From Autumn Love to Spooky Season Obsession (And Safe Fear?)

The evolution of the autumn season as a full-on personality is one I have watched unfold for decades. Hell, I have been embodying this personality type since I was a teen in the ’90s. And it all started with a now-dissolved coffee shop called Seattle Coffee Co.

Inside a branch of Waterstones on Princes Street in Edinburgh, I used to go there to study, which was really code for ordering the largest herbal tea you could get – I thought herbal tea was super sophisticated – grabbing a table by a window, slipping my Walkman earphones on and romanticising the whole damn thing to the soundtrack of Weird by Hanson.

If it happened to be autumn and raining, well, there was no stopping me becoming the most yearning, aching, angsty version of myself, who was absolutely sure that if I could only meet Taylor Hanson, surely we’d be together.

Anyone else watching Dancing with the Stars, by the way? Be still my ’90s heart.

What You’ve Got Mail started in the late ’90s, Gilmore Girls grabbed by the fistful of autumn leaves, and by the time it premiered in the UK in 2003, we were already a nation of mug-hugging, romanticising coffee-house dwellers. And we were about to discover that if a TV show could make its whole personality a season, so could we.

So, if the ’90s and early 2000s gave us a love of autumnal TV and film, coffee-shop culture, chunky knits and romanticising rainy days, the mid-2000s gave us blogs, lifestyle magazines and the beginnings of the cosy aesthetic.

Then came Pinterest and Instagram and suddenly cosiness was a whole identity, dressed in a warm, amber filter. We weren't just drinking the coffee, lighting the candles, putting on the chunky knit and watching the rain anymore. We were curating it. Photographing it. Making it a personality.

Hygge barely had time to render us all warm, sleepy and regulated before Spooky Season landed.

We threw off our cosy blankets, made a quick pitstop at our wardrobes for a ghost-motif sweater and rushed to grab something pumpkin-spiced on our way to watch or do something with a bit of Safe Fear attached.

Safe Fear.

The thing that, for me at least, truly separates Cosy Season from that of its spooky counterpart.

I want to be honest here and say that I have absolutely no idea if ‘safe fear’ is even a thing. I mean, I know it is, but what I don’t know for sure is if that is the correct term for it. I was researching why us humans enjoy fear – why we actively seek it out in the form of rollercoasters, horror films, binge-watching true crime documentaries, haunted houses, jumping out of planes… the list is extensive.

Anyway, I forgot to type ‘-ai’ into the search engine, as I often do, and AI started babbling about Safe Fear.

I skipped to the resulting articles, fully expecting to find some academic explanation of this apparently very real psychological phenomenon, and nowhere did I see any direct reference to Safe Fear.

But I have to admit, it works.

Fear and excitement are remarkably similar physiological states. Your heart rate rises, your skin tingles, adrenaline kicks in – the difference is largely what your brain thinks is happening. If getting all of those delicious physiological effects without any of the actual danger attached is your thing, and rollercoasters and jumping out of planes aren't, then it makes perfect sense that for eight weeks of the year there is a whole smorgasbord of other ways to get your Safe Fear fix. Maybe this is why my love of Cosy Season eventually became an obsession with Spooky Season.

It’s cosy with an edge.

It’s cosy season’s cooler, slightly unhinged sibling. It still wants the candles, the blankets, the warm drinks and the ritual of settling in for the evening. It just wants a ghost in the corner, a haunted house down the road and the possibility that the thing you just heard upstairs wasn’t the cat.

Cosy Season says: make the world softer.

Spooky Season says: make the world softer… but what if something is watching you?

And honestly, I get it.

Because Safe Fear is still fear. It’s just fear with the lights on, the front door locked and the knowledge that, eventually, someone will yell cut.