Horror comedy

Horror comedy, also known as comedy horror, is a literary and film genre, combining elements of comedy and horror fiction. The horror comedy genre almost always inevitably crosses over with the black comedy genre; and in some respects could be considered a subset of it.

The short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is cited as "the first great comedy-horror story". The story made readers "laugh one moment and scream the next", and its premise was based on mischief typically found during the holiday Halloween.^[1]

Horror comedy films

In horror comedy films, gallows humor is a common element. While horror comedy films provide scares for audiences, they also provide something that dramatic horror films do not: "the permission to laugh at your fears, to whistle past the cinematic graveyard and feel secure in the knowledge that the monsters can't get you".^[1]

In the era of silent film, the source material for early horror comedy films came from stage performances instead of literature. One example, The Ghost Breaker (1914), was based on a 1909 play, though the film's horror elements were more interesting to the audience than the comedy elements. In the United States following the trauma of World War I, film audiences sought to see horror on screen but tempered with humor. The "pioneering" horror comedy film was One Exciting Night (1922), written, directed, and produced by D. W. Griffith, who noticed the stage success of the genre and foresaw a cinematic translation. While the film included blackface performances, Griffith also included footage of a hurricane for a climactic storm. As an early experiment, the various genres were not well-balanced with comedy and horror, and later films improved the balance and took more sophisticated approaches.^[2]

See also

• List of horror comedy films
• List of genres
• Zombie comedy, a sub-genre involving zombies
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} Hallenbeck 2009, p. 3
2. ^ Hallenbeck 2009, p. 5–7

References

• Hallenbeck, Bruce G. (2009). Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914-2008. McFarland. ISBN 0786433329. 

Further reading

• Carroll, Noël (2001). "Horror and Humor". Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press. pp. 235–253.