Eldritch is more about “ancient and unfathomable, impossible to completely understand with a mortal human mind”. If something is just a very cool but entirely knowable monster with a lot of wiggly bits, like that’s tight but it’s not necessarily eldritch. We often use tentacles for eldritch horrors because tentacles remind us of the unknowable and alien depths of the ocean, and that’s cool as hell, but like. An octopus isn’t eldritch.
For example. Hm. Pyramid Head is a cool ass monster who is also a god, but on a scale of Eldritch to Euclidian (where 0 is entirely mundane and 10 is unknowable Lovecraftian horror terror) Pyramid Head is probably a 4? He can’t do anything without physically manifesting, and his manifestation basically follows the rules of physics when it engages with the world. The big knife is just a big knife. He gets points for manifesting randomly, existing in a state of unknowable limbo when he’s not tormenting you, and having an absolutely unknowable internal life if he has one at all. (I know the games did something with there being a red and a yellow pyramid head but tbh I can’t remember how any of that works so I’m just going off 2 and the good movie)
The dimension of Silent Hill itself, though, is like a 9. It’s mysterious, unknowable except in a state of madness. Madness, or communion with the divine, which is ecstatic madness. It’s a place with a mind of its own, whose manifestations are both literal and allegorical. It corrupts whatever it touches. It occupies stretching liminal spaces, defies its own boundaries at the worst times.
Fairies can be Euclidean or they can be eldritch depending on the writer—Euclidean fairies are born and (probably die) in the same body without changing, have powers with cleanly defined limits, may be wise but are limited to their own scope of experience from which to draw this wisdom. Eldritch fairies by contrast may have confusing, fundamentally inhuman bodies; they may have powers that don’t make any sense, or which are terrifying to think about too hard; their desires and goals do not line up with human desires and goals; to fully understand their perspective on the world would break a human mind and drive one to madness.
The eldritch is either profoundly horrific, or sublime—or both. It is uncanny. The more knowable it is, the less eldritch it is. Which is fine! There’s degrees. I’d put most Hive Minds somewhere on the scale, usually the lower end, by the way
