Sliding Scale of Comedy and Horror

""I'm a student of both horror and comedy because they're different sides of the same coin: Both are about using emotion to provoke an instinctual, physical response, and if you're lucky, spontaneous evacuation of bodily waste products.""

- Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, Extra Punctuation

When people think of Comedy, they rarely associate it with Horror and vice versa. However, both make great partners in crime together. If they aren't Crossing The Line Twice, they're bringing about a Sugar Apocalypse and escaping to Auda City. The reason they work so well together is that viewers need "breathers" between nonstop screaming or nonstop laughing, and one can easily segue into the other.

For purposes of this trope, we'll divide Horror and Comedy hybrids into three categories, Horror dominant, Comedy dominant, and balanced.

Horror dominant works will use comedy as a mood lightener or "breather" from the tension or gore. Characters will crack wise while they're in a safe spot, and have the monster use a Barrier-Busting Blow just as they relax. The benefit of this is that just as viewers relax along with the characters, tension is restored along with the scare. Other ways to use comedy in a horror movie is to treat viewers to some funny situational irony the characters can appreciate on an intellectual level while cursing on an "I'm gonna die now" level. The benefit here is that momentum is maintained throughout the scene.

Comedy dominant works have more leeway here. They may be a straight up comedy set in a typical horror setting or premise, or use Black Comedy and Dead Baby Comedy along with splatter horror to maximum effect. Comedy dominant works often deconstruct horror tropes for laughs, other times playing them hilariously straight as an Affectionate Parody (with perhaps a Lampshade Hanging).

A balanced work is perhaps the most subjective to qualify, because while it has equal amounts of horror and comedy, the viewer may be so sensitive to horror it seems scarier, or so desensitized to horror it seems funnier.

Of course, these works have one big problem they have to fight: avoiding jumping the shark due to Mood Whiplash. Avoiding this requires that the comedy or horror not break the feel of the established setting. Slapstick in the middle of suspenseful horror, or remorselessly and humorlessly killing a character in a comedy would do this. However, deadpan snarking and Rasputinian Death respectively would not.

See also Narm, where something that's supposed to be horrible turns out to be funny, and Nightmare Fuel, where something that might have been intended to be funny is instead unsettling. Both of them are results of something landing on the wrong side of the scale.


 * American Psycho
 * An American Werewolf in London
 * Angel
 * Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
 * Bad Taste
 * Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
 * Big Tits Zombie, a J-horror flick that slides much more towards the Sex Comedy genre.
 * Bio Zombie
 * Black Sheep
 * Boy Eats Girl
 * Braindead, also known as Dead Alive
 * Bubba Ho-Tep
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer
 * Any commercial featuring The Burger King
 * The Cabin in the Woods
 * Child's Play
 * Club Dread
 * Dance Of The Dead
 * Dead And Deader
 * Dead Next Door
 * Dead Set
 * Dead Snow
 * Some Discworld, notably The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and Hogfather
 * Doctor Who in spades.
 * Dororon Enma-kun
 * The Dresden Files
 * Dr. Giggles
 * Eight Legged Freaks
 * Evil Dead, particularly Evil Dead 2 and Army of Darkness
 * The Fearless Vampire Killers
 * Fido
 * Frankie and Stein
 * From Dusk till Dawn
 * Ghostbusters
 * The 2016 remake pushed the mix a bit more to the horror side than the original did, but still maintained the comedy.
 * Gremlins
 * Grindhouse
 * Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name
 * Hatchet
 * Higurashi no Naku Koro ni starts off each chapter as a lighthearted Slice of Life comedy, until someone dies mysteriously. From there, things quickly spiral out of control, usually culminating in the gruesome murder of several major characters.
 * Homestuck, comedy dominant.
 * Horndog
 * Hot Fuzz. It's a comedy, but most of the film is an homage to slasher flicks and there are some bona fide gory bits in there. It's something of a three-way hybrid, among a Badass Cop movie, Comedy and Slasher. The slasher elements also segue into Town with a Dark Secret.
 * IT. Heavily horror based, but still has some comedic elements thanks to Pennywise.
 * Jam
 * Jennifer's Body
 * John Dies at the End is pretty balanced, and it's not unusual to find comedy and horror on the same page. This is partly because the protagonists seem to use humor as a coping mechanism, and partly due to the sheer ridiculousness of the things they encounter, like the wigmonsters, or the ghost that possesses an entire fridge full of meat to give itself a corporeal body.
 * Kore wa Zombie Desu ka?? (heavily on the comedy side)
 * The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
 * The Last Circus
 * The League of Gentlemen
 * Level E
 * The Lieutenant of Inishmore
 * The Little Shop of Horrors, as well as the musical of the same name, and its 1986 movie version. The upcoming remake is said to be Darker and Edgier, however (if it isn't left in Development Hell).
 * Maniac Mansion
 * Monster Man
 * My Name Is Bruce
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion is of the Horror Dominant type. Some lighthearted moments can be found between the Mind Rape, Eldritch Abominations, Cruel and Unusual Death(s) and The End of the World as We Know It.
 * Night Of The Living Bread
 * A Nightmare on Elm Street, mainly as the series went on.
 * Now Eat
 * Paranoia Agent combines both elements of Surreal Horror with elements of Black Comedy.
 * Planet Terror
 * Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead
 * Puella Magi Madoka Magica: In the same vein as Neon Genesis Evangelion except it has Break the Cutie instead of Mind Rape
 * Psychoville
 * Rare Exports
 * Ravenous
 * RedLetterMedia. Yes, the Star Wars reviews.
 * Return of the Living Dead
 * Scary Movie
 * Scream
 * This is practically the Trope Codifier
 * Severance
 * Shaun of the Dead
 * The Signal is composed of three vignettes. The middle one is mostly a black comedy (mostly) while also showing us the first signs that things are even weirder than they seem.
 * SLA Industries
 * Slither
 * Sluggy Freelance
 * Shadow Hearts
 * Soul Eater: It starts out fairly light and Fanservice filled, but gets darker and darker as the story goes on.
 * Supernatural
 * Tales from the Crypt: Mostly the TV series and it's two theatrical movies, but the stories from EC Comics upon which they are based counts too.
 * Tasogare Otome x Amnesia: bounces back in forth
 * Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
 * Teeth
 * The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
 * Theatre of Blood
 * The Toxic Avenger
 * Transylmania
 * Tremors
 * Undead
 * Wasting Away, a zombie film from the zombies' point of view.
 * Yondemasu Yo Azazel-san
 * Zombieland
 * Most works by Garth Ennis
 * Most works by Neil Gaiman too.