Horror comedy movies: why a scare and a joke work the same way

A horror comedy is a film that mixes scares and laughs. It runs from pure spoof to films that leave you unsure whether to laugh or recoil. Both moods run on one engine: SYFY Wire describes both as a windup of tension followed by a release.

Critic Anton Bitel, writing for the BFI, Britain's national film institute, adds that nervous laughter makes a scene more uneasy, and fear makes a joke more uncomfortable, and so funnier. The mix is as old as the monster movie. In 1948 Universal sent the comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello up against Dracula, the Frankenstein monster and the Wolf Man in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bela Lugosi's last turn as Dracula. The pair went on to meet Boris Karloff, the Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and the Mummy, and Fangoria, the horror magazine, traces a line from those films to Ghostbusters and Evil Dead.

The films below are smaller and stranger than those studio hits. Relay's catalog tags more than 400 films as horror comedy; these nine come from Canada, Australia, Croatia and the United States, and each has a story behind the joke.

What makes a horror comedy

• A real threat. The killer, the monster or the virus has to be dangerous, or the laughs have nothing to push against.
• An ordinary job gone wrong. Ice cream vans, funeral homes, fertiliser farms and horror conventions are funny because they are so normal.
• A target. Many of these films aim at something outside the story: fame, politics, nationalism or the horror business itself.
• Timing. The beat before a scare and the beat before a punchline are the same beat.

9 horror comedy movies to watch

Ice Cream Man (1995)

Clint Howard plays Gregory Tudor, an ice cream man fresh out of the Wishing Well Sanatorium who turns the neighbourhood children into the flavour of the day. Olivia Hussey and David Warner co-star. The director, Paul Norman, made adult films under the name Norman Apstein, and this was his first and only attempt at a mainstream film. He wanted a horror film for children in the spirit of The Goonies and The Monster Squad. It was the first screenwriting credit of David Dobkin, who later directed Wedding Crashers.

It was shot in California in March 1994 for about $2 million, with mashed potatoes standing in for ice cream in many shots. Norman later said it found no audience because he had made a movie for preteens that no mother of preteens would let them see. It found one later. Vinegar Syndrome, a label that restores cult films, put it on Blu-ray in 2017, and Howard told The A.V. Club that besides Star Trek it is the title people most want to talk to him about.

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Just Buried (2007)

Oliver, played by Jay Baruchel, inherits his estranged father's funeral home just as a rival opens down the road. He and the mortician, Roberta, played by Rose Byrne, accidentally kill a local man, then keep killing to keep the business alive.

Chaz Thorne, a Canadian writer and director, shot it in Nova Scotia, in Halifax and Windsor. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 2007, and Thorne won Best Director at the Atlantic Film Festival that year. Exclaim! critic Brendan Willis found its humour closer to grey than black.

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Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal (2012)

Lars, a once-famous painter played by the Danish actor Thure Lindhardt, takes a teaching job in a small Canadian town. He agrees to look after Eddie, a mute man who kills and eats when he sleepwalks, and finds that he can paint again. The film asks how far an artist will go for his work.

It is the first narrative feature of Boris Rodriguez, a Montreal filmmaker with a Mexican mother and a Cuban father. He said the first pitch was a novelist and a werewolf, and they switched to a cannibal because with cannibals there are no prescribed rules. It was shot around Ottawa in 20 days, Rodriguez said. It had its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2012.

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100 Bloody Acres (2012)

Reg and Lindsay Morgan run an organic fertiliser business in rural Australia, and the secret ingredient in their blood and bone is people. When three young travellers break down on a country road, the brothers see a fresh batch.

The writers and directors, the brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes, started around 2004 with a straight, brutal horror script in the style of the 1970s. Then the Australian outback horror Wolf Creek became a hit, and Cameron Cairnes said they asked how to beat it at its own game. Their answer was to make it funny. The script won the horror category of the 2010 Slamdance screenwriting competition, filming began near Adelaide in January 2012, and it premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival that August. Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com called it the best low-budget horror comedy since Shaun of the Dead.

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Osombie (2012)

Dusty, a yoga instructor, joins a NATO special forces team in Afghanistan to find her brother, a conspiracy theorist convinced Osama bin Laden is still alive. He is, in a sense: bin Laden leads an army of zombies. John Lyde directed it for Arrowstorm Entertainment, a Utah maker of low-budget genre films.

Executive producer Kynan Griffin said the script was written before the real bin Laden was killed in May 2011, and called the timing too good to pass up. It premiered in May 2012, and The Daily Beast cast it as the anti Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's drama about the hunt for bin Laden. Reviewers noted that Lyde plays most of it with a straight face.

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Smothered (2016)

The men who played horror's biggest monsters play themselves. Kane Hodder was Jason in the Friday the 13th films, R.A. Mihailoff was Leatherface in Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, and Don Shanks was Michael Myers in Halloween 5. Bill Moseley and Malcolm Danare of Christine join them. Stuck at a poorly attended horror convention on Friday the 13th, the stars take cash to scare fans at a local RV park and discover they are the ones being hunted.

John Schneider, the actor best known from The Dukes of Hazzard, wrote and directed it, shooting mostly at his own studio in Louisiana in 2013. Dread Central called it the horror version of The Expendables. For once, the men usually hidden under the masks are the ones running.

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President Evil (2018)

Days before the November 2018 midterm elections, a killer in a Trump mask escapes a sanatorium and stalks three young women who are Muslim, Mexican and Haitian. If that sounds like Halloween, it is meant to. Richard Lowry, who directed and co-wrote it with Gregory P. Wolk, recreates the 1978 film's opening titles with a Trump mask in place of the pumpkin, and restages shots from John Carpenter's original at some of the same locations.

Critics split. Film Threat called it incredibly heavy-handed, while Starburst called it an affectionate and knowing homage to slasher tropes.

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Clickbait (2019)

Influencers on a fictional live-stream site compete on a popularity chart, and a stalker in a Trump mask goes after the top performer, Bailey. Each attack sends her numbers up. Surreal fake adverts break in, including one for a radioactive toaster pastry called Toot Strudels.

Sophia Cacciola and Michael J. Epstein, a married pair of musicians and filmmakers, made it. The Boston Globe reported that they drew on Halloween and the satire The Stuff, with a synth score in the style of John Carpenter. "We wanted to look at the impositions of fame culture on people, how it damages them," Epstein said. It premiered at the GenreBlast Film Festival in 2018 and reached video on demand in June 2019.

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The Last Serb in Croatia (2019)

A multinational company releases a virus to seize Croatia's water. The virus turns Croats into zombies, and Serbs, it turns out, are immune. Mićo, a hedonist who lives for massage parlours, restaurants and the cinema, sets out with one goal: survival. Film New Europe billed it as the first Croatian zombie comedy, a Croatian and Serbian co-production.

It is the first feature of Predrag Ličina, a Zagreb director of commercials, music videos and a TV comedy. He said he wanted to play with national stereotypes, which look and sound completely different in a horror setting, and that he swapped oil for water to show how small countries get exploited. He shot it in 28 days and called it a B film. It opened in Croatia on 28 February 2019, a day before its premiere at the Belgrade festival FEST, and Hristina Popović won Best Actress at the Pula Film Festival, Croatia's national film awards.

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Where to go next

• Before they were flesh-eaters, zombies were voodoo slaves
• Slasher movies: where the genre came from