My Top 5 Horror-Comedy Films

Humor and Fear look a lot alike, as far as the body reactions go. Laughter is an expression of surprise. So, too, is a scream. The difference? Watching Curly hit Moe with a shovel, and watching a cat jump out of a darkened recess in the space ship when everyone is looking for the alien. Those two scenarios are considered miles apart. But something really interesting happens when you start moving them closer together.

The Horror-Comedy movie (or, if you prefer, the Comedy-Horror movie) is one of those rare, fragile and delicate kinds of movies that is very tricky to pull off without tipping the scales one way or the other. It takes only a nudge to turn a comedic horror movie into parody, or worse, a self-referential meta-movie that becomes insider baseball. Likewise, if you’re not funny enough, the laughs will be more of the nervous variety than the knee-slapping kind. Not that there’s ever any real belly laughs in a Horror-Comedy movie. It’s more of a sensibility; not quite a slice-of-life motif, but the best of their kind manage to use a combination of setting and dialogue to keep you rooted in the story, rather than overwhelm you with gags. 

My Top 5 Favorite Zombie Movies

I don’t think it’s unfair to call zombies the new vampires. I mean, can you honestly fathom the cultural alchemy that would make a show like The Walking Dead one of the most popular, most watched shows in the history of television? I find the phenomenon around the “pop culturalization” of zombies more interesting than zombies themselves. Before George Romero got ahold of them in 1968, the zombie was a second stringer—a minion of the villainous zombie master or witch doctor or other magic-savvy boogem. They were little more than a plot device until Night of the Living Dead, but we’ll get to that in a second.

I like that the zombies are a cultural stand-in for us—the empty, rabid consumer, and this characterization can be shaded by religion or science, sped up or slowed down, to further delineate what the filmmaker is trying to comment on. Of course, some would argue that the zombie movie is more of a post-apocalyptic exploration of humanity, rather than a simple horror film. I say there’s room for both, and the best zombie movies split the difference handily.

Since this is a movie list, you won’t see The Walking Dead below. The show owes so much to the Romero zombie movies, and everyone knows it anyway, so I’ll just assume if you’re reading this list, you know it already, too. If you show these five zombie movies to a person who’s never seen a zombie movie before, these five movies would encompass the full range of all that is cool about the modern zombie movie.