Is It Scary Funny or Funny Scary?
Comedy-horror. Horror-comedy. Tricky to pull off, but well worth the effort!
In 2008 I pitched a series to Comedy Central called The Last Larry. The premise of the series was simple: take the cast of Seinfeld and put them in the world of Night Of The Living Dead (this was a year or two before The Walking Dead or I would have said that). Not the actual cast of Seinfeld, mind you, but a similar group of friends. You get it. Although trapped in a zombie holocaust, this group of friends never really talk about it. It was just this thing going on in the background. It was a conventional sit-com set inside a horror movie, but the sit-com wasn’t aware of the horror movie and the horror movie wasn’t aware of the sit-com.
The executives at Comedy Central (then) passed on the project because, in their words, “mixing comedy and horror doesn’t work.” Over the years, I’ve written a lot of pilots that didn’t get made. As I like to say, I’ve had my hand in more pilots than an Air Force proctologist. Of all of them, The Last Larry is the only one that I really see as a missed opportunity, because the executives were wrong. Mixing comedy and horror does work.
(Eventually, I would get a horror comedy made, the national treasure that is Stan Against Evil, which ran on IFC from 2016 - 2019)
Laughing and screaming are cousins. There are both involuntary reflexes that relieve tension. Look at the people on a roller coaster, or more appropriately, walking through a haunted house maze. Half of them are screaming and the other half are laughing. Horror movies and comedy movies are both structured around “gags.” That’s the language used on set. Getting a pie in the face? A knife in the head? They’re both gags.
Argh!
One of the reasons executives are afraid of horror comedy (or comedy horror) is because there are only three or four ways to do it right and about a million and six ways to do it wrong. The Last Larry was one way to do it right. The comedy and the horror exist totally independently of each other. A great example of this? Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein.
As a kid, I loved Abbot & Costello Meet Frankenstein. To my great surprise, it’s one of the few black and white movies I could get my own kids to watch. The film stars Bud Abbott & Lou Costello battling Frankenstein, Dracula and The Wolf Man. Bud Abbot and Lou Costello behave the way you would expect Bud Abbott and Lou Costello to behave. More importantly, Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolf Man behave the way you’d expect them to behave. This is important. They stay true to their characters. They never do anything goofy or wacky. The Wolf Man never raises his leg to go to the bathroom, Frankenstein never sticks his finger in a light socket to recharge, etc. Everybody stays in their lane and the film works great. As opposed to…
The Munsters. There was a story recently that this October, for the first time since the mid 60’s, The Munsters would be going up against The Addams Family on TV. This time around it’s Rob Zombie’s The Munsters going up against Tim Burton’s Wednesday (as in Addams). I’m sure that, like the original Munsters and the original Addams Family, they will be entertaining, well made and fun to watch. I also assume that, like the originals, they won’t be funny. I know that I am in the minority here, but neither one of those shows has ever made me laugh. Not the originals, not the remakes, and I assume not the new remakes.
Don't get me wrong. I love both shows. I love Rob Zombie, I love Tim Burton. I love the look, I love the feel, I LOVE the music. I love the fonts! I love the costumes. I love the way Herman looks in his leather outfit in Hot Rod Herman. I love little baby ducks, old pick up trucks, slow movin' trains and rain. But in the case of The Munsters and the Addams Family, they do not make me laugh.
Monsters actin’ wacky does not do it for me. The jokes are there, they just don’t land. It would be as if I cracked an egg into a bowl of flour and called it a cake. No, these are the ingredients you need for a cake, but they have yet to be made into a cake. And I’m sorry, The Munsters ain't cake.
But there ARE brilliant horror comedies, like Young Frankenstein, Shaun Of The Dead, Beetlejuice, The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, and all time breath-taking classic comedic horror films, like Evil Dead 2, An American Werewolf In London, and Re-Animator.
We'll discuss.