Widow’s Bay might be cursed, but that didn’t keep it from absolutely dominating at last night’s Emmy Awards. After coming up from behind to become one of the year’s most popular shows — so much so that it’s nominated for a Chainsaw Award this year — it earned nearly twenty nominations from the Television Academy, and thrilled horror fans the world over.
It certainly feels like the show came from behind to win some of television’s most prestigious awards. Before it premiered, Apple TV hardly marketed the show beyond an initial trailer, and it rose to the top of the ranks through sheer word of mouth alone, a common sight for horror but very rare for a show that ends up being the most awarded of its peers at a ceremony like the Emmys.
Between both the Creative Arts Emmys and the televised ceremony, Apple’s hit series won a whopping fourteen awards. It won almost all of its nineteen nominations, including wins for stars Kate O’Flynn, Stephen Root, and Matthew Rhys — the latter of whom became the first person to win two Lead Acting awards in one night, after he also won for his performance in the limited series The Beast in Me.
The series also took home one of the biggest awards of the night when it won Outstanding Comedy Series, beating out shows like Hacks, Shrinking, and the questionably classified The Bear. It became the beloved ingénue of the night faster than you can say “sea hag” — though, to us here at Fango, that hardly comes as a surprise.
I guarantee that anyone who kept up with the show when it premiered this past spring isn’t surprised by its copious winnings — I know that I’m not. Horror fans know that everyone underestimates a good scary story right up until it scares their pants off, and Widow’s Bay filled a spot in viewers’ hearts that they weren’t even aware they were missing, even if they claim not to like horror. It’s a tactic every horror lover knows well — rope ‘em in with a good time before dropping a metaphorical piano of terror on them.
Widow’s Bay fills a rare niche that I like to call cozy horror. For most, that genre consists of things like Halloweentown, Beetlejuice, or Gremlins, where the strange and unusual abound but the stakes remain relatively low. But occasionally, a film or show comes along that rides the boundary between quaint and outright terrifying — think Twin Peaks, where one moment you’re laughing at Gordon Cole flirting with Shelly Johnson, only to enter the bone-chilling Red Room the next.
It’s only appropriate that creator Katie Dippold won Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, since she rides that line so well. From the moment viewers dock on its shores, the town of Widow’s Bay is a place they want to explore and hunker down in, even if it means staying in its extremely haunted hotel. It possesses a richness of spirit that makes you not only root for its characters, but want to know more about them. To live with them, even through their most horrifying moments. (Can you say sunset cocktails?)
There’s an oft-quoted comment about rom-coms that floats around, where viewers complain that more recent ones forget that they need both rom and com to succeed. The same is largely true of horror comedies, who sometimes disguise lackluster comedy with enough gore to make Jigsaw gag. But in a year where we all need a bit of a laugh, Dippold and crew more than delivered, giving us Dale Dickey’s “dead baby, dead baby, lessssssbian” speech followed immediately by revelations of horrific human sacrifice, both played deadly straight.
Between this and Sinners, I guarantee everyone’s now going to be shouting about “elevated horror” and Hollywood’s various film academies finally paying attention to the genre after ignoring it for so many years. And while yes, I do think the tides have changed in horror’s favor over the last few years, Widow’s Bay sweeping the Emmys feels more to me like proof that, when done right, a good scary movie (or show) is impossible to ignore, even if you’re a bit of a scaredy cat.
That’s not to knock the success of films like Sinners or Weapons when it comes to awards. I hope, like many other horror fans do, that this does mark a change in the tides for genre offerings. Cult success is all well and good, but it’s fun to feel like a proud parent watching their kid win a soccer game when horror achieves mainstream success. It feels like proof that we’ve not just been shouting into the void all these years, like vindication for being called weird for liking stuff that freaks us out.
While we might not see a second season of Widow’s Bay for a while, this feels like the best way to fill the void while it’s gone. Even if the show weren’t infinitely rewatchable, fourteen Emmy wins is more than enough to light a fire under the ass of any horror fan. And hey, if there’s someone in your life that hasn’t seen it yet, you’ve got all the evidence you need to convince them.
Widow’s Bay is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
