Whether it happens when we get caught skipping school, or whether it happens when revolutionaries get caught secretly writing subversive plays that mock their rulers, we have always felt the instinctive need to laugh at our fears.
And this makes sense when you think about it, because just like with everything else involving horror, laughing is a form of catharsis.
One of the most famous horror comedies is 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein - every frame of it embodies that irreverent “laughing in the face of danger” quality mentioned above. The most interesting thing it does, however, is defang (heh) the Universal Monsters, who had been extremely popular the decade before. And that in turn raises an important question:
Is it possible to still be afraid of something after it’s been mocked? My answer: Sure, but it is definitely hard to recover from.
This is why many critics maintain that the best horror comedies achieve their success by keeping the comedy and the horror balanced, yet separate. I would say it’s a little more complicated than that, though.
There’s a world of difference between an outright horror comedy like The Burbs, a thriller with a few laughs like Signs, or a comedy with a few frights like Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. (Large Marge!)
It’s a tricky balance because in order to feel scared, we must feel for the characters, which means that an emotional connection needs to be established. Many filmmakers, rightfully or wrongfully, feel this can only be achieved if the laughs are kept to a minimum.
On the other hand, many of these same filmmakers also feel that for us to be able to laugh, we need to be emotionally detached from the characters, which means that comedy is emphasized over empathy in these cases.
And both of these “either/or” approaches risk losing folks from both camps. Laughs versus scares.
All that said, I don’t think humor automatically disrupts the seriousness of the life/death cycle in horror films; after all, people often crack jokes at funerals.
In short, laughter is the ultimate coping mechanism, and the best horror comedies meld the two expertly.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
A Frankenstein story
I would throw An American Werewolf in London into consideration as the king of the horror comedy subgenre precisely because it was the first one to meld both genres relatively seamlessly.
Right from the start, writer-director John Landis weaves in clever intertextuality here, as two best friends backpacking through England are warned by fearful townsfolk to stay off the moors.
This is a direct nod to the original Wolf Man, and the creepiness of the warning is undermined by the humorous banter of the two friends David and Jack. So, right from the opening sequence, we have homage, humor, and horror setting the table.
Moments later, the two friends are viciously attacked by a real bastard of a werewolf. David survives, but soon turns into a werewolf himself and is guided through his metamorphosis by Jack’s decomposing ghost. That old tale.
Some of the scary stuff: an atmospheric, mist-enshrouded beginning, a handful of downright nutty dream sequences that symbolize David’s corrupted mental state, and some suspenseful "werewolf stalking prey" sequences set in empty underground tunnels and dark city streets.
That first attack is harrowingly captured by cinematographer Robert Paynter’s sweeping camera, which displaces us emotionally yet keeps the action brutally clear. Later, that same floaty POV cinematography is brought back for the stalk-and-attack sequences, proving to be a perfectly chilling way to convey walking in a werewolf’s skin.
Overall, it is superb filmmaking, and it demonstrates how the best horror comedies - like the ones I’m covering in this very essay! - are actually very well-made films, despite the lack of respect they often get. They don’t skimp on any of the technical merits you would find in films that are taken more seriously, and they put their superb production values and stellar craftsmanship on full display.
All of that elevates the scares and jokes, which stem from intent and are dictated by genre. But that’s the fun stuff, the icing on the cake. To make it all sink in, you still must hit the same dramatic goals as you would in any other kind of script.
A story is a story. Horror comedies just happen to mix two kinds of stories, which is no small feat.
American Werewolf’s laughs come mostly from Jack, David’s sarcastic spirit guide, as well as the nonchalant ways in which the rotting ghosts of David’s victims try to convince him to take his own life in order to protect the lives of innocents. Again, that old tale.
Ironically, that last motif – which is one of the smartest manifestations of “your sins will come back to haunt you” ever – speaks to the existential angst that also flows through this eclectic film. David, who seems like a genuinely good person, tries in vain to defeat the curse, but it eventually cuts his promising life short.
Thus, by capturing the undercurrent of tragedy that has always been an integral part of the werewolf myth from the start, this landmark horror comedy also captures the best of all storytelling worlds.
Above all, American Werewolf is best known for its amazing transformation centerpiece, in which poor David turns into a wolf for the first time.
Utilizing make-up and animatronic effects by the legendary Rick Baker, the transformation stands above just about every other set piece of its ilk. This single sequence is also a microcosm of the entire film, as well as a testament as to why the movie works so well as a whole.
The transformation itself is portrayed as painful and heart-wrenching; we really feel it. But right in the middle, just as it reaches an emotional crescendo, we cut to an insert shot of a Mickey Mouse toy, smiling emotionlessly at the terror unfolding before it.
And that masterful balance of deep-rooted horror and ironic humor permeates the entire film… just as it permeates the best examples of the genre.
Re-Animator (1985)
A Dracula story (ironically)
Writer-director Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is a pretty stark example of that balance, seeing as it hits the extremes of both genres.
What makes this gleefully gory H.P. Lovecraft-inspired blast of insanity a horror film is the core concept of “man playing god” via the abject process of resurrecting corpses. Because remember, the dangers of bringing the dead back to life is one of the key horror themes, dating back to our old friend Frankenstein. (Plus, this version treats its rejuvenated corpses as raging zombies, so you have that reference in there to boot.)
On the flip side, what makes this film a comedy is how far it goes with the social transgressions and the “oh, that’s just plain wrong” aspects inherent to the resurrection concept.
Re-Animator downplays the laughs for the first twenty minutes or so, but as soon as a campy mad scientist and a hapless medical student fight an intentionally fake-looking zombie cat in their basement, we are pretty much dared not to laugh going forward.
And the fact that the ultimate villain of the piece is a disembodied, horny head? I think we can easily say this is a movie that wholeheartedly knows it is a horror comedy, and it is one hundred percent committed to honoring both sides of that coin.
And that’s the thing about horror comedies: There seem to be fewer limits here than in any other type of story because these two genres exist on the opposite ends of human emotion. This means there’s a wide swath of storytelling territory between those two endpoints, and that can be truly liberating.
If horror-comedy filmmakers really wanted to, they could lean into the excesses of both genres full tilt, just to see how far they can go to make their thematic points. And Re-Animator does just that by pretty much catapulting the entire “body genre” ecosphere into outer space!
As you may recall, the term “body genre” is used to describe sensationalized stories (in which women are usually victims or voyeuristic subjects) that deal with sex, violence, or emotion in excessive ways. Pornography, horror films, and melodramas are often used as examples. Re-Animator embodies all three, to the umpteenth degree.
For starters, as we’ve established, the film deals with the resuscitation of dead bodies, which is a completely abject notion that goes against the laws of nature and is a key aspect of the body genre. Hell, the climax alone is a hallucinatory body-genre nightmare, replete with ungodly things happening to decomposing, naked bodies.
Even so, an earlier sequence that finds our leading lady Megan confined inside a morgue is the epitome of what the body genres tend to revel in:
First, we have the fact that Megan is naked, trapped on an examination table, and about to be violated by that aforementioned severed head. Speaks for itself, huh?
The violence aspect is reflected by the fact that said severed head is still gushing blood from its tattered neck wound while being held by its own decapitated body… Yes.
And the emotional aspect is covered by Megan’s utter, understandable fear.
In the end, it all serves as an ironic distortion of the sex scene that occurs near the start of the film, in which Megan and our leading man Dan intimately make love and then Dan pretends to terrorize her. Now Megan finds herself truly being terrorized while she’s at her most vulnerable… which makes this the ultimate merging of sex, violence, and emotion in an absurdist, surreal body-genre package.
And by pulling out all the stops on either end of the horror and comedy spectrums like that, Re-Animator makes its thematic point emphatically clear: Don’t mess with things that shouldn’t be messed with.
And that’s exactly why I picked Re-Animator.
It is a vastly different kind of horror comedy from American Werewolf, and the tonal contrast only highlights the wide range of possibilities within the genre.
Therefore, since we just discussed this memorable interpretation of Frankenstein, i.e., one of horror’s foundational monsters, we simply cannot leave out an equally memorable interpretation of his horror genre cofounder…
What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
A Frankenstein story (also ironically)
The beauty of What We Do in the Shadows is that its creators* clearly love vampires, and the film’s myriad references show that they know and adore the genre.
*That would be writer-directors Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who hail from New Zealand. Between this film and its TV show adaptation, its TV spin-off Wellington Paranormal, writer-director Gerard Johnstone’s Housebound, and writer-director Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive, those clever Kiwis sure do know their unique horror comedies!
In particular, the five leads represent the five key vampire archetypes:
Viago is meant to be the Interview with the Vampire elite dandy kind of vampire.
Vlad is a direct allusion to Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, from his orgies to his constant torturing of things to the bizarre hairstyle he adopts near the end.
Deacon is more of the rough-and-tumble, leather-pant-wearing bad boy that Spike from TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer immortalized.
Nick is the newly-turned, modern Twilight kind of vampire.
And of course, the ancient Petyr is meant to look like the titular creature from 1922’s Nosferatu (which is often cited as cinema’s first vampire film).
Many vampire tropes are turned on their head here, such as the travails of the slave-like “familiars” and the quest for the long-lost love, while intertextually, everything from The Lost Boys to Blade is referenced. And with such love comes a warm roasting of vampire lore.
As for the horror of it all, What We Do in the Shadows is not scary, but it is not meant to be – and it doesn't have to be for the purposes of its story. However, even though there are jokes in every scene, the film does treat its horror aspects earnestly, which, again, is a trend we’ve seen in the best horror comedies.
For example, the vampire “floating effects,” while mostly played for laughs, are nonetheless filmed “realistically” here, for lack of a better term.
In fact, the visual effects look great overall, from the way Deacon and Nick transform from bats to humans during their hilariously heated fight, to the eerie way in which the group surges down the hall as one in pursuit of Nick before he is turned by Petyr.
And because the horror visuals and make-up designs are taken seriously here, the consequences feel real.
Case in point: Petyr’s death is treated like the traumatic event it is, as is the group’s reaction to it. Of course, soon afterward, we are subjected to more laughs as the cops come over and the gang attempts to memory wipe them, but still - Petyr is burned horrifically by sunlight, and he stays dead. Things are kept dangerous.
And that's exactly why we come away caring so much for Stu, Nick’s hilariously nonplussed friend. As a human hanging out among vampires, we are always wondering when they are going to turn on Stu and eat him. And the fact that the film revisits this idea several times throughout is very clever because it never lets us forget the danger Stu is in.
As such, we actually end up feeling sorry for Stu during the climactic werewolf attack, and then we feel relieved to see that he makes it through (relatively) intact.
All in all, the filmmakers show how invested they are in their own story by taking the time to both make us laugh at and make us care for a character they could have just completely ignored... one that we don't know much about, other than he's just Stu.
But it’s not just Stu who gets challenged here. In the end, the familiar yet esoteric vampire lifestyle is treated as a challenge for all the characters – from how difficult it is to hypnotize and feed, to how lonely one can feel if they can only go out at night.
And funny enough, because we’ve all had a hard time fitting in somewhere at some point in our lives, we find ourselves identifying with these undead oddballs in unexpected ways. And that is what makes What We Do in the Shadows such a wonderfully endearing horror comedy.
Speaking of endearing…
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
A Dracula story
As alluded to above, there’s a lot to be said about the importance of identification through comedy.
I bet many of us would say that we find the funny characters in films to be the most relatable, and it's because they have a grasp on life that most of the other characters don't (even if it takes them a while to realize it).
Meaning, the funny ones possess the fortitude to laugh at the world, which helps protect them from it, and that in turn radiates a sense of inner strength we find endearing.
Consequently, in Shaun of the Dead, we truly come to care about the characters because they make us laugh; we bond with them. This happens because screenwriter-star Simon Pegg and writer-director Edgar Wright attack (heh) several genres at once and use them to their full advantage.
Pegg and Wright take us through the conventions of romantic comedies (Shaun and Liz’s “will they/won’t they” relationship), redemption stories (Shaun struggles to make amends with his family and friends), and buddy comedies (Shaun and Ed’s bromance).
And they use those tropes in the same ways they use zombie-movie homages as clever shortcuts to flesh out the characters and the conflicts (as well as flip them on their heads as needed).
We are propelled even further into the characters’ mindsets by the classical cinematography of Daniel M. Dunlap and the whirlwind editing of Chris Dickens, which highlight the film’s clever thematic allusions to a society where people were shuffling through their worker-drone lives like zombies even before the actual zombie outbreak hit.
And that sets the stage for Shaun and the gang to stand up and fight for a more meaningful existence filled with human connections. Even if they must integrate flesh-eating ghouls into their lives to do it.
And this all adds up. Since each one of these characters dies in horrific ways that deeply affect Shaun, we are affected too.
Consider the third-act bombshells that drop when Shaun realizes that his mom has turned, and that his best friend Ed has decided to sacrifice himself.
Not only are these beats emotionally impactful, but just as it was with American Werewolf’s transformation scene, they are a microcosm of why SOTD works so well as a story.
Namely, these two scenes include both poignant moments and funny ones, one after the other, yet the shifting of tones doesn’t take away from either the laughs or the emotions in any way.
In fact, the tonal shifts support each other.
It’s a masterful feat of tonal calibration, and most importantly, it works only because of the time Wright and Pegg took to develop the characters.
Not to mention that all of this is happening while ravenous zombies are amassing along the edges of the frame, so the horror aspects are also maintained at all times here in incredibly well-conceived, intense set pieces.
Because again, the best horror comedies are just well-made films, period.
With that in mind, Shaun of the Dead is also smart enough to know that zombies have been done to death (heh).
So while the film does poke fun at the genre in the same loving ways that What We Do in the Shadows did, it wisely focuses more on its characters finding solace in each other during a dark time rather than on stoically trying to fight the undead in ways we’ve seen a million times.
And that aspect of SOTD’s story has proven to be yet another surprising attribute of the best horror comedies: They have heart. And they have heart because they have something to say, even if it’s in a charmingly goofy way. Here are a few of my favorites:
Arachnophobia is about facing your fears – it’s right there in the title! – and it has some great set pieces to boot (I love the Psycho shower nod and the climax in particular).
Beetlejuice is about recognizing there is nothing to fear about death, as conveyed via the prime modern example of Expressionistic set design!
Tremors is about loyalty and learning how to cooperate with the community you are at odds with (and it features my favorite horror comedy duo ever in Val and Earl).
Demon Knight, with its clever riff on the “Chosen One” monomyth set against a Living Dead premise, is about self-discovery and embracing who you truly are.
This Is the End, one of my all-timers, is about remembering who your true friends are. Along the way, it nails its farcical, dark comedy aspirations by making fun of vapid Hollywood actors, and it absolutely nails its well-shot horror set pieces. (And yes, my idea of Heaven does indeed include the Backstreet Boys.)
You may think I’m nuts, but to me, the appeal of these kinds of stories is that the best of them mean something. And this brings me to the coping mechanism factor we touched on at the start.
I really do believe that said notion explains why so many horror comedies appeal to children and teens. Yes, it may be weird to think of it that way, but I know for a fact that kids are more open-minded and durable than we give them credit for.
I began this essay series by talking about how I first saw Gremlins when I was five years old – it was my gateway to horror films, and it remains my favorite horror comedy to this day.
Admittedly, that movie was pretty harsh at times for me back then, but the comedy (and adorable little Gizmo) cushioned it. And that’s just how it works, I guess – kids are pushed to their limits by the scares, but then the laughs help them get through. Just like life.
The appeal is almost subliminal, too. Many horror-coded stories that feature kids are about that pivotal time growing up when you start to realize that the world isn’t the perfect place you thought it was.
And following through on those feelings teaches our young ones how to process and to understand and to be okay with their fears early on.
Although it is not a horror comedy, I think that’s why It* has always been such a resonant story for so many. I read the book when I was about twelve, the same age as the kids in it, so it really stuck with me.
*It is so confusing to write about It because “it” is also a very common proposition 😂
All things considered, It has a message that hits close to home:
Our fears will always come back to haunt us unless we face them head-on. And even if we have to fight the same fears over and over – and even if they take on the form of a demonic clown - it nonetheless gets easier every time.
Especially if you can learn to laugh at them.
That’s why we have fun “kid empowerment” horror-coded films like The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys, Fright Night, The Gate, Critters, The Addams Family, and Hocus Pocus, which teach us to do the right thing no matter what obstacles lie in our path.
We also have horror-comedy-coded animated films like Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, Hotel Transylvania, Curse of the Were-Rabbit, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, and Monster House, which teach kids empathy as they come to discover that the outwardly monstrous may not be so monstrous.
Even my beloved Gremlins has a lesson: Humans are too selfish to be the caretakers of the world, i.e., “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
The main lesson of all horror.
Ultimately, all of this leads back to my overarching point, which I tried to articulate while discussing Re-Animator:
The reason horror comedies feel so special is that you can do literally anything with them, reaching multiple generations along the way.
Just look at the ones in this essay – they’re all clever spins on the main movie monsters and concepts I’ve written about in this series thus far. And in case you’re thinking I’ve overlooked alien beings and slashers, that’s where Slither, Attack the Block, Totally Killer, and Freaky come in.
The latter two in particular speak to my larger point of being able to do untold things with the freedom of the form – we have a time-travel horror comedy and a body-swap horror comedy now. The sky’s the limit!
You can go as comedic as you want with a concept like Ghostbusters, or as dark as you want with a similar concept, ala The Frighteners.
The disparate tonal calibrations of the Evil Dead films prove that you can even do so in the same series – e.g., Army of Darkness goes completely off genre, while 2013’s Evil Dead is straight-up hard-R horror.
You can even do a horror comedy musical, ala The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Little Shop of Horrors.
It all depends on the overall effect a filmmaker is going for. If they just want to make people laugh and squirm at the gross-outs, then right below the surface is as deep as they need to go.
If they want people to care about the characters and feel the weight of the deaths, then they will need to play things seriously - even if it’s only slightly more seriously - when appropriate.
It’s all about tonal balance, and it takes storytelling deftness and deep genre knowledge to pull off. But it can be done.
In the end, that’s probably the truest lesson of this magnificent, maniacal, heartfelt subgenre:
As long as there will be horror, there will always be comedy… or is it the other way around?