Funny Guys
Building tension in a horror movie is similar to working toward a punchline to a joke in a comedy, and comedian filmmakers are proving that this is a skill that directly crosses over into horror. Recently, well-known comedians like Jordan Peele, who starred in five seasons of Comedy Central’s, Key & Peele, and Zach Cregger, who created the YouTube sketch channel, The Whitest Kids U’ Know, have taken a stab at the horror genre, and they’re killing it.
Crawling out of stand-up comedy basements and emerging from sketch-comedy sets, filmmakers like Peele and Cregger, particularly, have used their backgrounds to cement a new legacy in the horror genre with movies like Us (2019), Get Out (2017), Weapons (2025), and Barbarian (2022). Intermingling brief comedic moments with suspense, the macabre, and sheer terror, these filmmakers have expertly elevated the genre as a whole. When an audience experiences moments of genuine hilarity woven into their fear and palpable distress, a perfectly balanced masterpiece is born.
(SPOILER ALERT!!) For example, in Barbarian, a character named AJ, a sleazy Hollywood producer, is trying to sell his property to pay for shady legal fees. Hoping to inflate the square footage of the house listing, he ventures into the monster-infested basement beneath the cursed home with a tape measure, greedily adding up the measurements as he descends deeper into the dark, creepy dungeons. The audience is well aware of the horrors that await him, yet still chuckles at the absurdity of the underlying joke.
Because who wouldn’t love the extra square footage? Certainly not a man-eating monster.
According to Ben Sherlock, a filmmaker and writer for Gamerant, writing comedy and horror are fundamentally the same. “It’s all about timing,” he says. “The monster needs to jump out of the closet at just the right moment, much like the punchline to a joke needs to be delivered at just the right moment.” Sherlock argues that there’s a tonal balancing act occurring in modern horror filmmaking as more comedians make the leap across genre norms. Comedians are well accustomed to pivoting their performances, and their punchlines, to suit a desired audience reaction. However, instead of searching for their next big laugh, comedians-turned-horror-filmmakers are looking for their next big scare.
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Bradley Klaus, a film critic and journalist from Young Hollywood, notes that the horror and comedy genres have always had a lot of overlap. “Inherently, the directors of a horror or comedy project are taking an exaggerated circumstance and attempting to get a reaction out of the audience—whether that is to scare them or get them to laugh.” Through tight timing and built-up suspense, an entire subgenre called “horror comedy” was born.
Comedy has been sprinkled into the horror genre for many years, making a debut appearance in older films like Young Frankenstein (1974) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), then becoming fully actualized in the 90s as the Scary Movie franchise was created. As directors realized the powerful effect of comedy in their films, so did audiences, devouring them faster than Pennywise could devour a lost child’s soul. Delightfully self-aware and leaning into their raucous entertainment factor, horror suddenly found a multifaceted and artistic way to draw out raw human emotion and translate it to the silver screen.
Dark humor is an essential facet of the horror movie industry and plays a huge role in the innovation and evolution of modern filmmaking. Blending humanity’s fascination with the macabre keeps audiences on the edge of their seats and thirsting for out-of-this-world entertainment, something that’s often lacking in modern cinema.
It’s Alive! It’s Alive!
While much of mainstream Hollywood relies on rebooted blockbusters, formulaic hero movies, and Oscar-bait dramas to line the pockets of major production studios, the industry has largely excluded the horror genre from prestige. Often dismissed for its playful, loose, and unrefined nature, horror has long been treated as the outcast. Yet without it, the movie industry would be a broken record of repeats, reboots, and overused clichés.
Breathing new life into a stale industry, it’s the horror filmmakers who are the ones with the freedom to take creative risks and stoke the flames of innovation in cinema. By taking bold leaps to tell stories in new and profound ways, horror writers and directors use crossover tropes and blended genres to keep creative filmmaking from the brink of extinction.
With so many movie choices and an infinite amount of content available to stream, originality and creativity should be celebrated, not suppressed, because tonally complex works are the lifeblood of true entertainment.
Zach Cregger was once a comedian on the show “The Whitest Kids U’Know” but has since turned into an acclaimed horror movie writer and director. When interviewed with Collider, he opened up about the reasoning for his transition into horror. Cregger says, “The budgets are not extravagant, so you're able to be a little risky. I think it's one of the few theatrical avenues right now where you can be surprised.”
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While many audiences find comfort in knowing how a story will progress and how a movie will end, horror aficionados crave shock and awe in their entertainment,yearning for a touch of creativity that will drop from the ceiling, seep through the floorboards, and knock on their bedroom door at midnight. For horror movie fans, the rise of comedian-creators has only elevated their viewing experience, pumping life into the cadaver of a dying industry once again.
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