The So-Called Horror Genre That Actually Scares Me: A Critique of Cozy Horror

“Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.”

—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

There are a lot of new horror books hitting the shelves lately, from new original novels by Josh Malerman and Catriona Ward to adaptations of classics like T. Kingfisher’s Sworn Soldier series. According to The Guardian, horror sales rose a record-breaking 54% between 2022 and 2023, and another 34% in the first three months of 2024. The trend seems likely to continue based on reports in The Bookseller that horror novels are showing up in much larger numbers on submission. If you’re like me, someone raised on Goosebumps and Stephen King, you’re probably just as thrilled as I am. It is my belief that the rich substance of the horror genre has too long been dismissed as trashy, degenerate paperback fare. Horror films have risen in popularity since the 1980s, but literature has not received the same attention, it seems, until very recently. Of course, alongside this newfound popularity comes a greater level of cultural engagement, and a brand-new, broader audience has started dipping its toes into the horror scene. The ensuing conversation has brought a new subgenre into public awareness: the phenomenon of “cozy horror.”

The earliest and most comprehensive definition I can find for cozy horror is from a 2021 article, “The H Word: Getting Cozy with Horror,” by Jose Cruz for Nightmare Magazine. Cruz suggests that cozy horror can be identified by its dominant characteristics of familiarity, sensuousness, distance, and fun; in other words, cozy horror utilizes formula, nostalgia, and rich sensory detail to tell a story that, while delightfully spooky, won’t hit too close to home. The perils of cozy horror are far enough from reality that readers are in no danger of experiencing them, and so we are free to enjoy the romp through a ghost-filled graveyard, a towering Gothic castle, a witch’s cottage with a crackling fireside hearth.

More recent discussion around cozy horror seems to have kicked off in May 2023 when horror fiction podcast Books in the Freezer defined the term as fiction which follows the general conventions of the horror genre but “with a happy ending, or low stakes…or even if the stakes are big, it’s surrounded by humor, or a love interest, or things that kind of negate those big stakes.” Author Sadie Hartmann then brought the conversation onto Twitter, where predictably, a bunch of people started arguing about it. Soon afterwards, cultural recap website The Mary Sue published an article by Julia Glassman, “Instead of Arguing About This Horror Genre, Why Not Curl Up and Enjoy It?” As the title suggests, Glassman entreats readers to stop arguing and let people enjoy themselves.

I have problems with this.

I know—I sound like the Fun Police. That is not my goal here. Overall, I believe everyone should be free to indulge in whatever sort of fiction they like without some holier-than-thou snob trying to shame them for it. I’m fully in favor of people enjoying themselves, but my issues with cozy horror run deeper than a matter of preference. To me, a reader’s desire to distinguish and isolate certain “cozy” elements from the core of the horror genre signifies a critical confusion over horror’s role and function in literary society.

There have been plenty of bad faith arguments made against cozy horror. For example, Glassman’s article suggests that cozy horror makes certain horror fans angry because they see horror as “an endurance contest.” The nastier and scarier that a narrative can be, the more successful it is as horror fiction. I’ll be the first person to agree this position is objectively flawed. It’s like claiming Frankenstein doesn’t have enough jump scares; a fundamental misunderstanding of the context, history and purpose of the genre. However, I maintain that the way cozy horror has been defined is predicated on the same misunderstanding.

Cozy horror troubles me not due to the lack of violent or shocking content, but because its existence illustrates how wildly off-base our current cultural understanding of the horror genre is. Even we avowed horror fans seem to have forgotten our roots. Western horror fiction as we know it today originated in the 1790s when a handful of authors began to blend elements of 15th century fairy tales and then-modern Gothic literature. One of those authors was Anne Radcliffe, who also coined the dynamic on which the genre’s foundations are built in her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” published posthumously in 1826. Terror, Radcliffe proposed, was the discomfort of anticipation, the tension of a held breath. Conversely, horror was the moment of release, where the reader is confronted head-on with a disturbing idea.

Eventually, we christened this type of story the “horror” genre, but terror is always a crucial driving force within the narrative. Authors can strike whatever sort of balance they wish between these two elements, leaning more toward the subtle or the confrontational. The Exorcist and The Haunting of Hill House, for example, have obvious stylistic differences; however, they are both definitive horror narratives because tension and confrontation are the central forces of the story. Radcliffe’s terror-horror dynamic, the tense balancing act of shock and suspense, is the defining element of successful horror literature. The inclusion of supernatural elements is also important— not imperative, but the influence of myths and fairy tales on horror remains powerful to this day.

So, where is the apprehension, the shock and confrontation in cozy horror? Operating purely on Cruz’s definition, these elements are absent. A story that provides its audience a reassuring, insulated distance from discomfort and conflict is not terrifying; you cannot remove the primordial unease from the horror genre and expect it to retain its shape. Cruz also positions the element of fun in cozy horror as oppositional to such discomfort, but it seems an error to conclude that tension is the antithesis of fun. Likewise, sensuousness and familiarity are not as distinct from the disquiet at horror’s core as they might at first appear. Sensory detail is frequently used to convey visceral impact during moments of shock, and familiarity (including its subversion) is a core element of any successful genre fiction.

Horror stems from some of the oldest forms of existing literature. It is a fundamental expression of the human condition. Anyone who perceives horror as a measure of how much they can tolerate is missing the point, treating literature like exposure therapy rather than enrichment. “Cozy” horror seems to have sprung up largely as an antidote to such perceived aggression within the genre. To be fair, the strange, competitive attitude of some horror fans is not imagined—after Stephen King rocketed to success in the 1970s, publishers fast-tracked anything with blood on the cover, which led to a whole lot of sensationalist shlock bloating the shelves. Horror author Grady Hendrix catalogues this phenomenon in the collection Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction. Reading a few of those included titles makes it abundantly clear how readers could have gotten the impression that the horror genre requires a strong constitution.

Like many other champions of cozy horror, Cruz’s article is heavy with exhaustion over the gritty, gore-splattered and eagerly transgressive nature of many “grown-up” horror stories. It is worth noting that Cruz is a children’s librarian, and much of the enthusiasm for cozy horror is driven by an open desire to experience the “comfort” of children’s horror stories once again, rather than the “aggression” which seems to dominate the genre. Glassman even argues that cozy horror is often disparaged because its coziness is “feminine,” as opposed to the more “masculine” endurance-brand horror fiction. Equating femininity with comfort and softness isn’t particularly liberating from traditional gender roles, but that is beside my main point, which is that successful children’s horror is no “safer” than what we perceive as its more mature counterpart.

As the history of children’s literature demonstrates, trying to claim any particular genre of literature “for children” is already a fraught exercise. Fairy tales are considered children’s fare nowadays, but their modern narratives have been overwhelmingly sanitized. Still, the dark, hungry woods full of monsters and wolves found a new home in the horror genre, where children continue to gobble these stories up just as they have for centuries. It is undeniable that children adore the grotesque and horrific— R. L. Stine remains the most sweepingly popular horror author in history, surpassing even Stephen King internationally. The reason behind this is fairly simple.

In the 2004 International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, scholar Victoria de Rijke explains that the “suspension of disbelief required in [both] fairy-tale and horror fiction, where the reader generates an ‘intentional reproduction’ of anxiety as a signal of danger, ensures that they manage to enjoy it, as a mark of increasing sophistication and maturity… Every self-respecting child knows that the reader, not the book, is in charge.” For children, horror goes beyond entertainment; it empowers them to gain a sense of agency, and provides a healthy opportunity to explore life’s boundaries and transgressions within the solid guardrails of fiction. It stands to reason that if children’s horror serves this function, adult horror does so as well. The rationale of “cozy” horror therefore feels almost harmfully reductive to me.  Engaging with horror for pure shock value might be a shallow exercise, but horror literature which lacks “big stakes,” or any other measure of discomfort, purposely eschews the intrinsic ethos of horror.

This brings me to my secondary quarrel with cozy horror: I’m not certain anyone is actually writing it. Every time I see someone try to supply a clear example of the subgenre, I run into one of two problems—either the story in question lacks Radcliffe’s core terror-horror dynamic, which means it isn’t horror, or the narrative has been misrepresented, intentionally or otherwise. Take Cartoon Network’s Over the Garden Wall, for example. Frequently, the 2014 animated series is offered up as a quintessential exemplar of cozy horror, but is the story of two young brothers struggling to escape a stagnant, dreamlike purgatory—or die trying—really that cozy? Perhaps the story’s light and whimsical tone provides plenty of levity, but Over the Garden Wall would lose its impact if its essence wasn’t deeply unsettling. Another common example is the comedy slice-of-life series What We Do in the Shadows, which features a troupe of vampires who frequently murder innocent people on screen. That’s not a criticism; the show is hilarious, precisely because its entire mechanism is to call out the absurdity in the horrifying. But is it cozy? The household is running out of room to bury corpses in the garden. On some level, that is funny, but it’s also real. Laughing is one way we grapple with distress. Horror stories are another.

You may have also noticed that these examples are not technically literature: they are television shows, a visual medium. This is no accident. Cozy horror is defined by aesthetics above all else, and when people try to narrow their lens to strictly literary examples, they struggle. While perusing lists of cozy horror recommendations, I noticed titles including Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Shining. One could argue for their inclusion based on the tenet of nostalgia, perhaps, but if Edgar Allan Poe is a “cozy” author, who isn’t? I am loath to harp once again on Cruz’s article, but it is the only concrete source I’ve found which even attempts to approach cozy horror from a literary lens. Cruz provides Pennywise from It as an example of a “cozy” monster that we can hold at a distance. In the extremely literal sense, that’s true. A shapeshifting clown that thrives on fear is unlikely to threaten the average American, especially in comparison to, say, a home invasion. But are we going to simply ignore what fictional monsters like Pennywise represent? If we want to stay cozy, it seems increasingly evident that we must. When we strip the subtext from literary symbols like Pennywise or Count Dracula, leaving only the aesthetics behind, we are left with a hollow caricature of something that once held meaning. Unlike fans of “coziness,” I struggle to find this comforting.

There is a much broader piece to be written here on various forms of narrative expression being reduced purely to tropes and aesthetics—what some of my peers have been calling the “TikTokification of culture.” For the purposes of this article, I am confining myself to the horror genre, where my point remains that the most popular examples of “cozy” horror are visual narratives being interpreted based on aesthetics rather than content. The literary examples are hardly better, often a willfully shallow reading of classic texts which seems to reject further attempts at analysis. I have noticed only two contemporary authors whose work is consistently shelved on Goodreads as cozy horror: One of them is T. Kingfisher, the pseudonym of an author who has recently branched out from children’s fantasy to adult horror, which doesn’t seem like a coincidence—the handful of Kingfisher’s novels I have read are reluctant to confront horrific topics head-on, though the aesthetics are present. The other author is Darcy Coates, whose work consistently features a happy ending— but then, one could argue, so does Dracula. Coates herself considers the defining feature of her work to be a sense of “atmospheric dread,” which she evokes through the use of traditional Gothic horror tropes.

I do understand the fatigue with horror’s nihilistic tendencies. Writers like Glassman and Cruz are self-professedly interested in cozy horror precisely because it seems so antithetical to the violence, rape, and death lurking around the corner of so much popular horror fiction—and on the next tab of everyone’s news browser. I imagine this is the attitude of most cozy horror fans, and I sympathize. My central issue is that broader audiences perceive horror as a genre of “torture porn” in the first place, to the extent that its comforting potential seems to require a separate subgenre. Familiarity, sensuousness, distance and fun are already just as fundamental to the genre as the shock-suspense dynamic. In other words, horror is already cozy! And it deserves to be loved just the way it is.

Admittedly, the stakes of this entire argument are pretty low, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. As a passionate horror enthusiast, I want people to have fun reading horror stories, but I also want them to understand why. I believe the phenomenon of cozy horror represents a concerning overall trend towards audiences seeking out shallow, sanitized versions of narrative art, reducing complex stories to only their most superficial characteristics. This instinct, too, I can empathize with. We live in strenuous times, and one of the roles of fiction is escapism. But the impulse to reject any and all discomfort is dangerous; it isolates us in a bubble of our own experiences, and it makes the world beyond our comfort zone feel more threatening. When horror is doing its job, it should accomplish the opposite. Horror is a discomfort zone. At the same time, it is a safe space, as is all fiction, because if the experience grows too intense we always retain the power to close the book.

Many writers posit that horror fills a newfound niche for readers who feel strained under a global period of social and political unrest. To me, this makes perfect sense. Particularly for authors and readers of marginalized communities, horror is an ideal vehicle to explore dynamics of Otherness, power and helplessness. Engaging with dark subjects in so-called escapist fiction is not an act of gatekeeping, but a necessity in order to facilitate horror literature’s gift of empowerment to its readers. Ultimately, as the genre continues to expand its horizons and reach new, larger audiences, I only hope for more people to discover that horror is meant for everyone, whether it’s cozy or not.