A Haunting in Venice — Cozy horror makes life less scary

Life is hard! So I'm really glad that cozy horror movies like A Haunting in Venice exist to comfort us through times of hardship and winter frostbite.

In this episode, we explore A Haunting in Venice (2024) as a shining example of cozy horror, and why cozy horror is good for our mental health.

I also pull some tarot cards to try and make sense of why there is such divisive rhetoric in the horror community against cozy horror!

Mental Health is Horrifying is hosted by Candis Green, Registered Psychotherapist and owner of Many Moons Therapy.

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Show Notes:

Want to work together? I offer 1:1 psychotherapy (Ontario), along with tarot, horror, and dreamwork services, but individually and through my group program, the Final Girls Club. 

Send me some Ghoul Mail! I love hearing from you spooky ghouls! Want a chance to have your story read on a future episode of Mental Health is Horrifying? If you’d like to share what horror movies mean to you, how they have helped you with your mental health, or about a particular horror movie that you have thoughts and feelings about, send me some Ghoul Mail. 

Podcast artwork by Chloe Hurst at Contempo Mint.

Instead of Arguing About This Horror Genre, Why Not Curl Up and Enjoy It? By Julia Glassman in The Mary Sue

Oster, Emily F., Witchcraft, Weather and Economic Growth in Renaissance Europe. Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2004

The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff 

About Agatha Christie 

Subject spotlight: Mystery & Detective By BookNet Canada

Why Is Pandemic Fiction So Comforting Right Now? By By Kathryn VanArendonk in Vulture

What You Need To Know About Pluto in Aquarius from Chani

Transcript

Welcome ghouls to today’s episode of Mental Health is Horrifying. I’m your Horror Barbie host of darkness — Candis Green— Psychotherapist and all around spooky bitch podcasting from my bat-filled cave in Toronto, Canada. 

Where I live in Canada, the temperature has dropped, there’s snow on the ground and it starts getting dark at like 3pm. As we spend more time indoors during the long winter months, we need something to help get us through, n’est pas? On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a movie that makes you want to curl up with a snug blanket and a cup of tea – A Haunting in Venice. 

Listen – no matter the school of thought that you choose, there are endless sayings that highlight how hard life is. Benjamin Franklin said in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Dostoevsky said pain and suffering are inevitable. And French absurdists like Albert Camus had an entire movement dedicated to the fact that life was irrational and devoid of meaning!

So in a world filled with pain, suffering, and taxes, a movie like A Haunting in Venice can feel like a balm against an otherwise harsh, cruel world.

It’s not just the French that came up with entire movements through which to see the world – the horror community has too! Yes, A Haunting in Venice belongs to a very important sub-genre in horror called cozy horror. 

Okay — so let’s get right into it. Let’s check out A Haunting in Venice as a shining example of cozy horror, and why cozy horror is good for our mental health. 

Movie synopsis:

In 1947, Hercule Poirot has retired to Venice, but his friend and mystery writer Ariadne Oliver persuades Poirot to attend a Halloween party and séance at the palazzo of famed opera singer Rowena Drake, mostly because they are have HAD IT with Joyce Reynolds—a World War I army nurse turned medium — and they are determined to expose her as a fraud. 

The palazzo, a former orphanage, is believed to be haunted by the spirits of orphaned children who were locked up and abandoned to die there during a city-wide plague; rumors claim that the spirits torment any nurses and doctors who dare enter.

Rowena has hired Joyce to commune with her daughter Alicia, who committed suicide after Alicia's fiancé, chef Maxime Gerard, ended their engagement. Among the guests are Rowena's housekeeper Olga Seminoff, Drake family doctor Leslie Ferrier and his son Leopold, and Joyce's assistant Desdemona Holland; they are joined by Maxime right before the séance, and during it Poirot is able to expose that Joyce Reynolds is indeed only pretending to commune with Alicia and has employed various trickeries to fool her guests. 

Shortly thereafter, an unknown assailant nearly drowns Poirot when he is apple bobbing, while Joyce falls from an upper story and is impaled on a courtyard statue.

After Poirot recovers from his apple-bobbing attack, he interviews the guests, during which he witnesses manifestations of Alicia's ghost. In classic whodunit style, we as the audience are led to believe that literally everyone is a suspect because they are all acting kinda shady and mysterious, but in the end, Poirot deduces that it was indeed Rowena who killed her own daughter along with Joyce and Leslie, and tried to apple bob Poirot to death – hoping to pass them off as part of the children's curse. 

Rowena killed her daughter out of jealousy that she was developing an independent life, and Rowena wanted to keep her for hserself. She poisoned her slowly with small doses of the honey of Rhododendron ponticum (aka Mad honey), weakening and then caring for a hallucinating Alicia. When Poirot confronts Rowena on the roof, Alicia's ghost seems to appear to them both, pulling Rowena down off the building and into the canal where she drowns.

Movie background info:

A Haunting in Venice is part of the Hercule Poirot series of movies, that have been revived in the past few years by actor, director and producer Kenneth Branagh, having already directed and starred in Murder on the Orient Express, and Death on the Nile. It stars Kenneth Brannagh who is incredible as Poirot – the prefect amount of cheese – along with Tina Fey, Michelle Yeoh, Kelly Reilly, and Jamie Dornan. 

The film is loosely based on Agatha’s Christie’s 1969 novel Hallowe’en Party.

Did you know that Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time? It’s true! Spooky readers unite! She is best known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as the world’s longest-running play – The Mousetrap. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and a billion in translation. Damn girl! 

It’s so great to see that her work is still being enjoyed today. Her work never really went anywhere – it’s always been around – but as we’ll see later, mysteries and cozy horror are definitely experiencing a renaissance. 

What is cozy horror?

Listen to me kids – when I decided to do an episode on cozy horror, I did not realize that I was wading into such a divisive, controversial topic that people in the horror community seem to be quite polarized about. Did you know that there are people out there who are against cozy horror?! Article after article of people arguing over the validity of cozy horror as a genre! Fighting on Twitter or X or whatever that horrible place is called now! Turns out, there are some who think that cozy horror is sullying the horror genre? We live in a wild world people!

When I first discovered that you can put two of my favourite words – cozy and horror next to each other – I was never more excited in my whole life, but apparently for some, cozy horror is the downfall of the entire genre and we should all just go back to the golden age of horror in the 80s with our yabos out while dudes breathe heavily. 

Yes, I am decidedly pro-cozy horror, and if this is your first time hearing that term or you are needing some more elaboration on what this is and why it’s important for your mental health, you’ve come to the right place. 

I first discovered cozy horror via public libraries, which are a gift to us all. In a past life when I worked with public libraries, I leared of a genre of books called “cozy mysteries”, at which point I questioned what on earth I had been doing with my life up until this point. 

Cozy mysteries artfully combine crime and comfort, by depicting stories with no graphic violence, swearing, or sex for good Christian women like me. The mysteries that need solving are more lighthearted in nature, and follow a somewhat predictable narrative pattern so you don’t pull any muscles trying to use your brain too much. The cozy mystery’s protagonist is an amateur sleuth who uses intellect and life experience to solve a case – and the best example of this is Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. The stories typically take place in some quaint small town, and are peppered with humour, and a closeknit community of likeable characters – except for the villain who is unlikeable so everyone can agree to hate them together. 

Cozy horror which arguably evolved out of the cozy mystery – and people do be arguing! – shares many of the same characteristics as cozy mysteries, including a whodunnit narrative, an amateur but loveable sleuth (like Hercule Poirot), sets that are aesthetically pleasing — but also tend to have a supernatural or even gothic slant. All of Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot movies are a great example of this, along with any Mike Flanagan series that you can find on Netflix like The Haunting of Hill House, Knives Out, What Lies Beneath, Only Murders In The Building, Crimson Peak, or The Fog. 

Cozy Horror Renaissance: 

Many of the cozy horrors I just named came out within the past few years, except for The Fog which came out in the 80s. God I wonder if people hated it then. (And yes I just checked and indeed critics hated it in the 80s when it came out because… the 80s).  

We are definitely in a whodunnit renaissance. What a time to be alive! Of course whodounnits have been around forever, but the definite resurgence of the genre is no accident. 

I think there are a few reasons for this renaissance. Firstly, whodunnits never really went away – they were merely viewed as a “lesser than” genre of storytelling, snickered at and best suited for grandma’s, which is a whole level of misogyny and ageism that i don’t have time to get into here. We need to focus! 

Secondly, horror has always and will always be a reflection of the culture and collective unconscious in which it is created, and girl – I don’t know if you’ve noticed but these are some trying times! It’s scary out there! And while of course there are still tons of horror movies that reflect the violence of the world we currently live in – like the Terrifier genre – filmmakers are also responding to a need for comfort right now. 

This is where we can appreciate the mental health benefits of horror movies like A Haunting in Venice, which are of the cozy horror genre, and also ones that are generally bestowed a PG rating.

Spooky scary spectrum of horror and mental health benefits of cozy horror:

Boy do I LOVE a PG horror rating. My entire ethos here is that horror is for EVERYBODY and it is such a broad, diverse genre, so everybody can find something that they enjoy and reap the mental health benefits while they’re at it. And PG horror, certainly makes the genre so much more accessible. 

Horror has a lot of mental health benefits as they relate to our nervous systems and exploring our own fears and shadows, and these benefits include practicing nervous system regulation through things like jump scares, laughing, and tension release, being able to explore fears in a safe environment that you are in control of, exploring our own personal shadows via horror villains and monsters, bonding with co-viewers, and boosted mood and adrenaline. 

We turn to horror in times of hardship. One of my favourite examples of this is the movie Contagion – about a pandemic that kills millions of people around the world. It came out in 2011, but during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, it shot up in popularity and held a top 10 stop in the iTunes rental chart. The popularity of horror overall during the pandemic shot up above any other movie genre. 

I’ve spoken on this podcast before about a classification system I have created for horror as it relates to the nervous system, called the spooky/scary spectrum of horror. 

Window of tolerance is key in appreciating this classification system, which refers to an optimal state of nervous system stimulation in which we are able to function and thrive in everyday life. When we exist within this window, we are able to learn effectively, play, and relate well to ourselves and others. But when we are outside our window of tolerance? We are in the panic zone, and you just can’t get anything done there, let alone function. So if you're going to enjoy the mental health benefits of horror, it’s important to consider your own personal window of tolerance. And this will look different for everyone.

The spooky/scary spectrum puts horror movies on a scale from spooky (not so scary/regulated nervous system), to the scary red zone at the opposite end of the spectrum where you have gone past your window of tolerance and are curled up in the fetal position, anticipating nightmares for the next six weeks.

As an example, I would personally place A Haunting in Venice in my spooky zone, because it’s cozy, features Halloween and a séance which are passions of mine, Poirot gives me a warm fuzzy feeling and makes me feel like everything is going to be okay, and I also feel comforted by Tina Fey and Michelle Yeoh! 

I would place the movie Smile in the middle of my personal spooky/scary spectrum because I did find it quite scary, but I was able to stretch my window of tolerance juuuuuust enough to be able to tolerate it, and explore my own relationship to interesting themes portrayed in the movie like trauma and perceptions of safety. 

On the furthest end of the spectrum for me would be a movie like Megan Is Missing, which contains themes that even upon a cursory glance a personally so upsetting and dysregulating to me, that I know that this is absolutely not the movie for me and that is absolutely okay because why torture ourselves, right? 

And I wouldn’t want that to happen to anyone else either, which is why I think it’s so important to understand that in horror, there is something for everybody and it exists in a continuum. 

One of the benefits of horror is bonding with co-viewers, and this is where I really love cozy horror, because it makes the genre so much more accessible. There have been years where I’ve wanted to show a scary movie at my Halloween party and I knew that some of my guests coming were sensitive to scarier ones, or maybe they were bringing kids, and I would never want to traumatize those kids or scare anyone too much, so I like being able to reach for a horror more so on the cozy end of the spectrum – maybe like Sleepy Hollow or Crimson Peak – so that everyone can enjoy the experience. 

Scary Stories Make Life Less Scary:

When Ariadne and Poirot arrive at the Halloween party for the kids, Poirot is curious about why a performer is sharing scary stories with the children. Ariadne tells him – scary stories make life less scary. 

*play clip*

At this time of year especially, when it gets dark very early, when it’s cold outside, and home is the best kind of refuge, there’s something comforting about horror when you’re snug at home with your family or friends around a fire. When you know that beyond that door the world is scary, but in here you’re all safe together.

We definitely do enjoy cozying up with horror more in the winter. In data provided by BookNet Canada, which provides data for publishers, both retail sales and library loans for mystery and detective books increase significantly as we enter the cold months. And interestingly, sales and loans in the categories of “cozy mysteries” and  “women sleuths” increased 38% and 88% respectively year over year. 

We seek comfort in the cold, dark months from the harsh world outside. We are, after all, greatly impacted by our environments and must remind ourselves daily that we are really just complicated plants. Actually, witch trials are a great example of how scared people become in the winter. 

During witch trials in both Europe and the United States, more people were accused of witchcraft in the darker months. Think about it – these witch trials occurred before electricity and all the modern conveniences of things like indoor heating were invented, so the winter months were really hard from that perspective and it was easier to feel more scared. When it was dark outside, it was dark and when it was cold, you couldn’t go over to the thermostat to crank up the heat. People were more isolated because the telephone and internet hadn’t been invented yet, so it was easy for the minds to play tricks on them, and for whatever seasonal depression was called back then to take hold of their psyches. Everything feels more scary in the dark when we cannot see, right? We get spooked more easily, and imagine threatening figures out in the shadows beyond the safety of our homes. 

People also did not want to acknowledge that it was in fact winter that was making their lives difficult, and it was winter that made their crops wither and fail, and instead blamed witchcraft/women. Amazing! And as we know from my last episode on The Substance, those accused of witchcraft were overwhelming female, single and/or widowed and in the menopausal range. So basically childless cat ladies have been out here ruining crops for centuries. 

Conclusion / Backlash against cozy horror 

In discussions about the fact that some horror fans out there are pressed about the very existence of cozy horror, people have pointed to the fact that this is definitely a genre that appeals more to women — and we can see that this is also backed up by data too.

So one of my favourite therapy questions — what’s really going on here? Are we mad that women are carving out a space in horror to be cozy, to feel safe, to feel good about themselves? Why does this threaten with respect to what horror means to some? 

And you know – I feel like this calls for a little tarot spread. I’m going to shuffle and pull two cards to explore these two questions.

[CARD 1] – What happens when women carve out distinctive spaces to feel safe and comforted?

I pulled the fool here which is actually one of my favourite card in the deck and feels so perfect here because being the first card in the major arcana, the fool has absolutely no worries or fear attached to them. This is the beginning of something big. They are going on a journey, but they are completely unburdened and they have virtually no baggage attached to them other than a cute little shoulder bag and their sweet little dog friend. This card makes me think about what it would feel like as a woman to walk the streets alone at night, unafraid in the dark, the fool’s posture is so carefree, it almost looks like they are doing a little dance. In this instance, does this mean that they have nothing to fear? That perhaps this is a space for women only. Their body language is open, unafraid, as though anything feels possible. This card evokes safety, joy, comfort, a movie night in with your dog – such a great card for cozy horror. 

[CARD 2] — What does this threaten as it pertains to what horror means to some?

The second card that I pulled to answer the question “what does this threaten as it pertains to what horror means to some” is the wheel of fortune. A wheel that is moving! A tide this is changing! This very pluto in aquarius – a significant astrological shift that is occurring over the next 20 years – that will usher in momentous societal shifts that will shake up the status quo. The last time Pluto journeyed through Aquarius, between 1777 and 1798, the world's balance of power massively shifted, and we saw the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The fact that the tides are shifting in the horror genre – as they always do right – can threaten some to feel as through they are losing their power, control, or relevance. There is a snake at the heels of the Anubis, the Egyptian god of death, an existential threat that is going to make it difficult for that one figure to continue holding up that while all on his lonesome. The fixed signs of the zodiac appear in the corners, holding books of wisdom, and I’m sure if Anubis asked for their help they surely could figure out a way to help him continue to move the wheel of fortune, of life, along. It doesn’t all belong to one person. There are all these different segments to the wheel and it contains so much, so it’s this idea that there really is something for everybody and there is plenty to share. 

Conclusion:

It doesn’t have to threaten you if someone likes something different than you do – everyone is on their own path, and seeing these two cards together conjures up a sense of vulnerability here – like is their a jealousy, desire, or wish for the cozy haters to feel like they too can be that carefree, engage in silliness, light-heartedness? It’s not very heavy metal to watch Poirot movies, but does setting that persona down for a little while feel too vulnerable? 

Honestly, if we take a fear of engaging with our own vulnerability into account here – is it possible that cozy horror, or A Haunting in Venice specifically, could be placed on the “ultra scary” zone of somebody’s personal spooky/scary spectrum because it threatens something? 

Ugh wow human beings are so interesting.

Outro:

And that my ghouls is the story of A Haunting in Venice. Who knew that a cozy movie based on an Agatha Christie novel could be so controversial?! I hope that your takeaway from this is that you can like whatever you want – from extremely cozy to extremely scary – because this is your life and you should enjoy it and let others enjoy theirs. We should seek first to understand before judging what someone else likes, and approach each other with empathy and kindness because we’re all fighting battles that others may know little about. 

Mental Health is Horrifying is entirely researched, written, edited, and produced by me, Candis Green, Registered (and spooky) Psychotherapist. If you like this podcast, please consider rating and reviewing on your preferred listening platform. It really helps the show to reach all the other spooky ghouls out there and I will be eternally grateful – and an eternity is a very long time for a vampire, okay? 

If you live in Ontario and are interested in psychotherapy with me, I offer therapy for Final Girls who want to make sense out of the guts of their lives. I specialize in grief and trauma, and incorporate both tarot and dreamwork into my practice as tools to delve deeper into fields of psychic terrain. I offer other services as well which include tarot, horror, and dreamwork. You can follow me on Instagram at @mentalhealthishorrifying and you can also learn more about me and my services through my website manymoonstherapy.com.

OR you can also howl at the moon and I will hear your call.

Bright blessings.