Are you watching iZombie? The new show about a girl infected with a zombie virus who works in a morgue and solves crime? On the CW on Tuesday nights? Well you should be. It’s one of the most promsiing combinations of witty, banter-y humor and horror that I’ve seen in a while.
It also made me realize that while I’m a fan of horror in general I really love horror that knows how to laugh at itself. Because I’m more sensitive to visual scares than written ones, I actually refused to watch any horror movies until Evil Dead came along. There’s something so cathartic about laughing in the middle of something terrifying. While there are a lot of horror (novels and films both) with moments of unexpected humor, I’m talking here about laugh-out-loud funny stuff, rather than the dark-as-night black humor of something like Bret Easton Ellis. Some of my favorites are genuinely scary horror with comic relief, some are more comedies that adopt horror scenery, but they all combine that desire to bring you to an uncomfortable place through a scary or gross set-up and then make you laugh. This kind of push-pull of maintaining tension and then releasing it through humor is actually incredibly impressive, so if you like to laugh-scream, here are some picks for you. (more…)
