It’s cowardice, isn’t it? That instinct that draws horror fans to old movies; camp, arch, silly films; and contemporary films set in the comforting warmth of the hand-knitted past.
The word ‘cosy’ has become an irritating background note in conversations around horror fiction.
It’s usually spoken about as a specific subset of work in the genre that offers “that happy ending, or low stakes”, as explained by Agatha Andrews on the podcast Books in the Freezer on 30 May 2023. It’s perhaps about friendship and love more than it is about cruelty.
But beyond that explicit cosiness, there’s an implicit cosiness baked into much of the genre.
Few consumers or fans of horror like to think of themselves as craving cosiness. Horror is edgy, grim, and dark. It’s for kids who don’t fit it and, like, see the world differently, man.
Horror critics speak approvingly of horror films as ‘disturbing’, ‘harrowing’ and ‘unflinching’ – ordeals through which we put ourselves, tests of our mettle, proof of our resilience in the face of fucked up shit.
In practice, however, we don’t want to be disturbed or harrowed. We want to be able to flinch. So, we protect ourselves with a range of distancing factors:
1. Time. Stories set or written in the past are less threatening than those which are strictly contemporary.
2. Geography. If the setting is physically distant from us – Texas, Italy, deep space – we feel safer.
3. Realism, or its absence. Freddy Krueger might be mean, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films might be gory, but they’re also close to being fairy tales.
4. Personal experience. We all know what will feel like salt in our own psychological wounds and can choose to avoid it.
5. Topicality. Difficult topics become less difficult when they’re no longer live; nuclear war was less scary in 2003 than in 1984.
Don’t look away
The 2020 film His House (dir. Remi Weekes) is about as far from cosy as I can imagine. It’s about a couple, refugees from South Sudan, who are dumped in a council house on an estate in England. The house turns out to be haunted by those they left behind on the gruelling journey.
It is set now. It is set in the UK, in a landscape I recognise. Remove the ghosts and it is an example of brutal social realism.
With its narrative about war, the danger of small boat crossings on the English Channel, and the vicious heartlessness of the UK asylum system, it could not feel more topical.
And, though I had it easy compared to these characters, the setting and sense of poverty reminded me uncomfortably of my own childhood – of scraping by with bugger all, constantly on edge.
I admired it, and am glad to have seen it, but cannot say I enjoyed watching it. At various points I actually felt the beginnings of a true panic response.
That’s what horror writers often believe they want to achieve, or to evoke. In reality, however, for the consumer of horror, the effect desired is more often a shiver, a pleasant thrill, or perhaps even a giggle.
I have a colleague (a woman, very politically aware) who talks about 1980s slasher movies as ‘comfort viewing’.
These are films in which one person after another is brutally murdered, often in graphic, gory detail; these people are often young, often female; and the feel of the films is often distinctly grimy.
But they are generally so over the top, so ridiculous, and so clearly set in another time (the 1980s) and place (Everytown USA) that, for British viewers, they’re a reassuring arm’s-length away from real fear. They make us jump and gasp but they rarely stay with us, or haunt our dreams.
That distance only increases when modern filmmakers or writers recycle slasher tropes and evoke the idealised Spielburbian settings of our collective childhoods. In Stranger Things or Fear Street Part One: 1994, both on Netflix, there’s an added layer of retro kitsch, or ironic detachment.
‘Trauma dumping’
A lot of contemporary horror fiction, or weird fiction, is inspired by the authors’ personal, physical or mental trauma.
Modern short stories are often ‘about’ some raw, real personal issue, such as child abuse, depression, racism, chronic illness, or gender transition. Or big, pressing existential problems like climate change.
They force us to confront complex, difficult subjects to the extent that reading for pleasure can feel like watching the news through a fictionalising filter, or listening to a deep, painful confession.
By turning them into fantastic stories, the authors are giving us a comfort blanket – a tiny degree of cosiness. But is it enough? For many readers, the answer is, no. It still feels too much like homework.
Or, to put that another way, they are often more enjoyable for the writer to write than for the reader to read.
(And I say this as someone who cannot stop writing stories attempting to process my own experiences of childhood poverty, often without intending to do so at all.)
Tweed, jerkins and knitwear
When I think of ‘cosy horror’ my mind leaps to M.R. James. His stories often have historic settings – they are set decades before they were written – and their revenants are older still. Now, in addition, we have more than a century of additional distancing. The tweediness of Edwardian prose tells us that we’re perfectly safe.
You might argue that James’s stories present eternal, subconscious fears: loneliness, unresolved sexuality, child murder… This is true. ‘Lost Hearts’, for example, certainly gave me shivers, as did its 1970s BBC TV adaptation.
At the same time, the way these stories are framed as fireside yarns in the original texts, or as ‘ghost stories for Christmas’ on TV, offers us a protective shield.
Similarly, I prompted some disagreement on Bluesky when I argued that folk horror is an essentially cosy sub-genre. As the filmmaker Paul Duane observed in response, folk horror often deals with “harsh” themes.
Equally, however, most of the best known examples are now viewed through a fog of 1970s film grain with half the cast in literally cosy vintage knitwear (dark Hygge) or 17th century jerkins and buckled boots (heritage horror).
Because that patina is part of the texture of folk horror, modern takes on this sub-genre are often also set in the past, as is the case with Starve Acre or Robert Eggers’s The Witch.
We get people in wigs discussing old news, with perhaps the odd talking goat or immortal rabbit to remind us that, by the way, none of this is real.
Even better, or more cosy, are Hammer films, and those from similar British studios such as Amicus. Does anybody watch these expecting to feel scared?
We might feel a little unnerved, perhaps, by the occasional striking image, or be made uneasy by the sexual politics. But more often, our reaction is to laugh at the big performances, at the Home Counties playing dress-up as Transylvania, and at blood as red as primary school poster paint.
The zombie apocalypse is another strong example of a cosying mechanism. These are really visions of our world post-plague, post-apocalypse, which give us a safe space in which to ask: could I shoot my neighbour in the head if they came for my resources, or threatened my tribe?
Anyway, enough of all that. I’m off to escape the horrors of the modern world in the warm embrace of a silly, colourful film in which a pair of binoculars fire spikes into someone’s eyes.
You know, in a cosy way.
This piece first appeared in issue two of the General Witchfinders zine. Issue three is out shortly and features a new short story by me called ‘We Have Always Battled Monsters in this Castle’.
Precast Reinforced Concrete Heart 