Ghosts Outside My Window

A Love Letter to Winter Horror

“These late winters I feel like I’m living in the basement of the world.” — Grant Mazzy, Pontypool (2008)

The buildings in my apartment complex share an open green space in the middle, which has created something of a wind tunnel. The howling of the wind has become the soundscape of my life at home, an ever-present white noise that more or less goes unnoticed by me until I have someone over and they point it out. “It’s just the ghosts outside,” I say. They’ve become a comfort to me.

As the night arrives earlier each evening, the daylight slipping through my fingers as I walk home from work, I find myself noticing the ghosts more. Like the veil between our world and theirs has become thinner. They tap at my windows, waiting for me to let them in from the cold. Winter is on its way.

From ancient folklore and the Ghost of Christmas Past to some of the most iconic horror films of all time, horror and winter have a long, storied past. The desolate, quiet, bleakness of winter amplifies our inner world—an isolation that is both physical and psychological. The harshness of the cold also heightens our awareness of our external vulnerability; Sometimes the scariest monsters are our environment.

As someone interested in how environments and settings shape horror storytelling, winter horror speaks to me because the cold is never a passive presence. If a horror story is set in winter, it makes itself known. This refusal to go unnoticed makes winter horror distinctly psychogeographic in comparison to its seasonal counterparts. Psychogeography is an area of study that concerns itself with how characteristics of the environment shape human behaviours and emotions. While most psychogeographic literature focuses on the influence of urban infrastructure, I think the seasons contribute significantly to the way we relate to our environment. They are a temporally situated variable that shifts an otherwise stable environment. Snow quite literally becomes a blanket, covering the familiar landscape and impeding one’s ability to move around with ease. It can reveal the cracks in urban infrastructure, disrupting the rhythmic flow of everyday life. Combine this with frigid temperatures and shortened daylight hours, and it’s no wonder winter has such negative psychological impacts on so many people. But for all its harshness, there is also a softness to the melancholia of winter. It's this dichotomy that lends itself well to the horror genre.

When I feel trapped inside, I find winter horror a comforting way to sink into the melancholy of the season. Much of the subgenre is insular, featuring characters forced to stay indoors as the elements grasp the world outside in their icy hands. These interior spaces—the mansion (Crimson Peak), the hotel (The Shining), the school (Climax), the radio station (Pontypool)—become vessels for the psyche. It doesn’t matter what’s going on outside because you can’t (or don’t want to) go out there anyway. And if you do decide to brave the cold, you can’t venture far. This makes the world feel a little bit smaller, creating a kind of intimacy in the storytelling which not only heightens the tension and the anxiety but also draws you closer as an audience. When I watch winter horror, I can often feel myself leaning inward towards the screen. It’s almost as if I could stumble and fall into the narrative myself, like Alice down the rabbit hole. This is in direct contrast to how I experience most other horror, where distance equals safety.

I can’t help but be captivated by these horror settings and their place in the psychological battle of getting through the winter. Take me to the Overlook Hotel so I can roam its labyrinthine hallways while a snowstorm rages outside, or to the suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden, so I can wander through the forests at night and befriend a vampire. I’d even take being trapped in a radio station while a linguistic apocalypse unfolds before my very ears. Maybe I’m alone in this, and others don’t feel their hypnotic pull. But I think seeking out stories of isolation when we ourselves are isolated can be a healthy reality check: winter sucks sometimes, and that’s okay. If we look back in history, we can see that this time of year is a long-repeated and collectively experienced isolation. We have been scared, sad, and haunted by the winter for centuries; the ghosts outside my window whispering and wailing are a reminder of that. But despite all the anguish, we have persisted. Passing down these ghost stories from one generation to the next, and getting through these long winter nights together.