For real. How do you visually depict things that are indescribable/unknowable? Wtf is "Non-Euclidian Geometry"? It's supposed to break your brain, so anything that can be processed visually means you can, on some level, understand it.
Non euclidean geometry is any geometry that doesn't obey Euclid's axioms. Space itself is non-Euclidean (as far as the Moon cares it's moving in a straight line, but Earth is somehow always off to the side). The distance between A and B is always growing, and it's possible that if you go far enough in a straight line you'll end up back where you started. Spheres are Euclidean but any shape on their surface plane is not.
People mostly use non-Euclidean geometry as a shorthand for weird video game maps
Interesting tidbit - Some very old, like early 90s game engines, had a quirk where you could layer areas on top of each other. This allowed you to do some freaky things like have 720 degree circles, or rooms that, by all rights, should have occupied the same space. Made for some really mind bending mazes. Here's an example from Duke Nukem 3d
And, of course, you show how the gribbly weirdness effects the characters without directly showing the gribbly weirdness. Hitchcock's famous "Nothing is scarier" principle.
At the Mountains of Madness also has an escalating scale of weirdness. The initial fossils that trigger the expedition are weird, but so are all pre-cambrian fossils. Then the elder things are weird, but they're recognizably animals and turn out to be sentient and intelligent. They're people, just really weirdly shaped people. Then the shoggoth is weird. It doesn't have any fixed shape and is totally unlike any living thing on earth. But it's still, in some sense, a living, physical creature. Just a really fucking scary biologically engineered super predator/nanotech toolbox. And then one character sees the "unnamed evil" at the very end. The reader doesn't get any description of it except that seeing it completely breaks one character's brain.
For real. How do you visually depict things that are indescribable/unknowable? Wtf is "Non-Euclidian Geometry"? It's supposed to break your brain, so anything that can be processed visually means you can, on some level, understand it.
Non euclidean geometry is any geometry that doesn't obey Euclid's axioms. Space itself is non-Euclidean (as far as the Moon cares it's moving in a straight line, but Earth is somehow always off to the side). The distance between A and B is always growing, and it's possible that if you go far enough in a straight line you'll end up back where you started. Spheres are Euclidean but any shape on their surface plane is not.
People mostly use non-Euclidean geometry as a shorthand for weird video game maps
You use patterns and shapes that are visually upsetting and disorienting
Another example
You make use of really unsettling sounds and music
You use a wide variety of available optical illusions to make the audience perceive things that aren't there.
You use visual effects to depict spaces that cannot exist
More non-euclidian geometry
More non-euclidian geometry
[The "Freaky Circle" scene in Thor Ragnarok is a simple example of non-euclidean geometry in film]
Here's an article about depictions of non-euclidean geometry in horror movies
Interesting tidbit - Some very old, like early 90s game engines, had a quirk where you could layer areas on top of each other. This allowed you to do some freaky things like have 720 degree circles, or rooms that, by all rights, should have occupied the same space. Made for some really mind bending mazes. Here's an example from Duke Nukem 3d
Here's some non-euclidean spaces in made in Portal 2
And, of course, you show how the gribbly weirdness effects the characters without directly showing the gribbly weirdness. Hitchcock's famous "Nothing is scarier" principle.
At the Mountains of Madness also has an escalating scale of weirdness. The initial fossils that trigger the expedition are weird, but so are all pre-cambrian fossils. Then the elder things are weird, but they're recognizably animals and turn out to be sentient and intelligent. They're people, just really weirdly shaped people. Then the shoggoth is weird. It doesn't have any fixed shape and is totally unlike any living thing on earth. But it's still, in some sense, a living, physical creature. Just a really fucking scary biologically engineered super predator/nanotech toolbox. And then one character sees the "unnamed evil" at the very end. The reader doesn't get any description of it except that seeing it completely breaks one character's brain.
Exactly (though every time someone asks me to represent Non-Euclidian geometry I show them a Sphere.)