The breathtaking tableau lets the characters and viewer know immediately that they now exist in a world far more terrifying than they imagined. If one wanted to use a single image to encapsulate everything fascinating about horror set in space it would be the image of the space jockey in Ridley Scott’s Alien. Note: A newer English translation approved by the author is only available in digital Kindle and Audible versions in the U.S. Published the same year as Gagarin’s flight, the book uses the psychological stress of its characters as a metaphor for the dangers of exploring a universe you are not ready to understand.
The novel follows a crew tasked with the doomed mission of understanding and communicating with a vast alien intelligence. While Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film adaptation has overshadowed its source material, Stanislaw Lem’s contemplative science fiction classic Solaris remains a foundational work of the genre. Here are some of the most interesting, important, and chilling entries. Though Gagarin completed his mission without falling into an existential abyss, the possibility of this and other horrors meeting us out in space remains one of the most fertile grounds for horror. They called this hypothetical condition space horror. His supervisors feared it would drive him mad.Īccording to Beyond, a new book documenting the Vostok 1 mission on its 50th anniversary by documentarian Stephen Walker, some scientists speculated that “ultimate loneliness or isolation in the vacuum of space” would be too much for one mind to handle. It was one of humanity’s most astonishing achievements, granting Gagarin-who a few years earlier was in training to be a steelworker-a perspective on existence previously undiscovered by man. On April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space.
Space Madness: A Primer The psychological terror and incomprehensibility of outer space has produced decades of iconic sci-fi horror
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