For a long time, I wouldn’t have identified as a horror fan. It’s not that I’m afraid of blood, guts, or a suspenseful moment — rather, the inescapable darkness of the genre sometimes proves too much for me. I don’t always want to see the dark underbelly of humanity exposed. So it came as something of a surprise that over the last few years when, as I returned to the comfort shows and movies of my teenage years in the midst of the pandemic, I realised I’ve actually loved horror, or at least a certain subgenre of it, for a long time.
In the midst of the pervasive anxiety of the pandemic days, I, strangely enough, turned towards media that was ostensibly not comforting in the slightest — horror. I found myself devouring everything from family classics like Hocus Pocus and Beetlejuice to cult TV shows like Supernatural and Teen Wolf. There was something about these stories that made them easy to slip into and get far away from the uncertainty of the present moment. In some ways, all my favorite horror media was a little bit comedic, in some cases even campy, and that’s what I loved about it, both as a teen and a young adult trying to navigate a rapidly changing world.
Whether intentional or unintentional, comedic horror is as funny as it is terrifying. It’s schlocky, the effects aren’t great, the blood spray is exaggerated and we can tell the monster is just some guy in a rubber mask. We laugh even as our heart seizes. These are the movies we watch with our friends when we want something we don’t have to take seriously.
It is well-documented that horror is often an expression of the anxieties and cultural fears of a particular moment. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was a representation of Victorian fears about invading foreigners and uncontrolled female sexuality. Even before that, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein dealt with the age-old question of what it means to be a monster. In the long history of zombie films, the walking dead have been used to represent everything from class warfare to epidemics. You need only look at the popularity of recent zombie stories like Train to Busan and The Last of Us to see our pandemic fears taken to their most extreme ends. Horror has been reflecting, and capitalising on, our cultural fears for a long time. Part of why these stories exist is so that we can experience the things we fear in a controlled environment — and maybe come away from it with a better understanding of that fear and ways to push back against it.
What does laughter have to do with that, though? Why do some directors lean into the absurd and treat their subject matter irreverently? As much as we might make fun of comedic horror — that is, after all, half the joy of watching — there’s something that I love about it. There’s a reason we turn to it when things get hard. The real world can be scary enough on its own. Between large-scale political upheaval and the everyday embarrassments we suffer as we navigate human relationships, fear is a constant. Sometimes, it’s easier to face when we make it completely ridiculous. And so, just as we do with political satire, parody, and the meme-ification of current affairs, comedic horror allows us to extrapolate, exaggerate, and make the things we fear so cartoonish that they’re no longer scary at all. When we’re pretty much at capacity for stress, we want our fears to just not be so terrifying anymore. What better way to do that than to laugh at how silly they really are?
Being funny wasn’t the only thing that drew me into this genre. The familiarity of these movies and TV shows proved to be a balm in uncertain times. It may have been years since I first watched them, but the moment I hit play, I traveled not just to a different place, but a different time. Nostalgia settled me into a younger version of myself who didn’t have as many worries and wasn’t currently living under lockdown orders. Even as I relived the simpler days of high school, I came to these stories with new perspectives and a greater understanding of the world and found them increasingly relevant to some of my current struggles.
One of my pandemic favorites was the CW’s Supernatural. I was slightly obsessed with it as a teen, so it was all too easy to slip back into it. The show plays with anxieties in many ways, but especially with the most personal of our fears and doubts. No one does family drama quite like Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), and as I was confined to my childhood home for months on end with my own family, these foundational relationships were on my mind a lot.
The brothers’ relationship with their father and their strict, militaristic, and often downright neglectful and abusive childhood peppers much of the series, tapping into many viewer’s most private hurts and fears. Although my family is nothing like the Winchesters, watching them navigate the complexities of this relationship and its effect on them as adults gave me some hope for my own future. The instance that sticks out to me, particularly for the odd humour with which it’s handled, is the season seven episode “Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie.”
A spate of incredibly bizarre deaths leads the brothers to the titular arcade/pizza parlor, the Supernatural universe’s answer to Chuck E. Cheese. While they attempt to find the culprit that is setting murderous unicorns and giant vampire octopi on people, the false wonderland of Plucky Pennywhistle’s brings up their own memories associated with the arcade. Much like the children they interact with throughout the episode, Plucky’s was a place where they felt abandoned by their parents who had “better” things to do or was a convenient place to leave a child while they worked.
The episode tackles difficult themes, and our ultimate fear of abandonment, but the downright silliness of it all serves as a powerful chaser. The painful realisations Sam and Dean come to are difficult and integral to their character development. But they’re much easier to process when you get to watch Sam Winchester, the man who faced down the devil and won, running in abject terror from murder clowns.
My trip down memory lane led me next to MTV’s Teen Wolf. Part high school drama, part supernatural thriller, Scott McCall’s (Tyler Posey) adventures as a teenage werewolf were a much-needed escape from my own high school drama. Naturally, I thought the show would be the perfect distraction during the pandemic as well.
Within the first few minutes of the pilot episode, I was hooked again. Even though now I found it corny and eye-roll worthy, there were moments that I couldn’t help relating to my current worries. The show thrives on pairing everyday high school drama with a big unknowable supernatural threat. At first, I didn’t understand how Scott could be so worried about lacrosse tryouts and getting the girl when he was turning into a literal werewolf. His entire worldview is turned upside down, but he holds on tight to normalcy. In a strange way, it made me feel better about how I was handling the pandemic, throwing myself completely into my college classes while the world outside descended into chaos. We hold onto the familiar for comfort, whether we’re dealing with becoming a werewolf or a global pandemic, and it was good to be reminded that there’s nothing wrong with that.
And I discovered the fun thing about comedy horror is that the fears explored don’t always have to be so serious like the ones Supernatural and Teen Wolf give us. It can easily be applied to anything we worry about, right down to the minutiae of social interaction.
Take the FX series What We Do in the Shadows, based on the popular movie of the same name. Not only is it a great example of intentional campy horror, but it also gets its point across by putting ancient creatures of the night into ordinary social situations and showing us just how ridiculous they can be.
In particular, the season two episode “Brain Scramblies” takes the consequences of an awkward conversational faux pas to its very extreme. Nandor (Kayvan Novak), mistakenly believing he told his neighbour Sean (Anthony Atamanuik) he was a vampire, confronts him about it, accidentally revealing his true nature. To fix this, Nandor does what many people have wished to do in such a situation: hypnotise him into forgetting. Except, of course, Nandor promptly makes everything worse by messing up the hypnosis and giving Sean the titular “brain scramblies.” Sean has no idea who he is and has lost his mind completely. In the way of socially awkward people everywhere, Nandor has only dug himself into a bigger hole. Obviously, there’s only one solution: kill him.
The vampires get into various hijinks as they try to figure out what to do with Sean, but eventually, all ends well, Sean isn’t killed, and their neighbours still don’t know they live next door to vampires. For anyone like me who has social anxiety, this episode lets them walk through the absolute worst case scenario of an awkward comment at a dinner party and see it for what it is: it’s just never that serious, as demonstrated by the hilarious social ineptness of some blood-sucking monsters. From a story structure point of view, it’s brilliant: building up tension through both suspense and chaotic plot elements, only to diffuse and deflate the original source of fear.
Horror might not be the genre I reach for first, but it’s something I know I’ll keep coming back to over the years, whether it’s out of nostalgia for old favourites or to discover something new about myself. More than just pure escapism, it allowed me to cope with difficult changes and gain a new perspective on myself and my struggles.
Life is hard enough as it is and we don’t want to live in fear. But if we’re able to laugh at our fears, at the big bad monsters that haunt us in the night, then maybe we can face anything.
by Daniella Zelikman
Daniella Zelikman is a freelance writer from New Jersey. She has a great love for all things speculative fiction, but especially stories that involve magic and dragons.
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