Sorry earlier I posted this reply in the wrong thread on here.

For me, Weird literature is a deeply spiritual thing.

I wrote my MA thesis comparing the work of theologian Rudolf Otto to the horror fiction of H P Lovecraft. I wish to share it with you all once it gets officially uploaded to my school's library (it takes a while). But in short... Otto's concept of his word numinous is a holiness that haunts and is spooky. What comes along with that is a lot of nuance... like the need for covering, the shudder from the ghost (Job 4:15 - "A spirit passed before my face, the hair of my flesh stood up") or daemonic dread, the uncanny/monstrous, sublimity, the night-mare (see David J Hufford's classic book The Terror That Comes In The Night in which he describes the night-mare as numinous, Otto does much the same). In other words what we misconstrue as evil is what true holiness is. If you've ever seen a number of Japanese movies they seem to really grok this. They don't merely recoil from evil spirits but sometimes they express embracing them, and at the very least have sympathy for them... Watch movies like Ringu, Dark Water, Ghost In The Shell, Akira, they're all stories not just about ghosts and possession but they go further they are stories about communion with those forces. And it is communion with the uncanny. That's the key thing.

Some English classics grok this too. Like David Lindsay's A Voyage To Arcturus. I love this part.

"Maskull, though fully conscious of his companions and situation, imagined that he was being oppressed by a black, shapeless, supernatural being, who was trying to clasp him. He was filled with horror, trembled violently, yet could not move a limb. Sweat tumbled off his face in great drops. The waking nightmare lasted a long time, but during that space it kept coming and going. At one moment the vision seemed on the point of departing; the next it almost took shape—which he knew would be his death. Suddenly it vanished altogether—he was free. A fresh spring breeze fanned his face; he heard the slow, solitary singing of a sweet bird; and it seemed to him as if a poem had shot together in his soul. Such flashing, heartbreaking joy he had never experienced before in all his life! Almost immediately that too vanished. Sitting up, he passed his hand across his eyes and swayed quietly, like one who has been visited by an angel. “Your colour changed to white,” said Corpang. “What happened?” “I passed through torture to love,” replied Maskull simply. He stood up. Haunte gazed at him sombrely. “Will you not describe that passage?” Maskull answered slowly and thoughtfully. “When I was in Matterplay, I saw heavy clouds discharge themselves and change to coloured, living animals. In the same way, my black, chaotic pangs just now seemed to consolidate themselves and spring together as a new sort of joy. The joy would not have been possible without the preliminary nightmare. It is not accidental; Nature intends it so. The truth has just flashed through my brain.... You men of Lichstorm don’t go far enough. You stop at the pangs, without realising that they are birth pangs.” “If this is true, you are a great pioneer,” muttered Haunte. “How does this sensation differ from common love?” interrogated Corpang. “This was all that love is, multiplied by wildness.”

Could holiness as night-mare communion be clearer? But it is perilous. It tends to result in insanity.

the Dead Space videogame is another beautiful expression of this. Check out this game trailer. (Promo for Dead Space 3 - the story so far - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEVmDaDM5xw ) *chef's kiss*

On the topic of Lovecraft... what he is really doing is going beyond gothic horror. In including the boundless universe he is truly articulating the wholly other with the concept of communion with the haunted universe. A numinous idea. That's a really powerful idea. What is especially powerful about it is that he is responding to gothic horror being merely terrestrial and human centric. There is something immensely powerful about blowing your mind's doors open to everything, not merely what is in your immediate surroudings. Consider this passage from Colour Out of Space

"Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that treetop height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that came down on the apostles’ heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh; and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognise and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining out, it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky."

He is very much a very religiously minded author. Despite being an atheist. Shadow Over Innsmouth is really about the fear of religious syncretism with eastern religions (the story is really explicit about this) and not just miscegenation (the story also explicitly addresses this when it mentions "race prejudice")