The Rise of Wholesome Horror

Plus, new release news and community updates!

Well, we’ve made it through the first month of the year, and the groundhog has predicted a long winter, so we may as well get settled in with a nice tall stack of cozy horror. Right?

Sure. Let’s just jump into it.

In case you missed it, my novel NEVEREST is officially up for pre-order. You can earmark a copy on Amazon or the publisher’s website.

• Over on Wattpad, the Open Novella Contest (ONC) is underway! This is an annual community-run event where writers attempt to complete a novella (20k+ words) over the course of a couple months. Works must be original, developed from official ONC prompts, and meet certain deadlines. I’ll be participating this year for the first time, but there are a ton of other great authors also doing it so be sure to go scope that out.

• Speaking of the ONC, I will be documenting the entire behind-the-scenes process of writing the story — from how I came up with an idea for the prompt, to character design, plot, challenges, etc. — over on my Patreon. This has been a pretty fun exercise in self-awareness as I go through the process of planning out the story, and I think it ties in really nicely with my monthly exclusive “How to Write Horror” guides!

• Driftwood Press is currently accepting novella submissions. They pay a modest advance + contributor copies and are open to experimental fiction across genres, so that’s well worth a look!

• Through May, Dread Central is accepting submissions for the upcoming “Bury Your Gays” anthology of tragic queer horror.

• Also, congratulations to everyone who’s made it onto the Stoker’s preliminary ballot!

February is Black History Month, so the book club challenge for the month was “book by a Black author.”

This month I’m reading:

• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

• Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

• Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi

I might manage to slip in another book or two by way of audiobooks if I find anything good on Libby.

What are you reading this month? Drop me a comment to tell me about it!

Cultural trends shift over time. Fads come and go. Tastes and preferences ebb and flow. Certainly, some people like what they like and never deviate from it. But as a whole, consumer trends have a tendency to shift — often as a direct response both to the wider culture around them as well as the media fads before. Things get big, people get tired of them and start clamoring for the opposite.

Against a cultural backdrop of rising fascism, a global pandemic, a struggling economy, wealth inequality, climate change, late-stage capitalism, and a 24/7 news cycle that won’t let us forget about all of that and anything else terrible you can think of…well, it’s not a huge surprise that we’d be craving some cultural creature comforts.

There’s a growing demand for wholesome, feel-good content — and an internet consumer culture to match. But surely that can’t have anything to do with horror…can it?

What Do We Mean by “Wholesome,” Anyway?

To understand the wholesome revolution, you first have to understand what we mean by “wholesome.” This Vox article sums it up nicely:

"Wholesomeness as we’re using it now means friends supporting friends. It means valuing kindness. It means not judging simple pleasures. And while just a few short years ago, wholesomeness might have suggested a regressive nostalgia for the 1950s, today’s wholesomeness is determinedly progressive. If we’re going to have wholesome family values, the thinking seems to be, they’re damn well going to be diverse and multicultural wholesome family values."

Wholesomeness, which can be defined at a basic level as “good for you, bodily or spiritually,” is a matter of conformity to values. The modern trend is one of returning to a lot of traditional values (like kindness and cooperation), divorcing them from a traditionally problematic and bigoted Christian conservative moralist context, merging them with progressive values like inclusivity and consent.

It’s a good thing, overall. It’s, well. Wholesome.

The Vox article posits that this kind of wholesomeness spawns directly from pushback against the 4Chan Troll, the Nazi-idolizing Edgelord. I think it’s also a response to the sort of self-destructive cynical bitterness of the Gen-X and early Millennial experience (itself a pushback against the glossy mainstream consumer culture of the 1980s and its supposed family values).

I came of age in a time of, “If you’re not angry, then you’re not paying attention.” Some parts of that experience were good. It encouraged you to push back against injustice and see through a lot of “everything’s fine” bullshit. But some parts were decidedly harmful, like that counter-cultural insistence that smoking was cool, your depression meds prevented you from seeing the truth of the world, and only squares cared about exercise and eating well.

So this new wave of wholesomeness says: Self-care! Take your meds! Sleep and exercise and drink water! Take care of yourself as an act of radical defiance against a world that wants you dead! Be kind to each other because The Man wants your communities torn apart by in-fighting!

And maybe it’s just the sentimentality that comes from a swiftly encroaching middle age…but I gotta say, I’m loving it.

Video Nasties

But what about horror?

We can perhaps all agree that coziness and comfort is Good, Actually, in many aspects of our lives. But what about horror? Isn’t the purpose of the genre to explore our darkest impulses, to rip open the seaming underbelly of the beast and run our hands through its slippery entrails? How can horror of all things be wholesome?

At the very least, wouldn’t wholesome horror lose its bite? Be de-fanged for the kiddos? You can’t actually be scary and wholesome, can you?

Well. I think you absolutely can. And I’m going to get into that in a moment, explaining exactly what defines wholesome horror and offering some media recommendations. But first, I think it might help to define it in contrast to what it’s not.

The 2000s were a low point in horror media in a lot of ways, and a time defined by some horror that was decidedly unwholesome. We’re talking the Platinum Dunes era of horror, with its mean-spirited reboots like The Hills Have Eyes and Black X-Mas. We’re also talking about torture porn like the Saw franchise and Hostel.

This school of horror opens a door to a world where everyone is awful to each other. Time and again, we witness groups of “friends” who seem to barely stand each other. In a film like Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, the overt blood and gore is far less cringe-inducing than its attempts at humor, which all center on things like “no homo” jokes, ableist slurs levied at children, and ironic racism. Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses introduces a funhouse inversion of the nuclear family, one held together by violence, dysfunction, and mutual animosity aligned only to the common purpose of hurting outsiders (who are themselves pretty insufferable).

Stepping away from the pulpy camp, even the higher-brow horrors of this time period fall into a similar vein. Led by New French Extremism, we see films that wag their fingers at us for daring to enjoy such lurid filmmaking. A movie like Funny Games or Martyrs dares us, with unflinching brutality and unrelenting nihilism, to find joy or meaning or entertainment in violence — while repeatedly bathing the screen in blood and torment.

Against this backdrop, some hope-fueled, wholesome horror is a breath of fresh air.

Hopepunk Horrors

Okay. So to recap: wholesome horror is about a kind of radical shift — kindness in spite of darkness, caring for one another in an indifferent world. It’s about the struggle of being good to each other in the face of overwhelming, vicious brutality.

The defining characteristics of wholesome horror include:

• Sincerity

• Characters who care about each other

• Emotional vulnerability (textual and meta-textual)

• Endings that tend toward bittersweet or conditionally happy

You can get as dark as the story demands. Wholesome horror can be genuinely terrifying. But it needs something redemptive, too — some flicker that the world is worth fighting for, or that evil (which can never be overcome) can be run from another day.

Contrast with, for example, the ending of Cabin in the Woods, with its gleeful “fuck ‘em, let it burn” attitude.

You with me so far? Good. Let’s go on a journey.

If you know me, you know where I’m going to start: Jennifer Kent. The Babadook is, in my humble opinion, a landmark piece of horror, a film that helped to redefine the genre and usher in a new golden age. And for me, a big part of what makes it great is the ending. You can’t defeat grief the monster, but you can learn to live with out. How’s that for a hopeful ending?

Her next film, The Nightingale, is even bleaker — and has an ambiguously tragic ending — but it’s nevertheless cut through with a wholesome heart. Sure, it’s about rape, genocide, and child murder…but it’s also about friendship and healing and learning to walk away from vengeance to save yourself. What is that, if not wholesome?

Other wholesome horror directors include Guillermo Del Toro and Jordan Peele. In Del Toro’s case, his stories often end on notes of bittersweet tragedy — but there’s frequently a little glimmer of hope, a promise that maybe next time things could be different. Peele is more generous with his happy endings, giving you characters who deserve their triumphs against evil.

On a lighter note: Blumhouse’s Happy Death Day is another delightful film — a horror comedy featuring a Groundhog Day-style time loop and a similar message about self-growth.

A flagship wholesome horror title: Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, which absolutely doesn’t flinch from serving up horrors and social commentary but has a steel core built on the value of love.

For a really fascinating glimpse into the evolution of the wholesome horrors, sit down sometime to watch The Walking Dead and compare its first few seasons with its last few seasons. The series finale trades in the cynicism and despair of the show’s earlier run to give is a glimpse of a future where people band together to rebuild society — and root out human evil to make it happen.

Over in book world, we’ve got a few authors whose brand, I’d argue, is tied to hope and a certain kind of optimism. Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song is a heart-wrenching story of friendship and loss in the face of apocalypse.

Grady Hendrix has made a career of this type of horror. His books blend humor and breezy, fun concepts with emotionally impactful social commentary, and every one of them earns its hard-fought ending. If you’re just starting out, I recommend My Best Friend’s Exorcism and Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires as two books that share a universe and values (and strong women).

T. Kingfisher is another author whose horror house is built on a foundation of kindness. Hollow Places and The Twisted Ones both introduce horrifying monsters and heart-pounding suspense…alongside characters who live on the margins and have each other’s backs.

The most important take-away, I think, is that wholesomeness doesn’t need to rip the fangs from horror. Quite the opposite. Wielded by a deft hand, it has the opportunity to make the terror deeper and the losses more devastating. After all, vulnerability exposes you to true harm.

Allowing your characters to live and breathe and bleed on the page, to let them love one another and be truly decent and trying to do the right thing, makes them all the more sympathetic…and so much more like ourselves. The fear they feel and the threats they endure aren’t so different from what could some day happen to us. And isn’t that the greatest horror of all?