Horror Comedy: Why Modern Horror Films Are Funny

The situation is serious, but it is not serious.
If we move that well-known maxim by Ennio Flaiano (who also worked on a couple of films) from politics to cinema, it becomes not only lighter, but also a perfect description of a genre that seems to have no crisis in cinemas. I’m not the one saying it, but sites that generate millions of contacts and have been working for years on intercepting cultural trends: horror comedies are the films that have defined the last decade, and continue to define the one we find ourselves in. And they do exactly that: describe terror and death, with a smile on their faces.

Yes: almost twenty years have passed since Sam Raimi brought comic elements back to one of his horror movies Drag Me to Hell (after going to school with The house 2), almost ten since Jordan Peele earned a very rare Oscar nomination for Best Picture with Get Outbut the genre doesn’t seem to know any pauses, with new proposals in theaters on an almost monthly basis: we mention, among the latest or upcoming releases, Send Help (work by the aforementioned Raimi), Till death do us part 2 e Ti uccideranno – They Will Kill You. Scary titles, which hide more than a laugh.

Of course, there are more than fifty shades of this genre, black like humor and red like guts, but these films remain quintessentially contemporary, because they perfectly reflect the (post)modern public’s love for the mix of genres, and above all the cynical irony that has always characterized what for the past twenty years we have called, for the sake of brevity, internet culture. Nowadays, to be honest, it is almost impossible to observe a product of pop culture (does that even still exist? Let’s leave this to a later discussion) that takes itself completely seriously. For horror, being ironic is simply easier.

After all, since the first stirrings of the horror genre, humorous elements were present: they were more scary or more funny, the skeletons that appeared from nowhere in Devil’s Manor by Georges Méliès (it was 1896), or the dancing ones by Walt Disney (much more recent: 1929)? And then of course the first boom in parodies, with Frankenstein’s brain by Abbott & Costello (for the Italian public, Gianni & Pinotto) in 1948 to lead the way. That type of film, after all, was nothing more than the natural conclusion of a movement that had led horror and comedy to overlap more and more, during the reign of Universal’s monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein, The mummy, The invisible man.

But modern horror comedies are not parodies: they simply work on mechanisms that – as the aforementioned Jordan Peele reminds us at every turn – are quite similar:

If this one cited by Peele is the fundamental (secret? I wouldn’t say exactly) ingredient of the recipe, those who consume horror seem to particularly appreciate, at least in recent years, a homeopathic dose of those challenging themes that seemed to have become the norm in the genre (so much so that someone had already found a new label: elevated horror).

So here comes horror films that are pure and simple rides at the amusement park of fear, with titles like those of the series Final Destinationor the very enjoyable The Monkey released just a few months ago: films in which it’s a game, watching the protagonists die in the most bizarre, imaginative, spectacular ways, without worries or mourning. The result is the same pleasure – perhaps just tinged with a slight sense of guilt, at times – that we felt in the nineties with the sequels of Nightmare: we knew that history wouldn’t have any surprises in store for us; we knew that, once we finished the film, we wouldn’t think that it was the masterpiece that would change our lives; but we wanted to see come Freddie Krueger would have put an end to the existence of his unfortunate victims. Nothing but refinements of subject or screenplay: when faced with the spectacle of people dying badly, those count for little.

Then it will be a question of exorcising them, those images of death (which can never be as scary as those we see on television every evening), but inevitably, faced with those scenes goreour mouth opens wide in laughter. Perhaps it is no coincidence that zombies have become the protagonists of hilarious comedy films, and clowns of terribly scary horror films.