Horror: don't bother if it's not meant to be fun?

No matter which way you go, you're still trying to eke out the two hardest reactions to truly inspire in a human being through a detached medium. When the humor is usually not personal, and the fear has distance due to it being on a static screen, you're still in kind of a harsh realm. I'd say they're equally difficult.

Certainly it's easier to make "unpleasant" horror. But true, relentless horror is also difficult - The Texas Chain Saw Massacre isn't revered for nothing.

But horror comedy is a little bit more easily attained, because the juxtaposition is kind of there already. Gallows humor works on the same principle.

I don't agree with this at all. I can count the movies I consider to be effective horror comedies on one hand. It's really hard to strike the right balance, as least as far as my tastes are concerned.

You can have straight horror with moments of humor, or black comedy, but successful horror comedy is a whole other thing.

I think horror is like metal; there are so many variants on a theme that to give definitive statement like that would be impossible. I think there are lot of films that don't achieve great horror status but that still work within the genre.

I am the same way. Although that's mostly with contemporary films. The gonzo flicks of the 80's and a lot of the Hammer films from before that certainly made it look easy. But the past fifteen years or so I usually run away from films labeled as horror-comedies. Which has been weird for me, because those used to be my favorite.

Let me backpedal: I think it's easier to get laughs in a horror movie. I think horror movies (effective ones, at any rate) put the audience in a place where they're primed for an emotional release. Some of the biggest laughs I've ever seen in theaters were at horror movies (though not necessarily horror comedies).

But "horror comedy" isn't the same as "horror movie with laughs", so I chose my wording poorly.

Laughs in horror movies:

Re-Animator
From Beyond
Friday the 13th Part 4, 5 and 6.
Dawn of the Dead (either)
The Exorcist

I don't remember many laughs in The Exorcist, but I think The Shining is kind of the king of what you're talking about.

"Uh-huuuuuuuh..."

Sidebar: Hey, this kind of works.

Point, you.

Well yeah, I agree with all of that. Didn't mean to pull semantics on you, I honestly thought you were talking about horror comedy as a sub-genre.

I rewatched RE-ANIMATOR the other night and I'm starting to feel like it's a straight-up horror comedy.

I agree with you; it's a really narrow genre. Too many of them try for horror comedy and trip over the line into horror parody. Not the same. But I honestly am not sure where some of them (Night of the Creeps, Monster Squad) fall.

It is an incredibly fuzzy boundary, no diggitty. One made fuzzier by awful films that I think people like us don't want to associate great films like NIGHT OF THE CREEPS or RE-ANIMATOR with. I would like to say that CREEPS wouldn't be in the same column as MATTHEW BLACKHEART: MONSTER SMASHER, but that's just wishful thinking. They have the same intentions.

I've seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre a good number of times, but never noticed how much of a black comedy it is until seeing the movie with an audience. I'm thinking that was very much in intention.

Let me just clarify, because this is not what I was trying to express in that thread. Let's say we're starting from the assumption that a film is bad, I'd rather watch it if it's fun and/or doesn't take itself seriously (or lend itself to being taken seriously, maybe?). That doesn't necessarily mean it's an outright comedy, in fact the kind of movie I had in mind when I said that was not horror comedy at all. But it's less an expression of what I think the filmmakers should try to do than what I find enjoyable. Also, it's not a black and white thing. There's a range.

The 'horror' films that work without comedy are the most relentless and often tragic. I often hesitate to categorize the films that terrify me as horror films. But come to think of it there are laughs in TCM, Alien, Cannibal Holocaust and Audition.

I guess I'm not really making any point here...nevermind.

There's really no one way for a movie to work. But, I certainly get the idea that if you can't pull off the true terror, then there better be something for the audience to enjoy. Not scary, not fun is a recipe for disaster.

That said, "fun" is an incredibly vague concept. Tremors isn't quite a comedy, but who's going to argue with it? I think Hammer was able to get away with a lot because there usually were other elements that the audience could enjoy, the cinematography, the acting, etc. How many cheap horror films have no redeeming factors other than whether they scare you or not? How much are you going to get out of Saw, The Blair Witch Project, or Paranormal Activity otherwise?

Maybe the idea isn't so much that a movie needs to be "fun", but that a horror movie that doesn't pull off the horror, better have some redeeming filmic value otherwise.

That definitely goes along with what I was trying to say. There are tons of movies that succeed on some level even if they're not at the high end of some evaluative spectrum - the best, the scariest, the most serious, the funniest, etc. And it's all subjective.

AKA "tits".

I've got pretty low standards for horror, in that I can find something to enjoy in most of the crap I watch. The worst? When utterly nothing works. Bad acting, bad direction, bad gore, no laughs OR scares... BIG waste of time. I try to avoid most of the amateurish home video filmed indie horror DTVs. But if there's a man-in-suit monster (regardless of execution), I'll torture myself with it.

I need to be engaged on some level, that's all. A horror film that isn't scary isn't like a comedy that isn't funny, because there are many things a horror film can do that can save it from its flaws, but a comedy that isn't funny is completely screwed.

By the by, I always found it weird that people consider An American Werewolf In London a horror comedy, even Landis has expressed confusion over this. It's often very funny, but when it comes to the werewolf stuff, Landis doesn't fuck around.

But I think that's what makes it a great horror comedy - the comedy is actually funny and the horror is actually scary. I don't think anyone would argue SHAUN OF THE DEAD being a horror comedy, but when it comes to the zombie stuff it gets pretty serious. To me there's just a range, i.e. AMERICAN WEREWOLF errs a little more on the side of horror and SHAUN more on the side of comedy. But if you're talking about a movie where even the horror elements are played for laughs I think you're talking about a pure comedy or straight up spoof.

You got it. Why I'm much pickier with comedy & drama than I am with other genres.

The movie doesn't always get to choose. After 40 years of cliched wolfman howls, when you hear that fucking thing shrieking on the moors for the first time, it's so goddamn scary that it's funny. Make any sense? You just need some kind of release at that point.

Especially when you consider how horrifying and graphic--mostly in terms of the sound design--the subsequent attack is. The release actually works to deepen the horror that follows.