Editorials
10 Overlooked Modern Horror Comedies
There’s perhaps no two genres more closely aligned than horror and comedy. Both serve the purpose of eliciting a physical response from the viewer, and both rely on a rhythm, or precise timing to land their intended gags. Horror often uses humor as levity to punctuate long stretches of tension or scares, giving the viewer a moment to catch their breath before ramping up the suspense again. So, it’s no surprise that the horror-comedy mashup makes for some of the most fun horror movies.
Celebrated films like Cabin in the Woods, Slither, Tucker and Dale vs Evil, Shaun of the Dead, Evil Dead II, and more have become tried and true crowd pleasers that even non-horror fans tend to love. But for those looking for something new or different, there’s a lot more horror-comedies out there that are worth seeking out.
Here are 10 modern horror-comedies that are deserving of more love…
I Sell the Dead
Harkening back to the gothic horror of Universal Studios horror films of the ‘20s and ‘30s, this period horror-comedy follows a grave robber as he recounts his story of crime from prison to a Father (Ron Perlman) as he awaits his execution. The grave robber, Arthur (Dominic Monaghan), tells of his partnership with Willie Grimes (Larry Fessenden) as they turn a profit robbing graves and contend with blackmail by Doctor Quint (Angus Scrimm), before unwittingly digging up the undead. Vampires, aliens, ghouls, and rival grave robbers all contribute to Arthur’s current predicament with often humorous results. Glenn McQuaid’s first outing as director isn’t perfect – Arthur’s story drags on its own – but anytime Fessenden is on screen I Sell the Dead really shines.
Dead & Breakfast
If you prefer your horror-comedies heavy on the splatstick side with a musical number interlude, this one is for you. Following a group of friends road-tripping to Galveston, TX for a wedding who then wind up lost in the town of Lovelock where a murder results in them being caught up in the investigation. When one of the friends opens a mysterious box belonging to the deceased owner of the bed and breakfast, it sets a demon loose that begins possessing and slaughtering everyone around. Think Evil Dead II meets the honky tonk charm of the small town south. Gory, silly, and featuring many actors on the rise; Jeremy Sisto (May), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (The Walking Dead), and Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter) round out a surprising cast of recognizable faces in this underseen film.
Witching & Bitching
Otherwise known as Las Brujas de Zugarramurdi, or The Witches of Zugarramurdi, this Spanish horror comedy by Alex de la Iglesia starts out with a bang, involving a pawn shop robbery by robbers disguised as street performers (think Jesus and Sponge Bob). On the run from the police, the robbers head for the border and stumble into the secluded town of Zugarramurdi. The encounters with the town’s inhabitants, a large coven of witches, grows increasingly bizarre. This is a dark, over the top horror comedy that leans heavily into gross-out humor. Though subtitled, Witching & Bitching is easily of the most accessible of de la Iglesia’s work, whose dark humor often falls more toward the bleak. Gory and irreverent, this zany comedy is a crowd pleaser.
Bad Milo!
Duncan (Ken Marino) deals with constant stress in his life, to the point where it manifests in his intestinal tract as a demon. A demon that crawls out of his butt and literally kills Duncan’s sources of stress. That’s correct. A butt demon. That Duncan winds up bonding with and naming Milo. Who knew a butt demon could be so gosh darn cute? Somehow, writers Benjamin Hayes and Jacob Vaughan, and the talented cast, manage to take an over-the-top premise and turn it into something so horrifically endearing. As if the comedic relationship between Duncan and his butt demon isn’t enough, the supporting cast is equally great, especially Peter Stormare as Duncan’s therapist. A creature feature in the distant vein of Gremlins should be more popular than it is.
Wolfcop
This goofy Canadian indie gem about an alcoholic cop, Lou Garou (get it? Ha.), who gets turned into a werewolf is every bit as irreverent and silly as it sounds. Written and directed by Lowell Dean, this werewolf horror comedy is as much of a love letter to Canada as it is to werewolves. It’s the perfect B-movie to watch with friends, and if a drunk werewolf isn’t enough to sell you, then scene-stealer Willie Higgins (Jonathan Cherry) is worth the watch alone. The even better sequel, Another Wolfcop, is finally arriving on Blu-ray in July, which makes now a perfect time to get introduced to Lou and his straight-edged partner Tina (Amy Matysio).
The Final Girls
Perhaps because it’s far heavier on the comedy than the horror, or not as self-mocking as horror-comedies like The Cabin in the Woods, The Final Girls seems to be far more overlooked than it should be. An accurate and loving break down of slasher tropes, Max Cartwright and her friends get sucked into the retro slasher Camp Bloodbath when a fire breaks out at the theater playing the film. Max and her friends must pass themselves off as new counselors and steer clear of machete-wielding maniac Billy Murphy to survive to the end credits. The only problem is that Max is now confronted with the character Nancy, the scream queen her deceased mother was known for playing. While humorously deconstructing the slasher tropes, The Final Girls also succeeds in doing what most slashers can’t- getting the viewer to care about its characters. This one pulls on the heartstrings.
Fido
Set in a 1950s alternate universe where space radiation has reanimated the dead, a company has created technology that neutralizes the zombie by way of a domestication collar. Therefore, most zombies have become household servants. When housewife Helen (Carrie-Anne Moss) buys a zombie despite her husband’s phobia, the neighborhood starts to unravel when that zombie, Fido (Billy Connolly), breaks his neutralizing collar. This gory zombie comedy borrows heavily from the likes of Lassie Come Home, The Night of the Hunter, and of course, George A. Romero’s zombie films. A small Canadian production followed by a very quiet release in 2007 meant that despite being well-received by critics, Fido was mostly slept on.
The Voices
On the surface, The Voices seems like a quirky sort of rom-com, with Ryan Reynolds as Jerry Hickfang, a socially awkward factory worker living alone with his dog and cat, and searching for love. Jerry is more than just awkward, though, he’s schizophrenic, and he chooses to stop taking his medication. This then means that his delusions take over, especially in the case of his pets. His dog Bosco is a good dog, representing Jerry’s pure nature, whereas evil Mr. Whiskers appeals to Jerry’s dark side. When Jerry’s unrequited work crush stands him up, his delusions get deadly. The way Jerry deals with his victims is surprisingly gruesome. This horror comedy is the darkest of dark, and sadly far less seen than it should be.
The Editor
While almost anything by Astron-6 would certainly apply to this list, like Father’s Day or Manborg, The Editor is so very niche in its humor that it’s no surprise it’s not often brought up in conversations about horror-comedies. Written and directed by Adam Brooks and Matthew Kennedy, with additional writing credits by Conor Sweeney, The Editor lovingly and humorously pokes fun of giallo films. Brooks stars as Rey Ciso, a film editor who gets caught up in a string of murders while working on a director’s latest giallo film. Using the same cinematic language and tropes employed in classic gialli, The Editor pays homage to numerous films from the 1960s to the 1980s; Deep Red, Torso, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, Black Belly of the Tarantula, and dozens more.
Attack the Block
This sci-fi horror comedy has it all: jokes that stick their landing, endearing leads, action, suspense, and above all, amazing creature design. After a nurse in training is mugged by a gang of street teens, she’s then forced to team up with them to defend their block from an alien invasion. Starring Doctor Who’s Thirteenth Doctor, Jodie Whittaker, as the nurse, and John Boyega (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) in his breakout role as gang leader Moses, Attack the Block is pure heart and vicious bioluminescent alien teeth. U.S. Distributors were concerned American audiences would struggle to cope with the street gang’s slang and their thick South London accents, and the U.S. release was limited. Attack the Block offers style and substance, and while it’s lighter on the scares, the creature effects make up for it. It’s the type of film you wish got a sequel.
Of the three films that make up the Diabolical Trinity of classic religious horror films—Rosemary’s Baby (1968), The Exorcist (1973), and The Omen (1976)—The Omen is the most purely entertaining.
While Rosemary’s Baby digs into the societal shifts of the 60s and The Exorcist explores spiritual tensions between faith and doubt in an ever-shifting world, The Omen seems most interested in just telling a thrilling story. It achieves this by blending two major trends of the 1970s, the devil movie and the paranoid thriller, into one crackling adventure yarn. In the process, The Omen has sparked fear and curiosity about what could happen in the “end times” if such events are to occur.
After seeing The Exorcist, producer Harvey Bernhard contacted writer David Seltzer and said something along the lines of, “Hey, write me one of those.” Seltzer, having never read the Bible, thought it would be an interesting challenge, so, according to various interviews, he read the Bible and several commentaries in search of a story. Then he stumbled upon a passage in the book of Revelation, the image of a great Beast rising out of the sea, that sparked his imagination. In the commentaries, he found that the sea represented politics in some interpretations of the text, and he began building his story on that foundation.
Seltzer has told this story often, and I am inclined to believe him. However, from there, much of the theological-sounding lore of The Omen was created purely by Seltzer. Many of the ideas surrounding The Antichrist in the film appear to be drawn much more from the pop-eschatology sensation of the 1970s, The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsay, than any Biblical source.
Lindsay’s book was the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s and re-popularized views of the “last days” that had been dying along with fundamentalism for decades, namely Dispensationalism, Millennialism, and the Pre-Tribulation Rapture. In dispensationalism, history is broken into several epochs of time (or dispensations) that culminate in the return of Christ and his thousand-year (millennial) reign.
Before this return, a seven-year Tribulation will occur in which the Antichrist comes to power and persecutes all who oppose him, culminating in a battle between the forces of good and evil at the valley of Megiddo, usually called Armageddon. Of course, in this worldview, the true believers in Jesus will be lifted out, or raptured, before all this takes place. Since the publication and popularity of The Late Great Planet Earth, this has been the prominent belief in Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christian circles, though Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and mainline Protestant denominations largely reject it.
Lindsay also did something unique that had not been the case even in dispensationalist circles before him—he posited that the creation of the modern state of Israel in 1948 started the countdown to Armageddon. Fans of the film will immediately realize where Seltzer ran with this idea in the first line of the poem created for the movie: “When the Jews return to Zion…”
Damien Thorn and the Creation of Horror’s “Innocent Villain”
Seltzer’s next inspiration focused on the idea of the Antichrist as a child, what he would call the film’s “innocent villain.” In watching The Omen, it is readily apparent that Damien Thorn (Harvey Stephens) does not really do anything evil beyond a bit of normal kid mischief. Even the moment in which Damien knocks Kathy Thorn (Lee Remick) over a second-floor railing can be read as an accident orchestrated by Damien’s diabolically connected nanny, Mrs. Baylock (Billie Whitelaw). The film takes this idea of the innocent villain a step further by casting Gregory Peck, best known for playing arguably the greatest father in film history, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), as Damien’s earthly father, an element that greatly satisfied Seltzer.
The New Testament itself says very little about the Antichrist and certainly nothing about his childhood. In fact, the word antichrist is used twice (1 John 2:18 and 2 John 7 for the curious) and refers to groups of people, not a particular person. There is also a passage in 2 Thessalonians 2:1-12 in which the writer (usually attributed to Paul) discusses “The Man of Lawlessness” who will “exalt himself over everything that is called God” and “proclaim himself to be God.”
Then there is the Beast of Revelation chapter 13 with “seven heads and ten horns” that Seltzer latched onto, which has been interpreted in a multitude of ways over the centuries. Powerful people throughout history, from Charlemagne, various Popes during the Protestant Reformation era, Napoleon and Hitler, to modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have all had the label placed on them by various circles. Even religious leaders like Billy Graham have not escaped being called the Antichrist.
Lindsay and modern dispensationalists are certain the Antichrist will be a 21st-century individual as they are equally certain that the Rapture, Tribulation, and return of Christ are imminent, likely within their lifetime. Many scholars and theologians, however, interpret these passages as symbolic representations of the Roman Empire and the first-century Caesars who persecuted, tortured, and murdered Christians and Jews who refused to submit to Imperial rule and worship them as gods. For example, that the Beast from the sea in Revelation has seven heads is symbolic of the famous seven mountains of Rome, with the 10 horns referring to rulers and magistrates of the Empire.
But this is all really of no matter to Seltzer and the story of The Omen. Instead of being concerned with any historical or theological accuracy, he instead built his own lore, which sends Robert Thorn and photographer Keith Jennings (David Warner) on a globetrotting investigation into the nature of the Antichrist and how to stop him. Some of this lore includes the child being born of a jackal, the reaction of animals, the protective cult that arises around Damien, the daggers of Megiddo, and maybe most interesting of all, the peculiar flaws in Jennings’s photographs that presage the ways certain individuals will die.
All these aspects are where the paranoid thrillers come in, as films like Blow Up (1966), Z (1969), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), 3 Days of the Condor (1975), and All the President’s Men (1976) were all the rage at the time. Especially in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the idea of journalists (like Jennings) as ordinary heroes who could bring down the powerful, nefarious forces in the world was exactly what audiences craved. And what greater hidden evil force was there than the Devil? This is also why the device of the daggers of Megiddo is so important to a movie like this. If Damien is indeed the Antichrist, there must be a way to stop him, though in the Biblical text, the only power capable of destroying the Devil is God Himself.
The Mark of the Beast, 666, and the Film’s Most Famous Religious Symbolism
The piece of lore created for the movie with the most solid Biblical grounding is the Mark of the Beast. Revelation describes a mark on the forehead or hand of those who worship the Beast and his image. Again, this is symbolic language differentiating those who belong to the power of the Roman Empire and those who belong to Christ, who have the Mark of the Lamb. In Seltzer’s hands, the mark is very literal, a birthmark that is borne by not only the Antichrist but all his followers, meaning they are marked from before birth as belonging to Satan, and there is no escaping it. This is all rather distressing to the priest Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton), who betrays his mark by warning Thorn about Damien and pays the price by memorably being impaled by a spire that falls from a church steeple after being struck by lightning.
Why is the mark three sixes? Again, this is drawn from a passage in Revelation that states that the Beast can be identified by calculating his number. In Biblical scholarship, this is believed to be the sum of the name of a man transferred into Hebrew numerology, a practice in which each Hebrew letter also represents a number. Using this method, the number of the name Caesar Nero, which many believe to be the most logical choice, is six hundred sixty-six. In the film and elsewhere, this number is changed to three individual sixes. According to the film, this represents the Diabolical Trinity (a designation also unique to the film) made up of Satan, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet. That Damien carries this unique birthmark under his hair convinces Robert that the child is the Antichrist, and it’s up to him to destroy him.
Part of what makes The Omen great is its ambiguity. Damien could be the Antichrist, or he could be at the center of a series of coincidences. Director Richard Donner stated in interviews that he believed Robert Thorn had gone insane by the end of the film, which, to Donner, is the only explanation for why Thorn would attempt to kill an innocent child. However, that enigmatic smile in the final shot suggests that Damien does embody a spirit of great evil. The sequels, however, all but erase this ambiguity.
In audiences, The Omen sparked a renewed interest in the concept of the Antichrist and the dispensationalist interpretation of the end times that continues to echo throughout the last five decades. Around the time of the film’s release, even Elvis Presley was photographed brandishing a paperback copy of Seltzer’s novelization. Dispensationalist authors like Hal Lindsay, Tim LaHaye, and John Hagee have made millions publishing books and giving lectures about the Antichrist and the end of the world.
The Legacy of The Omen, 50 Years Later
Though A Thief in the Night (1972) preceded The Omen in initial release, it gained quite a resurgence (along with the ability to create three sequels) in the wake of the popularity of The Omen and went on to scar the psyches of Evangelical children for decades. Hal Lindsay was also able to release a film version of The Late Great Planet Earth in 1978, complete with narration and a brief onscreen appearance from Orson Welles.
In the 1990s, the Left Behind series became a cultural phenomenon, spawning twelve books in the core series, a YA spinoff series, video games, and a movie series (2000-2005) starring Kirk Cameron. A bigger studio adaptation of the first book was released in 2014, starring Nicolas Cage. 20th Century Fox and The Omen got in on the renewed “end-of-the-world” vigor by releasing a remake of the original film on June 6, 2006. The franchise was revived once again in 2024 with The First Omen, which explores ideas of the Antichrist and the motivations of those in power in our current religious, social, and political context.
But despite all the sequels, spinoffs, rip-offs, remakes, and “end times” money grabs of the last 50 years, the original version of The Omen remains untouchable. Its greatest strength is that it seeks, first and foremost, to entertain. And it does so admirably.
After half a century, its influence can be felt in horror, the culture at large, and even in various faith circles. It is a testament to the power of story and film that, consciously or unconsciously, fans of The Omen and those who have never seen it alike are, to this very day, marked by the Beast.
You must be logged in to post a comment.