Earlier today my attention was drawn to an article put up by Julia Glassman for The Mary Sue telling everybody to shut up about “cozy horror”. In it they quoted a tweet I put at the end of a thread regarding the sub-genre four days ago. I suppose this particular fandom publication deciding to jump in on a discourse three days late and a dollar short shouldn’t be much surprise but I’m rather put out that they chose to quote a minor point I made at the end of that thread rather than engaging with my core argument so that they could complain, “people are compelled to take something fun and wholesome and turn it into a heated debate.” Even that would be insufficient to warrant a reply if the author hadn’t later said, in the same article, “It’s also undeniable that this problem is gendered. Endurance is associated with masculinity, and coziness is associated with femininity. Maybe that supposed femininity is what makes cozy horror feel so threatening to people who consider themselves hardcore horror fans.”

Now frankly this is not only nonsense but it’s offensive nonsense. Neither myself, nor the other people I know who were linked by this article as critics of cozy horror put forward such a gender-essentialist read of the phenomenon. In fact, when later asked for an example of cozy horror the one I gave was a short story written by a man.

It’s not entirely uncommon for The Mary Sue to pull this maneuver: They will start by adopting a position in favour of big-tent, commercially viable, smoothed down forms of media and then they will code this media as feminine so as to claim that anyone who dislikes said media must, thus, be a sexist. This works poorly, though, when your target has an open and expressed tendency to work specifically with queer fiction. So let’s avoid these bad-faith swipes going forward and instead examine what I actually said about horror.

In my thread, what I said was, “Regarding Cozy Horror and my resistance to it, I generally start my inquiries into a medium with the question of what it does. In the case if Cozy Horror it seeks to remove discomfort from Horror. I mean that’s on the box. I find discomfort a necessary sensation to maintain the horrific. As such attempts to render Horror comfortable collapse Horror. There’s plenty of comfortable spooky media which is not Horror. Generally it’s situation comedy (like the Addams Family) or it’s fantasy / adventure with a Halloween vibe (Nightmare Before Christmas). These are fine. But they aren’t horrific. They are also mostly children’s media. As such I find “Cozy Horror” to generally be either an attempt to market children’s media to adults or it’s just not very good at furnishing the experience it promises. And I worry that it will try to gentrify Horror. People who seek comfort from art often react… negatively… to the presence of art intended to provoke discomfort. Nobody likes a severed head replacing their marshmallows in their hot cocoa.”

As you can see the commentary on the gentrification of horror, mostly a veiled swipe at a certain subset of SF/F authors who have been actively introducing “cozy” vibes into their early forays into the horrific, was nowhere near the main point of my argument. Instead I was focusing on the function of discomfort to the horrific.

Now discomfort need not be extreme. While I am fond of chasing the limit experience that the works of Barker and Bataille are about, not every moment of discomfort needs to be an ecstatic experience that brings a subject to the limit of experience. Discomfort can be as simple as the itch of wool against bare skin.

We can find these degrees of discomfort throughout horror – be that in the long and awkward stares of the secondary characters in Get Out, in the creeping dread and uncertainty of The Lighthouse and Pulse or in the frank body horror of Gretchen Felker Martin’s superb Manhunt (or the discomforting normalcy of her villains internal lives for that matter). Discomfort can live in eros such as in the far-too-appealing monsters of Nightbreed. We look at the monster and want that for ourselves thus feeling discomfort in our own desire. Certainly there is discomfort in extremity. Nobody can comfortably read the n-Body Problem which is nearly as extreme as horror fiction gets. But that is also a book that ends with the protagonist observing a rainbow. As the recent Hellraiser reboot remarked discomfort is something to modulate. We can see this in extreme music: Pushing into more and more extreme walls of haptic noise is less effective at causing discomfort than the rise and fall of chaos in the work of Litvrgy. And much as with extreme music, discomfort isn’t always about what happens to a character either. Sometimes the discomfort is literally a physical discomfort caused in the audience such as the strain caused by trying to make sense of the garbled organic noise of Merhige’s Begotten.

Discomfort is a multivariate sensation but Glassman makes an elementary error by assigning discomfort against a kind of “endurance contest” as if we want to reduce the experience of horror to a guest spot on Hot Ones. I am not certain how often I have to talk about the significance of surrender to art before this becomes clear but there’s no contestation here. The point isn’t to overcome the horrific but to be overcome by it. And this is what comfort fiction denies its audience.

Now I want to focus, for a moment, on a work I am currently reading. I was lucky enough to be given an ARC of The Water Outlaws by S. L. Huang. This is not a horror work at all but, then, neither is Over the Garden Wall and that didn’t stop Glassman for putting this children’s cartoon front and center in her attack on the critics of cozy horror. Now I want to preface this comment by noting that, at time of publication, I have not finished reading Huang’s book and a full review will be forthcoming but one thing I observed is that it is largely a very cinematic novel. Huang has an exceptional grasp of what characters see but generally gives short shrift to other sensations.

With one exception: pain.

When one of the perspective characters feels pain the text comes alive. We get not just another sense beyond what is seen but also an enhanced view into the internality of the protagonist in her moment of discomfort. The discomfort of the character, the physical and psychic discomfort of the character, brings the text to life in a way that a dozen pages of beautifully rendered description of scene fails to do. We don’t just read her discomfort; we feel it. There’s an expression that the excellent horror critic Ashley Darrow often uses: horror wants to do things to your body. And this is what makes discomfort so central to the experience. Comfort is an opiate; as such it numbs nerves that should be made hot.

Now when I briefly examined cozy horror before I pointed out that much of what is put forward as cozy horror is children’s media. I don’t have a problem with children’s media. In fact I did a whole series of articles specifically about critical evaluation of children’s media. But Glassman can hardly say that comfort fiction is not infantilizing on one hand while on the other throwing forward examples from children’s cartoons. Frankly as amusing as a show like Dead End: Paranormal Park may be, it isn’t horrific. There’s no discomfort present. Because it’s not aiming for discomfort but rather to provide children with a fun supernatural adventure.

“Cozy horror may sound safer than other horror genres, but it’s a mistake to think that it’s any less complex or sophisticated.” Glassman says, but this a non-sequitur. Nobody said cozy horror lacked complexity. We said it lacked horror.

And this brings me, at last, to gentrification. I said before that “people don’t like to find a severed head in their hot cocoa” and this is what worries me about cozy horror advocates. Because, as is often the case with defenders of comfort fiction, cozy horror fans seem to have very thin skins. And this sensitivity leads them to tell people who criticize their preferred media to shut up in articles on major fandom websites. “What’s odd about the whole debate is that the time people spend denouncing a genre is time they could spend reading or watching stuff they actually like?” Glassman asks and the answer is we were. Quite happily. Until you went and got irritated over the fact that anyone anywhere said anything negative about this subgenre. I wrote four tweets four days ago and as a result you put me and a bunch of other people who likewise spent a tiny bit of time on one afternoon talking about how cozy horror had some problems on blast – called us sexists and such. Criticism happens. How many times have French New Extremity films been called “torture porn?” How many uneducated think-pieces do we need to see about final girls written by people who don’t appear to have the first clue who Carol Clover is? Do you think a literature that is built upon equal measures of Mary Shelly’s radicalism and Bram Stoker’s conservativism has no critical evaluations of how it treats race, class or gender? Perhaps if The Mary Sue were to hire somebody who wasn’t a neophyte with horror to write their think pieces on the topic they’d realize that autocriticism is a common recreation of people who watch and read horror fiction. As one might expect from people enamored with the fiction of discomfort, many of us enjoy turning that discomfort inward and interrogating what it means to read and appreciate uncomfortable material. But apparently Glassman does not like that discomfort any more than she would like the discomfort of the bodily destruction present in In The Earth, one of the best recent folk-horror films.

Glassman is welcome to enjoy situation comedies like What We Do in the Shadows and children’s shows like Over the Garden Wall. But perhaps she should save the culture criticism for people like Carol Clover, Gretchen Felker Martin and Annie Rose Malamet – who know how to interrogate their discomfort without recoiling in favour of the softness of a cotton blanket.