10 great comedy horror films

In Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974), Victor Frankenstein’s American grandson (played co-writer Gene Wilder) travels to Transylvania to claim his inheritance. Released in cinemas 50 years ago, it pays homage to the legacy of James Whale’s classic 1931 Universal horror film Frankenstein by retaining such 1930s stylisations as black-and-white cinematography, wipes, iris shots and a melodramatic orchestral score (by John Morris). It even uses laboratory props from the original. 

Yet Brooks’ film, following in the arguably camp footsteps of Whale’s own sequel Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and then going much further, is more parody than revisiting. It outrageously lampoons Whale’s by then outmoded conventions (remember that Brooks’ film came out in the same year as Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and milks them for all their comedic worth.

Young Frankenstein, which is being rereleased in October for its 50th anniversary, represents one end of the ‘comedy horror’ spectrum, with no real horror but rather just the recognition of horror’s hoary old routines and forms for relentless spoofing. Horror is, after all, a genre ripe for ridicule, given its often inherently absurd premises and machinery, and its love of ossified clichés. 

Yet humour can also merge transgressively with horror to complement and enhance its unsettling effects, with the viewer’s nervous tittering only adding to the general unease – while, conversely, elements of the horrific can make a comic routine seem more misplaced and wrong, and therefore all the funnier. 

In other words, comedy’s laughter and horror’s fear can be like Jekyll and Hyde, offering two aspects of the same uncomfortable, uncontrollable impulses in the audience.   

Here are 10 key comedy horror titles.

Director: James Whale

On a dark and stormy night, two separate parties seek shelter at an old mansion where they are offered questionable hospitality by a clan who are like precursors of the Addams family – right down to Boris Karloff’s Lurch-like butler Morgan. James Whale’s film seems almost a parody of the gothic inflections it has inherited from its source (specifically, J.B. Priestley’s 1927 novel Benighted).

This is in part owing to a certain shrill campness on display, brought about by sly plays on sex and sexuality: the house’s family name Femm, the attempts of dour Horace (Ernest Thesiger) to get one male guest (Raymond Massey) into his bedroom, Morgan’s obvious love for Horace’s brother Saul (Brember Wills), and even the casting of actress Elspeth Dudgeon as the centenarian patriarch Sir Roderick. Here a family’s madness comes queered, while much comic business is made of the way Horace discards flowers and serves potatoes.

Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

In the late 1940s and 50s, comedy horror was dominated by a series of films bringing Universal’s top-billing comedians Bud Abbott and Lou Costello into corny collision with various old-school Universal monsters. The post-Psycho landscape of the 1960s, though, brought change.

As both the first splatter film, and one concerned with culinary cannibalism, Herschell Gordon Lewis’s feature certainly lives up to its title, but the patent ludicrousness of its plotting, the hamminess of the performances, and a pair of deadpanning cops, tilt all the bared flesh and gratuitous gore into a decidedly comic register. Like the characters who turn to Egyptian cultist Fuad Ramses (Mal Arnold) for a more exotic kind of banquet, Lewis welcomes viewers looking for something beyond their usual cinematic experience, and serves up a menu of deliriously bad taste. The climactic scene at a literal junkyard marks a gleeful pride in its status as crazy trash.

Director: Jack Hill

The opening credits sequence combines a goofy children’s cartoon and a jaunty theme song howled by The Wolf Man himself Lon Chaney Jr, who also appears as old retainer to a younger, more debased generation in their spooky rural mansion. The narrative proper is introduced, in retrospective storybook style, by its protagonist/survivor Peter Howe (Quinn Redeker) with an impish nod and a wink. The degenerative disease that Peter describes as dying out along with this incestuous clan’s last members gets its jocular-sounding name Merrye from the family. And even the corpse of one of the family’s victims still has a visible smile on his face.

All of which is to say that Jack Hill’s schlockfest (including a lawyer actually named Schlocker) finds the funny side of madness, perversion and psychosis, even as Chaney’s presence, and much discussion of classic monsters, look back to the moribund modes of Universal horror.

Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi

Worried about losing the youth audience to television, Toho Studios turned to up-and-coming commercials director Nobuhiko Obayashi to bring them a hit expressly in the mold of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws (1975). What Obayashi delivered instead was this hilariously unhinged haunted house movie – although, in keeping with his original remit, he does include a sequence where a naked woman thrashes about up to her neck in bloody water, even if the scene takes place in a mansion’s flooded interiors rather than in the ocean.

Here, seven heroines, each named for their defining attribute (Gorgeous, Prof, Mac, Sweet, Melody, Fantasy, Kung Fu!), must endure attacks from aggressive futons, hungry pianos, bleeding clocks, disembodied heads, possessed lighting fixtures and singing-and dancing cats, while one hapless man is transformed into a bunch of bananas – all to the accompaniment of Godiego’s upbeat pop score and a destabilising barrage of in-camera trickery and editing effects.

Director: John Landis

Jewish American tourist David (David Naughton) may play out his sense of otherness in England via a series of terrifying nightmares, and eventually by his transformation into a man-eating lycanthrope, but writer-director John Landis also finds considerable comedy in his protagonist’s alienation.

Before David and fellow American Jack (Griffin Dunne) take their fateful walk from The Slaughtered Lamb on to the Yorkshire moors where a werewolf attacks, they first engage in several funny cultural misunderstandings with the locals. Later, as David is confronted with the grisly ghosts of werewolf victims in a Piccadilly Circus fleapit, the porn film See You Next Wednesday, glimpsed in snatches on screen, shows a surreal series of scenes involving mistaken identities and wrong numbers. All these jokes of incongruity, incomprehension and disorientation amplify David’s outsider status, and his sense of being uncomfortable in his own skin. Yet for all the incidental comedy, this ends in tragedy.

Director: Sam Raimi

“Who’s laughing now?” asks Ash (Bruce Campbell), some way into Sam Raimi’s sequel to his cabin-in-the-woods shocker. The fact that Ash is addressing these words to his own possessed and animated hand which, after it tried several times to kill him with a range of kitchen objects, he has just stabbed and bloodily chainsawed from his own arm, means that the answer to his question is: the audience.

Putting the yuck in hyuck, Raimi delivers a perfect blend of splattery pandemonium and Three Stooges-style slapstick, helped immensely by Campbell’s physical performance (where he is somehow both clown and his own straight man), and finds that sweet spot between horror and comedy where you are left entirely unsure whether to laugh or recoil. The overtness of the comedy here also sends the viewer back to the 1981 original, whose notoriety for ‘nasty’ excess upon release made its own considerable humour go unnoticed.

Director: Peter Jackson

In 1950s New Zealand, adult mama’s boy Lionel (Timothy Balme) is stuck between the new love of his life Paquita (Diana Peñalver) and his manipulative, mendacious mother Vera (Elizabeth Moody) – and when the latter is bitten by a Sumatran Rat Monkey, Lionel must face down a horde of the infected to get what he really wants and be reborn untethered from his mother’s monstrous influence.

Made in the same ‘splatstick’ spirit as Peter Jackson’s earlier Bad Taste (1987), but on a much larger budget, this is often regarded as the goriest film ever made, but less often recognised as the first ‘rom zom com’, 12 years before Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead (2004) would popularise the term. Jackson mixes up elements of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) with Dan O’Bannon’s The Return of the Living Dead (1985), throwing in Kiwi cultural cringe and a kung fu priest. It is disgustingly droll.

Director: Takashi Miike

“What I’m about to tell you is all a joke, so please don’t take it seriously”, says yakuza Ozaki (Sho Aikawa) in his opening line at the beginning of Takashi Miike’s feature (subtitled Yakuza Horror Theatre), just before he kills a white chihuahua that he claims is an assassin. Ozaki has clearly gone mad, and his underling Minami (Hideki Sone) is assigned to kill him in Nagoya – but Ozaki dies en route before Minami can reluctantly execute the order, and his body disappears. Now on a surreal underworld odyssey in search of a corpse, Minami must face not just the Minotaur-like ‘gozu’ of the title but another gender hybrid that tests his own homoerotic feelings towards his boss.

Just how these feelings are resolved you will have to see – if not quite believe – for yourself, but Ozaki’s opening words prove programmatic for a film that is having fun with its own abject perversion.

 Director: Eli Craig

Horror has always harboured a prejudice against the redneck and the rube, making them the masked, muttering mutilators of urban co-eds. The comic beauty of Eli Craig’s film is that it inverts this relationship. Here tool-toting good ole boys Tucker (Alan Tudyk) and Dale (Tyler Labine) are genuine nice guys who only get mistaken by college interlopers for cold-hearted, rape-happy killers – an impression not helped by the fact that the city slickers keep getting massacred in freak accidents that are all too easily ascribed to the confused pair’s doing.

This comedy of errors savvily eviscerates the norms of the woodland slasher, and reveals how readily good men can be misjudged as bad. The real evil here is prejudice, embodied by privileged, preppy alpha Chad (Jesse Moss), whose misbeliefs make him more unhinged and dangerous as the film progresses. Fortunately, big-bellied, bearded Dale is on hand to serve as ‘final girl’.  

Director: Josh Ruben

As the title implies, Josh Ruben’s film is a monster movie. Yet it is also a chaotic murder mystery, as kind-natured new forest ranger Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) arrives at the small, snowbound community of Beaverton on the same night that someone – or something – starts taking out the residents one by one. Yet, as if whatever is circling in for the kill were not dangerous enough, all these affectionately drawn, well-armed neighbours are already their own and everyone else’s worst enemies, at loggerheads over their small town’s future as a potential location for oil exploitation.

Beaverton and its angrily polarised residents are clearly a microcosm for America and the ecological concerns that divide it – yet Ruben finds hilarity amid all this strife, whether in the crossed purposes, conflicting aspirations and escalating micro-aggressions that push everyone apart, or in the witty dialogue and small-town eccentricity that bind them together.