Scavengers Reign’s Stellar Finale Cements It as True “Cozy Horror”

In the past couple months, I have quit posting on the site formerly known as Twitter, and have tried my best to avoid checking it. As such, I can’t say I’m as tuned in to the latest pointless nerd discourse as I used to be. However, one such much-debated topic from earlier this year is back on my mind now: the “cozy horror” discourse.

To recap what happened: a few writers tried to define a subgenre of “cozy horror”—fiction that contains dark supernatural elements but ultimately favors warm fuzzies over cold chills, citing works like Over the Garden Wall or What We Do in the Shadows as examples. People argued over whether such stories count as a type of “horror” as opposed to just pre-existing descriptors like “spooky” or “goth.” Then, an article from The Mary Sue tried to frame these genre classification arguments as hateful gatekeeping and brought in a weird gender essentialist angle, presenting traditional horror as “masculine” and “cozy horror” as “feminine,” and it became a whole big thing on Xitter for a few days.

I’m thinking about this discourse now after finishing the Max animated series Scavengers Reign, a show that stands out from basically every other American animated series in its commitment to actual no-bones-about-it terror—when it’s not basking in the splendor of its alien ecosystem in a manner that’s strangely relaxing. If “cozy horror” were an actual genre and it applied to full-blown adult horror as opposed to just comedies and softer-by-necessity children’s media, Scavengers Reign—particularly its ending—might fit the bill better than almost anything else.

Imagine if Ridley Scott’s Alien looked like James Cameron’s Avatar. Or if Hayao Miyazaki remade Annihilation. Or if a Planet Earth-style nature doc took place on another planet and the predators had human targets. That’s what Scavengers Reign feels like—the calmest and most beautiful possible delivery system for nightmares. This beautiful horror begins with its opening sequence, where pretty piano music makes a space disaster something you can watch again and again.

The show follows four humans and one robot who survived the crash of the spaceship Demeter (no Draculas involved in the crash, to be clear) on the planet Vesta. Commander Sam (Bob Stephenson) and botanist Ursula (Sunita Mani) landed together, and by the series’ start have already figured out how to make efficient use of the flora and fauna in their immediate area, but the further they travel, the stranger things get. Cargo specialist Azi (Wunmi Mosaku) is accompanied by the robot Levi (Alia Shawkat), which is developing sentience. Then there’s Kamen (Ted Travelstead), the man responsible for the crash in the first place; he is all alone except for a weird psychic creature called the Hollow feeding off his bad memories… and eventually, his body.

Until the happy ending certain characters receive at the end of the season (which might not last long, given the final tease of a Season 2 conflict), their individual situations are mostly pure horror, nothing cozy about it. The viewer’s experience, however, is different than the characters, and experiencing Scavengers Reign as a viewer means an exorbitant amount of sheer wonderment mixed in with the disturbance and grotesquery.

For sci-fi fans who like to fantasize about alien worlds, long stretches of Scavengers Reign can be a form of comfort viewing. All those weird little creatures are creatively designed and beautifully animated. The ways in which the different parts of the ecosystem all fit together have the pattern-fitting appeal of an “oddly satisfying” video compilation.

But yes, some of those creatures are also incredibly dangerous and incredibly creepy. If you don’t have the stomach for body horror, Scavengers Reign will likely be unwatchable. Perhaps most disturbing of all are the ways in which interactions with this alien environment transform some of the characters for the worse. Kamen was a bad person to begin with, but when he’s a bad person in the belly of a lumbering, overpowered Hollow, he becomes even more dangerous. Sam, in contrast, is a good person, and his downfall at the hands of nature is all the more tragic. It’s genuinely painful to watch as he retains his conscience even as the parasite keeping him alive is trying to force him to infect others. 

And yet, there’s one character who is transformed by Vesta for the better: Levi. The mold growing in its circuit boards has given the robot feelings and a greater understanding of the environment, and though the robot is initially destroyed halfway through the season, the planet ends up bringing it back to life. This merger of technology and nature is the most Ghibli-esque part of the show, and it’s the force that is ultimately able to save the day, allowing the survivors a living-with-the-land, Nausicaa cottagecore ending.

In the climactic psychic battle, Vesta’s positive view of nature overpowers Kamen/Hollow’s cycle of destructive despair. The vision that snaps Kamen out of it and defeats the Hollow is part-2001: A Space Odyssey, part-The Tree of Life, part-Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. Rather than finding cosmic horror at humanity’s insignificance, Scavengers Reign finds a sense of peace with this insignificance and an abstract sort of spirituality. If you can live with the horror, there are few things more comforting.

All episodes of Scavengers Reign are now streaming on Max. 

Reuben Baron is the author of the webcomic Con Job: Revenge of the SamurAlchemist, a member of the neurodiverse theatre troupe EPIC Players, and a contributor to Looper and Anime News Network, among other websites. You can follow him on Bluesky at @andalusiandoge.bsky.social.

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