out way back in 1954. It goes beyond just bugs too. There’s a whole litany of super sized monsters that generally rely on their massive size to strike fear into peoples’ hearts. A particular favorite of mine that’s never been put to screen is from a web serial called ‘Worm,’ that features these huge monsters called Endbringers. This one is aptly named Leviathan.

They do other awful things to scare you besides being building-sized, but their sheer mass is enough to make most everyone in ‘Worm’ quake in their boots.

What’s interesting to me about this fear of large things is that it’s very old. We’ve been making up stories about horrifically large creatures since antiquity. Myths like the giant Kraken and whole races of giants that come to destroy the world are not uncommon. Not all of them are written to evoke a sense of horror, but I think there’s an undeniable sense of awe that comes with being gigantic. Often its a sensation that’s right in your face, but it can also (interestingly) come as something more subtle too.

I watched this great video about the subtle horror of a game I played called ‘Armored Core 6.’ In this game, you play as a multi-story mech bristling with weapons, hurtling around at supersonic speeds destroying everything in your path. At first, you’re in awe of your own size, stepping past trees that only come up to your shoulder, or looking down at the semitrucks and burned out tanks that dot the landscape. Later on, you start to encounter truly massive constructions like this weaponized mining vessel called the Strider.

It’s hard to get a sense of scale here, which I think hints at the root of the subtle horror at hand. How much bigger could it possibly get? Well, they get so big you start to forget you’re even driving a huge mech in the first place. Here’s the Strider from another angle where the player is moving past one of the feet.

As you approach, it just keeps swelling in your field of view until it gets so big that it takes up more than you can see on screen. You get to fly to the top of this thing and walk across it, at which point you realize its actually big enough to be a whole new level on its own. Then you remember that you’re using a four-story mechanized weapon shooting missiles the size of your body to scale this thing, and … yeah. It’s just on the border of incomprehensible. There’s also that stuff in the background, structures that are somehow even larger. It all speaks to a level of industry that’s so far beyond us. Like how could tiny humans possibly remain in control of something so utterly huge? Its a question that gels really well with the game’s themes, and one that I’ve seen asked more and more often.

This is one most interesting short films I’ve ever seen, and it’s criminally under loved even at 4.4 million views. It’s about a planet-sized runaway factory that has gone well past its original purpose. Humanity has lost control of the system and it can’t be shut down even though nobody needs the war machines that it was designed to produce. Now the factory toils on with no sign of ever stopping. Fields of enormous machines lie in ruin as new units are pumped out all day, every day. It hits on that same feeling that I get when I fly past something huge and derelict in Armored Core, or when I drive through a big city and think, ‘how much further will this have spread in the next twenty years? The next thirty? A hundred?’ It seems unfathomable to me that human structures could exist as such scale, just like those massive bugs that Jack Black had to kill by the dozen in ‘King Kong.’ How big could they possibly get? Too big to understand.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley