Screaming, Crying, Laughing Through the Best Horror Comedies
Few genres mix better than horror and comedy, both of which are designed to elicit visceral reactions out of their audience. It’s a blend through which multi-hyphenate Danny McBride went from Eastbound & Down hijinks to an Alien prequel, to backing the nu-Halloween trilogy, and back to hilarity in The Righteous Gemstones. It was also the realm of Jordan Peele, from his sketch comedy beginnings to award-winning frights in Get Out and Us (and beyond). Peele agrees that the two genres are close-knit, elaborating in a Get Out featurette, “I think horror and comedy are very similar. In one, you’re trying to get a laugh; in the other, you’re trying to get a scare.” It could be argued that the best of both worlds is the horror comedy.
We’ve put together a list of the best horror comedy movies that fuse fun and fear for your entertainment. Regrettably, in the interest of time and word count, some fan favorites and cult hits didn’t make the cut. Honorable mentions to New York-sploitation maestro Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage, sick-making Aussie sci-fi horror Body Melt, tubular gateway horror comedy The Monster Squad, ’90s creature feature Tremors, self-aware slasher camp sequel Bride of Chucky, and Jim Hosking’s foul, fluid-filled black comedy The Greasy Strangler.
What follows is a subjective crop of the top horror comedies, guaranteed to get laughs and scares alike.
An American Werewolf in London (1981)
Understood to be one of the greatest horror movies of the 1980s, John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London stands as an elite horror comedy with one simple trick: it observes the ludicrous situations that would naturally arise from its horror elements. So when wolf-bitten backpacker David (David Naughton) transforms into a werewolf during the full moon (with an assist from special effects creator Rick Baker), levity comes the following morning as he awakens butt-naked and embarrassingly human again in the London Zoo’s wolf enclosure. It’s not all laughs, but David’s tragic saga gets plenty of effective humor to balance the tonal scales.
The ’Burbs (1989)
A common focal point of horror and thriller movies is the deceptive domestic bliss found in the American suburb. While the likes of A Nightmare on Elm Street take the thesis dead-seriously, screenwriter Dana Olsen finds plenty of room for humor among its white picket fences. Paired with Gremlins and Small Soldiers director Joe Dante, The ’Burbs is a cheeky blend of creeps and comedy that has its fans cheering, “Satan is good. Satan is our pal.” Tom Hanks stars alongside Bruce Dern and Rick Ducommun as a trio of suburbanites who suspect that their new neighbors have literal skeletons in their closet in this black comedy.
Happy Death Day (2017)
What if the movie Groundhog Day featured a slasher for its hero to evade on each repeating day? That’s the premise of the Blumhouse-backed time-loop horror Happy Death Day, helmed by Freaky director Christopher Landon. Jessica Rothe delivers a hilarious performance as coed Theresa “Tree” Gelbman, who awakens on her birthday and gets killed by a masked figure, only to repeat the same day over and over again until she decides to solve her own murder and capture the culprit. Not only does the movie acknowledge its similarity to Groundhog Day, but it also takes that simple premise as the jumping-off point for a wholly unique and unforgettable variation on the theme.
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010)
“Oh, hidy-ho officer, we’ve had a doozy of a day. There we were minding our own business, just doing chores around the house, when kids started killing themselves all over my property.” Poor Tucker (Alan Tudyk) sounds unstable, but he’s telling the truth in Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, directed by Eli Craig. This 2010 movie flips the killer hillbilly horror trope on its head; the eponymous hillbillies are indeed minding their own business and fixing up their shared lakefront cabin in the woods when a series of unfortunate misunderstandings cause a sequence of accidental deaths among some college kids nearby. Tudyk and Tyler Labine shine as they stumble through every cliche in the slasher movie handbook.
Young Frankenstein (1974)
It’s pronounced “Fronkensteen,” if you’re the embarrassed grandson of the infamous creator Victor Frankenstein. In Mel Brooks’ sendup of the 1931 Universal monster classic and the 1818 Mary Shelley novel it adapts, the younger Frankenstein is played by Gene Wilder (who also co-wrote the script with Brooks), who inherits both his grandfather’s Transylvanian estate and, eventually, his hubris to reanimate the dead, leading to a new creation. Wilder’s performance, equal parts feigned dignity and naked desperation, leaven nearly two hours of back-to-back sight gags and innuendo, all filmed in a stark 1930s-esque black and white. You’ll never hear “Puttin’ on the Ritz” the same again.
The Cabin in the Woods (2011)
A minor nitpick of Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods is that the title seriously undersells all that’s packed into its 95-minute runtime. But maybe that’s the point when it’s all about adherence to a simple horror movie formula. The cabin of the title is the focal point for a group of college students—among them Thor’s Chris Hemsworth and Grey’s Anatomy’s Jesse Williams—who converge for a weekend getaway but find themselves at the center of an ancient ritual with world-ending implications. Through this ritual, every movie monster in existence can potentially be thrown at the youths, to include witches, sexy witches, and a merman. Come for the slasher humor, stay for bonus performances by Bradley Whitford (Get Out) and Richard Jenkins (The Shape of Water).
House (1977)
Assigned by Toho Studio to make a feature capturing the success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, director-producer Nobuhiko Obayashi crafted a wild whopper of a horror movie from an unlikely source: his young daughter Chigumi, who would receive story credit for House. The basic plot follows a schoolgirl and her friends who travel to the rural home of her aunt, where they are dispatched one by one. But the methods of death (a jar of teeth causes a drowning, for example), the lighthearted soundtrack by rock band Godiego, the crude special effects, and the sudden tonal shifts from goofy to ethereal melodrama take a basic supernatural premise into bizarre territory.
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
In the event of a zombie apocalypse, the average person would probably try to gather up their loved ones and wait it out in an impregnable refuge. Such is the plot of Shaun of the Dead, written and directed by Edgar Wright of Scott Pilgrim and Spaced fame. Simon Pegg (of the Mission: Impossible franchise) co-writes and stars as one of a cadre of Londoners caught up in an undead cannibal outbreak, whose trek to Winchester pub for safety (and a pint or two) makes up the rest of the story in this quick-fire comedy. It’s one thing to follow a capable and stoic Rick Grimes like The Walking Dead series does, it’s another to center a pair of feckless slackers (Pegg and fellow Spaced alum Nick Frost). Combined with the George A. Romero movie references, Wright’s debut feature is filled with belly-bursting comedy.
Bad Hair (2020)
When compiling this list, it became clear that the horror comedy subgenre is woefully short on Black-led films, but we can dig a little deeper than the poorly-aged spoof Scary Movie. If you’re Black, there’s an entire system of politics surrounding “good hair” (straightened and tamed, according to white standards) and “bad hair” with tighter, more coarse curl patterns. Though the CROWN Act in the state of Texas has banned discrimination against natural hair textures, Black citizens still face humiliation and punishment for the way their hair naturally grows. In his campy 2020 film Bad Hair, writer-director Justin Simien (Dear White People) tells the story of an ambitious production assistant who must change her image to advance her career. The weave she gets turns out to have deep roots in ancient lore, and soon it racks up a body count. The stacked cast includes Elle Lorraine, Jay Pharoah, Lena Waithe, Kelly Rowland, and Laverne Cox, among other familiar faces.
Evil Dead II (1987)
Sam Raimi’s 1980 gem The Evil Dead is the ultimate cult hit, gaining fame after a co-sign by Stephen King and gaining infamy through an X rating by the MPAA for its stop-motion splatter effects and intense violence. The sequel, also directed and co-written by Raimi, brings back the buckets of blood and mayhem to become the first movie many think of when hearing the term “horror comedy.” Physical comedy maverick Bruce Campbell returns as strong-chinned hero Ash, once again in a good vs. evil bout with feral Deadite demons—and this time he’s got a chainsaw and a sawed-off shotgun. These demons mock and taunt more than The Exorcist‘s Pazuzu or Hereditary’s King Paimon; for Ash, this means a Three Stooges flavor of violence and literal geysers of blood as the evil tries to ensure his death by dawn—and it means comedy gold for the rest of us.
One Cut of the Dead (2017)
The biggest mistake one can make with One Cut of the Dead is to turn it off within the first 30 minutes. What starts as another low-budget zom-com peels back to reveal a heartfelt love letter to hardscrabble filmmaking. In Shin’ichirō Ueda’s latest feature, a cast and crew are overrun by real zombies summoned by their director while attempting to film their fictional undead movie True Fear in a single take. The gags are slow-burning; what at first seems like a production error later reveals itself to be part of a grand, clever design. When the laughs wane, it’s easy to marvel at the ingenuity involved in the Sisyphean task of putting on a great show. The movie has since gained a life of its own, spawning a French remake titled Final Cut from The Artist director Michel Hazanavicius, which opened at Cannes in 2022.
Re-Animator (1985)
Vaguely based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1922 novelette, Re-Animator is a special kind of Gothic horror tale that marries hearty laughs with effective scares. Stuart Gordon directs in his first collaboration with star Jeffrey Combs, who plays the lead role of intense medical student Herbert West. After West creates a reagent that can raise the deceased, he begins to flout ethics and experiment on dead humans, catching the professional jealousy of a doctor who wants to assume credit for the invention. What follows are decapitations, mad science, sex, splatter, and a screaming Barbara Crampton in one of the most impressive Lovecraft adaptations to this day.
The Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
A story about a mean, green, man-eating plant from outer space taking over a rundown florist shop is bound to pay comedic dividends, and that’s just what happens in adapted musical Little Shop of Horrors. Muppets maestro Frank Oz directs and delivers the tale of a Venus flytrap-like threat (No CGI, all puppet work designed by The Dark Crystal sculptor Lyle Conway) that visits Earth and wreaks havoc on the citizens of Skid Row, the funniest of which is naturally Steve Martin as a sadistic crooning dentist. With a marvelous, sprawling soundtrack penned by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, it’s hard not to sing along as the body count starts to rise.
(featured image: Universal Pictures / Neon / Toho)
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