Johnny Mitchell, Lucy Gair, and Matt Wright
Horror Comedy: The Perfect Unfitting Genre
Have you ever wondered how movies of dualling genre can often make a perfect match for the other? Have you ever been watching a classic Disney movie and find yourself quite horrified from elements they put into this charming, animated flick? Or how about when someone’s watching Evil Dead and they have no idea whether or not to laugh uncontrollably or hide away in fear. It’s the magic of cinema that allows two genres that shouldn’t match to provide something completely unique through the mixture of the two. One of the most classic examples of this blended genre and the one that is arguably the most showing of this trend is a horror-comedy. Two famous genres within film, the horror comedy has become a genre within itself with how many films and parodies have been created with this mold in mind. So the question remains, how was something like this created, how much influence has it had on cinema as a whole, has it had a hand in shaping new forms of movies and the ways they can be viewed, and why would something that shouldn’t work actually work so well together?
Horror comedy (also known as ‘Comedy Horror’) works as a literary and film genre that combines horror fiction and comedy together. The connections go back as long as both genres have existed, with the first real horror movie, Georges Melies’ La Manoir du Diable (1896) featuring a scene with the devil as a vampire bat; it’s an image that elicits both fear and laughter. Horror comedy is actually an American creation; since American audiences took a long time to adjust to seeing horror on the screen as opposed to on the stage or in books (where it was normally kept), and it took the 1919 Robert Wise movie, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, to get audiences warmed up to the concept. ‘’The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’’ by Washington Irving, which also happens to be a quintessential early American tale, was one of the first books that captured this mixture of goofy and creepy vibes. The stage play, The Ghost Breaker, was a fascinating dive into why exactly the public at the time were more accepting of horror comedy; during a time of World War I and when real lives were at risks, it was the indication that people ‘’wanted to laugh in the face of death’’, which paved way for a huge amount of comedy films including comedic centred actors like Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers, and more movies that expanded into the realms of satirical dark humor, even horror-based. (Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History 1914 – 2008, Bruce G. Hallenbeck, Chapter 1: The Silents: Unheard Punchlines and Subtitled Screams, pg. 5).
The genre can be categorized under three different types: black comedy, spoof, and parody. Black comedy is something that deals with tragic or distressing subject matters in a humorous way. Black comedy doesn’t always have to strictly by scary, with examples like Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), The Trouble with Harry (1955), The Old Dark House (1932), Eating Raoul (1982), The Evil Dead (1983), Re-Animator (1985), Return of the Living Dead (1985), and Scream (1996) treating gruesome deaths with laughs as oppose to screams. Parody is an imitation of a specific style or genre, also done with comedic effect. A parody decides to mock the trends of the genre of choice, being solely meant for laughs, with examples like Young Frankenstein (1974), Love at First Bite (1979), Re-Possessed (1990), and Silence of the Hams (1993). Spoof is a film’s characteristics that are exaggerated into a humorous fashion. Unlike parody, spoof treats its genre with respect and only has good-natured fun with its target. They are deceptive in their presentation as a spoof feels more like horror with comedy stuffed into it. The first horror spoofs were the ‘’old dark house comedies’’ which were very prevalent during the transition period between silent films and ‘talkies’. Examples like The Cat and the Canary (1927), and The Bat Whisperer (1930) were films that took these spooky mystery tropes and added comedic elements into them. Spoof was also insanely popular with the comedy teams of old like Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Wheeler and Woolsey, and the Ritz Brothers – who each made a movie using the old dark house comedy format. (The Horror Spoofs of Abbott and Costello: A Critical Assessment of the Comedy Team’s Monster Films, Jeffrey S. Miller, Introduction, pg2.) All these sub-genres work for horror comedy because they all rely on changing the typical format of recognizable styles and altering them to fit into something that can be taken in a lighter war. Black Comedy allows people to view something unpleasant through a less-serious lens, while spoof and parody allows for deviation of the horror genre. With all these semi-genres and the concept of horror comedy being very jumbled in finding consistency, it makes the movies horribly difficult to advertise and even more difficult to cater to horror fans or comedy fans, which is why the genre is not as popular in more modern times. Yet it’s a genre that has still stuck around and it’s important to understand how it operates to find that out.
One of the defining elements behind why this genre arguably works as well as it does is because both horror and comedy are not only highly subjective genres (as everybody is going to react to scares or laughs in a completely unique way) but both also evoke strong emotions because they thrive on extremes. Horror and comedy usually have a wide variety in their handling, but also in their magnitude; they can be extremely subtle or extremely bombastic. In many ways, they both have similar ways of building their reactions; both rely on timing to get the better reaction and both require a sense of uniqueness because they’re both genres that can get predictable very quickly. Either way, they have a method of physically connecting with the audience, which is possibly why they work well together; both have similar goals and deliveries, but function on different ends of the emotional spectrum, or as Author Robert Bloch once put it ‘’opposite sides of the same coin’’. He also said that ‘’Both horror and humor require the same distorted conception of reality to be effective’’, a point that is far more accurate than it may seem.
Some of the more influential horror directors like Alfred Hitchcock and James Whale are known for interjecting comedic elements into their works of suspense as a means of lightening tension. Both genres also rely on elements from real-life more than any other in order to get a reaction out of the audience. For horror, it relies on creating something that a regular viewer can identify being scared of, while comedy is usually a defense mechanism to laugh at something that, on some level, mocks someone or something (all comedy is based around some form of misery after all). Because of this, you’ll find that some of the most famous horror films (or at least the scariest) are ones that try to ground themselves within reality. This means that stuff like humor, or levity, is essential to a good scary movie as it breaks up the pacing of the scare and keeps audience on edge. There’s no real correct way of doing horror comedy; it can be overtly comedic dialogue, situations, and gags like something from Edgar Wright, or a clever establishment of tone like something created by Sam Raimi. ‘’Horror and comedy can both be understood as genres that engage the viewer on a visceral level, moving beyond a rational or realist mode of reception into a mode where coincidence and spectacle dominate’’, this statement is also accurate to how both genres can feature a sense of distant through either un-relatability or for purpose of a punchline. So the genre is pushed to find balance between connecting with its audience to induce the correct emotions, and being distant enough that the situations can also be taken lightly and without feeling overly genuine. (Transnational Horror Across Visual Media: Fragmented Bodies, Dana Och and Kirsten Strayer, Politics and Horror Comedy, pg. 201).
While horror relies on a sense of foreboding wonder and fascinating repulsion, comedy pushes away from this mindset and rather tries to embrace the violence of the situation. Humor comforts while horror confronts and these dualling ideals work wonderfully when you want the audience to feel like they’re being pulled in several directions; one minute lulled into a sense of security and then yanked back out of it. Adding comedy to horror movies places the audience into a state of feeling not usually experienced with regular comedy, where it’s more a moment of reflection instead of dwelling on what should be a horrific event. This distance allows for the audience to understand the complementary nature of both genres and also allows for further elements to be added within their own genre like political satire or even overly extreme action like with Black Sheep (2006) and Army of Darkness (1992). A horror comedy can be uniquely equipped to explore the comedic tragedy of various social problems like racism, sexism, stereotyping, classism, familial problems, etc, and it’s a genre that captures a reality so closely that the irony causes its audience to either laugh or cry. It’s a genre that relies on a sense of separation from the people as a means of mockery or to not overwhelm the audience with its otherwise gruesome themes like in Drag Me to Hell (2009) and The Cabin in the Woods (2009), but its needs to mirror a sense of reality in its environment to create a connectable feeling of irony that can heighten tension and cause even more unclear emotions, like Get Out (2017) and Us (2019).
Horror Comedy is a genre that by all accounts shouldn’t work as its combined genres are polar opposites. But at the same time, they complement the other because both have fundamentally similar ways of construction. Both have been connected together since the beginning of their genres, both have to construct their scenes very similarly to get an effective reaction, both connect with the audience on an emotional and even psychological level, and both are incredibly famous genres that need variety and fresh material in order to not get repetitive. Whether a laugh or a scream is what you’re looking for, it’s good to know that one genre is capable of doing it without it feeling too strange.