The Comedy Horror Movie: The KEYS to Both Laughs and Scares

Washington Irving’s short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has been cited as “the first great comedy horror story”, as readers were made to “laugh one moment and scream the next”. This is, in essence, what comedy horror movies are all about.

We’ve all been in that situation where our friend is describing something awful…and yet our first instinct is to laugh. Is that because we’re horrible people? No! We tried not to laugh, after all. So why do we? Laughing in the face of sobriety has been described by psychologists as a defence mechanism that guards us against overwhelming anxiety. Furthermore, laughter relieves our stress and lightens the mood.

To get to the bottom of the weird and wonderful phenomenon of the good comedy horror movie, we first need to do a bit of digging. We’ll study the comedy and horror genres alone and then start seeing what happens when they overlap.

Are you sitting comfortably?

1. Comedy

What Makes a Comedy a Comedy?

Comedy films are obviously, most of all, designed to elicit laughter from the audience.

Comedy writers humorously exaggerate the situation, language, action but most importantly, characters in their films. By observing the deficiencies, foibles and frustrations of life the comic can then parody them.

• Comedy makes us laugh because of the contrast between a character’s blind egotism, along with the delusion of their existence or goal, and our capacity to watch from afar, to see what the character cannot perceive about themselves.

But comic characters must be woven into a comic story in order to get a real, full-blown comedy. Lots of scripts have funny moments but what is it that makes the plot a comedy? What is the shape of comedy? Let’s take a look at the key points.