Have you ever finished watching a movie and thought to yourself, “Was that a joke?” Well, it turns out that every once in a while, that might actually be the case. Not all films are what they appear to be on the surface, or at least that’s what some of their creators have led us to believe. Here are a few that you might be surprised to find out were intended as comedies.
4. PSYCHO
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic Psycho was considered shocking in its day, but one person who disagreed with that assessment was Hitchcock himself. During an appearance on the British TV series Monitor in 1964, the director revealed that the movie was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. “A lot of people looked at this thing and said what a dreadful thing to do, how awful, and so forth,” Hitchcock said. “The content as such was, I felt, rather amusing, and it was, uh, it was a big joke, you know? And I was horrified to find that some people took it seriously.”
3. THE WICKER MAN
The 2006 remake of The Wicker Man was not well received, in part because viewers found it more unintentionally funny than scary. According to its star, Nicolas Cage, the joke is on them. In a 2022 interview, Cage said, “I know people had fun with that even if they thought the comedy was not intentional.” He also went as far as to say, “I’m going to set the record straight now: That is not a fact. Neil [LaBute, the director] and I both knew how funny it was.”
2. FACE/OFF
Another Nicolas Cage film that leaned into its humorous elements was 1997’s Face/Off. Originally intended as a sci-fi movie, director John Woo told Vulture in 2023, “I started to make it like a comedy. Or a comedy-like movie, not a real comedy.” “I’m a big fan of MAD magazine,” he went on to say. “The characters in my movies sometimes feel like characters from there. The whole thing is so ridiculous. People who can change their faces—it’s so unreal.”
1. DIE HARD
People have been arguing over whether or not Die Hard is a Christmas movie for years, but maybe they should be considering what genre it belongs to. The film’s director, John McTiernan, once said that “Die Hard is basically a Shakespearean comedy.” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream literally is a festival night when some weird thing happens, and all the princes become asses, and all the asses become princes,” he pointed out. “In the morning, the true lovers are united, and everybody returns to their regular lives and feels better for having this event where the world got turned upside down.”
The post 4 Movies You Didn’t Know Were Comedies (According to Their Creators) appeared first on VICE.
