In recent years, there has been much discussion about how closely related horror and comedy are. There is plenty of common ground: each genre works with tension, subverts expectations, and so on. Comedians like Jordan Peele and Zach Cregger have proven that people from a comedic background can, at the very least, make horror films, and that a wider audience is interested in seeing them.
But shouldn’t this theoretically work the other way around as well? If so, why haven’t we seen as many horror directors making comedies? We don’t have the answers to those burning questions. That said, we’ve decided to showcase a few prominent horror directors who’ve tried their hands at comedy at some point. Beginning with…
4. Wes Craven
Freddy Krueger had his funny moments, and People Under the Stairs might technically be a horror-comedy, but Vampire in Brooklyn ended up being Wes Craven’s most blatantly comedic movie. Eddie Murphy, who came up with the story with his brothers Charlie and Vernon, stars as the titular vampire and plays multiple roles as he tended to do back in the 90s. As the main character, Maximillian, Murphy seeks to mate with a half-vampire played by Angela Bassett to prevent his bloodline from ending. It was both the only time Murphy appeared in a movie with a horror director and the only time Craven made a movie starring a comedian—and that sure as hell doesn’t sound like a coincidence.
3. John Carpenter
As much as it might sound like a joke to the uninitiated, the guy who directed Halloween actually once directed a movie in which Chevy Chase plays an invisible man. Three years after starring in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, Chase and director John Carpenter came together for 1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Chase, as Nick Halloway, finds himself on the run from the CIA after a freak accident renders him completely invisible. This would serve as a vanity project for Chase and, ironic as it may sound, a “horror show” for Carpenter. In fact, Carpenter seriously considered quitting the business after his experience with Chase and went so far as to say that his former leading man needed to be set on fire.
2. Alfred Hitchcock
The director, known to many as the “Master of Suspense,” had as good a sense of humor as anyone, and it shows in many of his films. He even directed a screwball comedy in 1941 called Mr. & Mrs. Smith (no relation to the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie movie). But 1955’s The Trouble With Harry, described beautifully in the trailer as “a delightful little romantic comedy that just happens to revolve around a corpse,” is perhaps his most noteworthy attempt at making a funny movie. It follows the comedic mishaps of a group of people trying to dispose of a recently deceased man whom more than one of them thinks they killed. There’s a love story, a murder mystery, and even the kid from Leave it to Beaver playing with a dead rabbit—in case you weren’t entirely sold on it up until this point.
1. George A. Romero
George A. Romero rarely strayed far from horror during his decades-long career. Interestingly, the first movie he made after the success of Night of the Living Dead was a romantic comedy called There’s Always Vanilla. The story centers around a freeloader named Chris who falls in love with a model named Lynn and gets her pregnant. Expecting Chris to be a bad father, Lynn contemplates getting an abortion, but instead opts to move in with a guy she doesn’t think will be a bad father and have him raise the kid with her. If this sounds nothing at all like something you’d want out of a George A. Romero movie or a comedy, just about anyone who’s seen it would likely agree with you. That includes Romero himself, who once called it his worst film and “a total mess.”
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