For those too scared to fully commit to horror, here are some horror comedies that bring a good laugh to the horror concept

Words Andrea Brigino
Photos courtesy of Netflix
July 2, 2024

As someone who can’t watch anything in the Conjuring universe or go to haunted houses alone with their eyes open the whole time, I’ve missed out on a lot of popular classic horror movies, horror games, and fun in pressure-induced breakout rooms with clowns in them. It can be very hard to get into horror when you’re easily jumpy, have a hard time sleeping afterward, or are prone to getting nightmares. This especially sucks when you’re missing a lot of good storytelling and concepts because of the eerie horror element.

Well, along with the horror genre comes the equally popular horror comedy or horror parody genre, which creates a satire out of the usually ridiculous supernatural events that come with classic horror or places a lot of comedic figures into a scary situation to make the horror concept more lighthearted and funny. If you’re a jumpy or easily scared moviegoer wanting to get their start in horror, here are some horror comedy classics to ease your landing into spooky grounds.

Happy Death Day

This horror comedy staple takes the original Groundhog Day concept and adds a dark slasher twist. It follows a stuck-up college student waking up on her birthday, experiencing déjà vu from the minor social interactions she faces until she is drastically killed by a baby-masked killer and wakes up to her birthday again.

The strange, existential horrors of the movie lighten up as the protagonist becomes increasingly fed up and quippy about her time loop situation, either by acting out to the extreme or retorting with funny quips at other people, knowing they won’t remember it the next day. It’s a nightmare situation from the point of view of a snarky, relatable protagonist.

Zombieland

If you get too spooked by the zombies speeding about in The Walking Dead or Train to Busan, the Zombieland franchise takes a comedic spin on the trend of fast zombies. Set in an apocalyptic timeline, a group of distrusting lone survivors band together to find a safe haven away from the destroyed states of their hometowns.

The whole movie is filled with meticulously laid-out rules on how to survive the zombie apocalypse, along with visual presentations of where to shoot zombies, running zombies over with cars, and montages of raiding abandoned stores. There are more lighthearted family elements, the importance of not being alone in these situations, and, of course, an iconic Bill Murray cameo sequence mid-movie you can’t miss.

Freaky

The idea of switching bodies with someone else was introduced as a life lesson and an eye-opening experience in the classic Freaky Friday, but this horror comedy shows the worst-case scenario of someone else being in possession of your body. After teenage girl Millie gets stabbed by town serial killer the Butcher, she wakes up in the body of said serial killer and realizes that in turn, the Butcher has taken possession of her body.

There’s an entire montage of the Butcher giving Millie an entirely new makeover, intending to cause a ruckus in high school, while Millie, as a middle-aged man, has to convince her friends that the serial killer is in her body and stop him before she can never get control of her body back. It combines the typical slasher horror with the comedic antics of body switching.

What We Do in the Shadows

This classic horror comedy takes the trope of immortal vampires walking around modern-day Earth in a more comedic, less composed (and honestly, a lot more realistic if you really think about it) way. It follows a group of vampires who are a hundred years old trying to navigate the small horrors of real life: being tax-paying adults.

In worlds where vampires are rich without much explanation, always decked out in the best human disguises, these vampires instead follow the old soul trope of not being able to follow modern fashion trends or modern technology, deep confusion about how to pay rent, and several disputes regarding distribution of chores and conflicts as flatmates.

Ready or Not

A tasteful horror that combines satanic rituals, classic board games, and generational wealth at the center of it all, the Le Domas family accumulated their riches from creating board games. Every time a new member of the family is welcomed, they have a tradition of picking from a set of random childhood games to play for that night. Grace, who had just married Alex Le Domas, picks hide and seek from the random selection of games and needs to hide from the rest of the family until sunrise.

Little does she know, the matter of being caught by the rest of the family is life or death, and she finds out the sinister and twisted nature of the Le Domas family as she tries to survive the night. The movie brings a comedic twist to each kill, with the gory scenes being caused by comedic timing or characters making stupid decisions.