You can feel it in the air, can’t you? We’re in the last couple weeks of summer, and spooky season is just around the corner. Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil movie is getting rave reviews — including from us! So long swimming pools and barbecues, the people demand thrills and chills.
But for some gamers, the appeal of the horror genre isn’t just about the adrenaline rush. You know the ones I mean: the people who treat nightmare fuel like Silent Hill f and Resident Evil Requiem as comfort entertainment, like an episode of The Golden Girls or a couple hours with Stardew Valley. Cozy horror has been a popular sub-genre in movies for decades; it’s generally more approachable scares like Gremlins, Misery, or Tremors instead of gorefests like Saw or Terrifier 2. It’s the perfect way to describe this year’s Emmy’s darling Widow’s Bay, a horror comedy about a cursed island in New England run by a neighbor with tourist aspirations. We’re also starting to see more mashups of these two seemingly incongruous genres in games, like with the spooky farm sim Grave Seasons and Devolver’s hit 2022 roguelike sim Cult of the Lamb.
To learn more about the appeal of cozy horror, I spoke with affective neuroscientist Dr. Eric Leonardis, who’s an expert in how our brains process emotions through play and entertainment. (He previously weighed in on one of our most-anticipated fall games, Virtue and a Sledgehammer.) In the eyes of the good doctor, it’s all about taking back control.
“It’s what they call dark play in the [neuroscientific] literature, this idea that if you have these explorations of negative themes, sometimes doing so will actually make you feel like you have more control over what might happen in the future,” Leonardis explained. “Because we’ve simulated it, we’ve thought it through, right? The classic example is like when Michael Myers comes up the stairs, and you’re like, don’t go into the basement, go out the front door. Get out of there. You know what I mean? This is what I would do in this situation, right? And that can be comforting.”
He adds that horror can feel cozy because we know we are safe in the heat of the moment, even if our character is getting their neck ripped open by a vicious zombie.
“We can explore these things without necessarily freaking ourselves out and actually feel at ease, because we know it is not happening to us. It is a situation which we are removed from and can reflect on safely. And I think that’s one reason that people might actually move towards these things,” Leonardis said.
What’s more, by navigating scary environments in a game, we’re actually keeping our survival instincts sharp. Many of the emotional and neurological responses we have to virtual scenarios are just subdued versions of the real-life equivalent. A type of brain cells called place cells are a major reason for that, because they allow us to immerse ourselves in virtual spaces as though they were real ones.
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“About 25 to 30 percent of place cells are recruited for virtual spaces versus real life,” explained Leonardis. “It speaks to our brain’s ability to actually project ourselves into these environments. We’re engaging the same evolutionary structures that we’ve used in the past to perceive real humans and animals. It’s another situation where we can use our machinery in the brain to actually perceive very complex aspects of these environments.”
So if you’re planning to revisit Raccoon City or Silent Hill at some point this fall, give yourself a pat on the back. You’ll be far better prepared for the IRL zombie apocalypse than most.