Would you Like Fries with Your Cosmic Horror?
Huw Nolan
"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,"
translated: "Under the Golden Arches at R'lyeh dead McCthulhu waits dreaming,"- Grimace (probably)
In H. P. Lovecraft’s 1926 short story The Call of Cthulhu, the titular entity functions not as a monster in the traditional narrative sense, but as a symbol of epistemic rupture. Cthulhu is described as a vast, alien intelligence that lies dormant beneath the sea, its reawakening foretold by cultic prophecy and cosmic alignment. The narrative is constructed from fragmented documents, eyewitness accounts, and archaeological discoveries, none of which offer a complete or coherent understanding of the entity itself. Cthulhu’s name is described by Lovecraft as an “almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn””. Lovecraft’s philosophical claim, and that of other students of cosmic horror, is that the universe is vast, indifferent, and ultimately incomprehensible to human minds. Its central terror lies in the realisation that human meaning, order, and morality are illusions within a cosmos that neither recognises nor accommodates them.
Cthulhu is not malevolent, just indifferent. It does not attack, seduce, or persuade; rather, it signifies the fragility of human reason when faced with the non-human and the non-comprehensible. Lovecraft’s horror emerges not from physical violence or supernatural agency, but from the suggestion that human categories of time, morality, and knowledge are parochial at best. In this sense, Cthulhu functions as a figure of metaphysical excess. It represents that which cannot be assimilated into conceptual thought, and which threatens the coherence of the symbolic order itself.
Against this background, the appearance of Cthulhu in commercial or domestic settings, in this instance as a Happy Meal toy, raises some interesting questions. The transformation of this symbol of cosmic horror into a soft, adorable toy is not mere a matter of commodification. It reflects a broader cultural observation in which figures once resistant to conceptualisation are made legible and commodified. This dynamic could be the dawn of a new era of the post-sublime.
The Kantian sublime refers to experiences in which the subject is confronted by something too vast or chaotic to be fully grasped (such as the immensity of space or the violence of a storm). Crucially, this breakdown is resolved when the subject reasserts the power of reason, recognising their capacity to think beyond what is immediately perceptible. By contrast, the Cthulhulian sublime offers no recovery. Here, the subject confronts not just magnitude or disorder, but a reality fundamentally incompatible with human thought, a maddening logic that dissolves meaning, not simply exceeds it. What was momentarily shaken in the Kantian sublime is permanently broken in the Cthulhulian.
The post-sublime, by contrast, names a condition in which such confrontations are foreclosed in advance. Objects that once carried the potential to destabilise human understanding are pre-integrated into systems of consumption and representation. When the time arises for the reader, audience to encounter the stories of Lovecraft for the first time, they have already met the slumbering eldritch horror, in the palatable form of a cutesy Squishmallow named Theotto. The result is not confrontation, expansion or disruption but pre-emption. Stories that once expanded the reader’s imagination with unsettling visions of cosmic ontologies and the fragility of existence will soon be encountered as predigested fluff, consumed long before the reader had progressed beyond cheeseburgers to Big Macs, their impact blunted by premature familiarity and commercial repetition.
When a child grows up with a plush Cthulhu toy, they encounter not the idea of incomprehensible terror, but its likeness, formatted for domestic life. The figure that once stood for the limit of intelligibility is now encountered first as a product. When, later in life, the original literary or philosophical context is discovered, it no longer produces rupture. The referent has already been encountered, not through myth or reading, but as decoration. The unknown has already been named, shaped, and made harmless. As Foucault would suggest, when we name a monster, we do not simply describe it—we domesticate it.
Lovecraft begins *The Call of Cthulhu* with the claim that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” Yet this cultural moment does precisely the opposite. It ensures that every signifier, even those designed to resist interpretation, is rendered legible. The unknowable is not denied but reformatted. That which once induced horror is now encountered as trivia, as aesthetic, as collectible.
Perhaps the real horror was never Cthulhu itself, but our assumption that mystery must remain untouchable to retain its power. When children grow up hugging plush monsters, they learn something Lovecraft may never have anticipated: that we can live alongside the unknowable without being destroyed by it. The cosmic indifference that once drove readers to madness becomes, in this reading, another simple fact of existence like gravity or weather. This domestication does not diminish the universe's vastness; perhaps it suggests that humans are remarkably adaptable creatures, capable of finding comfort even in the presence of incomprehensible forces. The real marvel may not be that we can conceive of cosmic horror, but that we can make peace with it.
In the end, we must thank McDonald's for the gift of existential cosiness: proof that in an indifferent universe, at least someone cares enough to serve cosmic comfort food, a large post-sublime, post mix coke and a plush Cthulhu to take home!
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