Years ago, my coworker and I were in her car and we were talking about apocalypse scenarios. It was an entirely unserious discussion, and plagued with the dark humor of our jobs. At the time, she wanted a quick death and told me she was probably going to end it fast; I asked if I could have all her stuff, because I was planning on surviving it.

Then she asked me: “Have you ever seen Zombeavers? I feel like you would love that movie.”

As a lover of horror B-movies, I was keen to give it a look. Later that night, I read the synopsis and discovered that it was a horror-comedy, something that I’ve historically had beef with.

Sorry, Amy, I didn’t end up watching Zombeavers. Mea culpa, girly-pop…

Why Beef With Horror-Comedy?

I can admit that saying I don’t like horror-comedies is like the king saying he doesn’t like his jester. Horror-comedies do me no real harm in the long-run. But believe me when I say I have a point with this. To get to that point, I need to build the house of cards before I can knock it over. I need to explain my understanding of why this genre even exists.

On paper, I can understand why horror and comedy make such good bedfellows. They are considered “low arts,” but have their moments in the limelight when they pull off their respective crafts well. They are highly subjective, age quickly, act as time capsules for their cultural ages, and tend to play off emotions.

Horror activates our anxieties in some way and then pays it off by culminating the scene and resolving the tension. To use an example in Silence of the Lambs, the scene where we get our first look at Catherine Martin’s life in Bill’s prison pit. Catherine is crying and begging to leave, Bill is acting erratically, everything in the scene is deliberate and slow. Anything could happen at any moment. Tension builds and builds, until we see the money-shot of the scene; the fingernail embedded in the wall. Catherine suddenly understands where she is, that there were others before her, and that she’s likely to die there. We, the viewer, get a bonus because the fingernail is painted in glitter polish, something that Clarice noted in an earlier autopsy; we now can confirm that this is Buffalo Bill and Catherine is absolutely snared. Situation established, tension built, pay-off struck.

Comedy works in a similar way, using a similar mechanism of tension-relief cycles, but playing on different feelings. In any given joke, even just the verbal ones, you have the question that gets set up. The man walks into the bar and pulls a small man who plays piano out of his coat. Frasier Crane mentions that he should, under no circumstances, be woken up. We set the set-up aside for a while which builds a tension of curiosity. The man tells his story of the genie and the wish he was granted. Frasier’s brother comes over, talking about a confrontation he plans to have with his wife’s lover. Then the release of that tension: “Do you really think I wished for a ten-inch pianist?” as a punchline; Niles fires a starting pistol and Frasier staggers out of his bedroom in a rage. Situation established, tension built, pay-off granted.

The two types of scenes act as two sides of the same coin. Both types of scenes create tension for the viewer and the pay-off is based in emotional experience.

Horror and Intent

Here’s where it goes downhill.

Imagine the Silence of the Lambs scene again. We’re in the creepy basement pit. Catherine Martin has put the lotion in the basket. The basket ascends… But then we see a cheery note to the effect of “Keep Your Chin Up!” and Catherine stares the encouragement in her dank pit with shock. The tension is still broken, sure, but we’re not scared anymore. We’re bewildered. The subversion of expectations might provoke a chuckle.

Creating anything for an audience requires an intended experience for that audience. There has to be a tone that someone is working towards. Again, there is a lot of room for subjectivity here. Some people found Breaking Bad to be a tense, dramatic experience; I found it to be several rounds of “Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.” But especially in genre works, there is an intended experience. If I came away from a comedy and it didn’t make me laugh, the comedy failed with me. Same with if a horror piece doesn’t provoke some kind of anxiety.

I fear that we may be entering a cultural zeitgeist where we don’t want to provoke anxiety of any kind.

Now, I can understand if we don’t want to live in an anxious state all the time. I don’t expect every book, movie, show, or game to give me an anxiety-provoking experience and I think the consequences of living in that kind of world would suck. However, in some works, I do think provoking anxiety is necessary and horror is one of those types of works.

If horror creates anxiety and we want to make anxiety as short-lived as possible, we need a fast way to disperse anxiety and pull it back around to a constantly positive experience. We need to resolve all tension with a laugh instead of a scare. We need to make every uncomfortable thing in our property into a joke.

We need to make a horrific thing into something comedic.

Get Your Peanut Butter Out of My Chocolate

I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I like my horror to be horrific. I like to be disturbed by a movie. When I think about my favorite scenes in any given horror property, they’re usually the extreme ones. The Firefly family forces a woman to wear her lover’s face and hang on a coat-hook for about 12 hours before scaring the shit out of a housekeeper and getting hit by a truck. Yakuza Kakihara pours boiling oil over a man’s back while he’s suspended by his back on meat-hooks as a form of torture for information. These aren’t things that I would want to participate in on any level, and they aren’t things that I would condone in reality. But the ways these scenes are portrayed are compelling, thought-provoking, and I like to be confronted with something gross and terrible and have to try to work through it.

Not everyone is going to share that viewpoint, but I know I’m not alone with the sentiment. The problem comes when I get promised a particular experience, and it gets changed out for another.

I used to get so irritated with Netflix because of how they marketed horror movies. Every single synopsis, bar none, needed to be turned into some kind of pun. As if they didn’t trust their viewers to even read about the idea of something disturbing. To me, it felt condescending. “We know you don’t actually want to watch something scary, so we’ll just make it funny instead.”

I do, Netflix. I want something scary. I want to wake up in the dark scared to death because I watched The Babadook again and I’m afraid that fucker is in here. I want my horror spooky and creepy, like the creators intended, and I don’t need your D-grade puns to sell what could be a perfectly serviceable movie.

“But I Like Horror-Comedies…”

That’s fine. Me too, sometimes. I’m not a complete hard-ass about this. I was a teenager when the Scary Movie franchise was around and I had a ball with that. But I didn’t think of it as a horror-comedy. I didn’t go into those movies expecting a scare and finding all these sillies around. I went in expecting a comedy; it just happened to be that I was also expecting references to horror movies within those jokes.

What I don’t appreciate are the bait-and-switches: the movies that bill themselves as scary shock-fests and end up being a stand-up show in an abattoir.

Imagine if a comedy movie did the same thing. Imagine if you were expecting The Emoji Movie and, partway through, it turned into Hostel. People would be (rightfully) pissed because that is not the experience that was promised.

But when it happens to horror, it’s fine.

I have to assume this is a coping skill turned cultural. Humor is considered to be a mature defense mechanism. When we can find something humorous about an uncomfortable situation, we’re able to process it. This is why people use dark humor when they talk about heavy topics. This is why coping through humor is a concept.

But what if I’m not coping with anything? What if I’m just taking it in, absorbing it, and experiencing it? Why is that harder to find, when it used to be the expectation?

I’m planning to see Return To Silent Hill a few times when it comes out in theaters, because I’m a masochist who loves seeing my favorite toys torn to shreds in front of me apparently. My expectations are low-to-average, because Christoph Gans is responsible for both the best and worst Silent Hill movies. But if he managed to take an (admittedly frustrating) story of anxiety regarding death, culpability, and love and turned it into a horror-comedy, I will walk into the ocean backwards.