"I'm a student of both horror and comedy because they're different sides of the same coin: Both are about using emotion to provoke an instinctual, physical response, and if you're lucky, spontaneous evacuation of bodily waste products."
— Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, Extra Punctuation
When people think of Comedy, they rarely associate it with Horror and vice versa. However, both make great partners in crime together. If they aren't Crossing The Line Twice, they're bringing about a Sugar Apocalypse and escaping to Auda City. The reason they work so well together is that viewers need "breathers" between nonstop screaming or nonstop laughing, and one can easily segue into the other.
For purposes of this trope, we'll divide Horror and Comedy hybrids into three categories, Horror dominant, Comedy dominant, and balanced.
Horror dominant works will use comedy as a mood lightener or "breather" from the tension or gore. Characters will crack wise while they're in a safe spot, and have the monster use a Barrier-Busting Blow just as they relax. The benefit of this is that just as viewers relax along with the characters, tension is restored along with the scare. Other ways to use comedy in a horror movie is to treat viewers to some funny situational irony the characters can appreciate on an intellectual level while cursing on an "I'm gonna die now" level. The benefit here is that momentum is maintained throughout the scene.
Comedy dominant works have more leeway here. They may be a straight up comedy or parody set in a typical horror setting or premise, or use Black Comedy along with splatter horror to maximum effect. Comedy dominant works often deconstruct horror tropes for laughs, other times playing them hilariously straight as an Affectionate Parody (with perhaps a Lampshade Hanging).
A balanced work is perhaps the most subjective to qualify, because while it has equal amounts of horror and comedy, the viewer may be so sensitive to horror it seems scarier, or so desensitized to horror it seems funnier.
Of course, these works have one big problem they have to fight: avoiding jumping the shark due to Mood Whiplash. Avoiding this requires that the comedy or horror not break the feel of the established setting. Slapstick in the middle of suspenseful horror, or remorselessly and humorlessly killing a character in a comedy would do this. However, deadpan snarking and Rasputinian Death respectively would not.
See also Narm and Nightmare Retardant, where something that's supposed to be horrible turns out to be funny, and Accidental Nightmare Fuel, where something that might have been intended to be funny is instead unsettling. Both of them are results of something landing on the wrong side of the scale. See also Lightmare Fuel, where a perfect balance is actually reached between the two.
Compare the First Law of Tragicomedies.
Some works that mix comedy and horror include:
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Advertising
- Any commercial featuring The Burger King.
- Wilkins Coffee commercials are comedy dominant, featuring the puppet Wilkins killing the puppet Wontkins for disliking the coffee in increasingly brutally horrific and absurd ways with Dissonant Serenity.
Alternate Reality Games
- Omega Mart is a surrealist satire of a grocery store that has its fair share of both Surreal Humor and Surreal Horror elements to it since the products are more often than not weird yet benign parodies of real products, while also having enough creepy stuff both on the shelves and behind the scenes to feel like something's just off enough for normal people to notice.
Anime & Manga
- Ayashi Kotogatari. A slice-of-life-esque comedy with a girl living in a Youkai-haunted mansion.
- Dororon Enma-kun
- Dusk Maiden of Amnesia: Bounces back and forth.
- Ghastly Prince Enma: Burning Up
- Ghost Stories, at least the Gag Dub version.
- Franken Fran has genuinely terrifying Body Horror and Gorn, but largely uses those elements for satire or Black Comedy.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is primarily horror dominant in the earlier parts, but finds a balance between comedy and horror somewhere around the third part, and sticks with it. Each subplot can lean in either direction or Mood Whiplash between the two with little warning. The main exceptions are the final fights of each arc, which are rather universally action dominated.
- Hellsing
- The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service
- Level E
- Lychee Light Club
- Paranoia Agent combines both elements of Surreal Horror with elements of Black Comedy.
- Soul Eater: It starts out fairly light and Fanservice filled, but gets darker and darker as the story goes on. Despite that, it never gets really gory aside from blood and even the more serious villains have occasional moments of levity.
- Tomie is horror dominant. The titular Villain Protagonist is essentially a Humanoid Abomination version of a bratty Alpha Bitch and the comic gets a fair amount of comedic mileage out of her, but her actions are portrayed as seriously vicious and horrifying.
- The Unpopular Mangaka and the Helpful Onryo-san
- The Voynich Hotel has all sorts of unsavoury characters, from demons, witches, and criminals (ranging from: Yakuza, present and past; assassins; and serial killers), and quite a lot of weird natural occurrences on the island to boot, but things are consistently light and funny. Most of the time.
- Yondemasuy Azazel San
- Zombie Land Saga, after setting itself up to be a normal Schoolgirl Series during the cold open, then reveals itself to be a zombie Survival Horror work... for about seven minutes. At which point, the person who brought the main character and the other zombies back to life tells our heroine that they're slated to become idol singers, and the whole thing becomes wackier from there. Early episodes play heavily with horror imagery, while later ones often restrict themselves to using the main characters' undead nature as an excuse for slapstick instead.
Comic Books
- Horndog, a underground comic book by Isaac Baranoff that includes both straight horror and comedy segments.
- Johnny the Homicidal Maniac alternates between playing its use of Gorn and Johny's insanity for laughs and horror at a frequent pace.
- Mort the Dead Teenager
- Mr. Crypt leans heavily on the comedy side, involving a sentient skeleton dealing with angry villagers, vampires and other hilarity.
- Red Xmas
- We Kill Monsters
Comic Strips
Films — Animated
- Hotel Transylvania
- It's Such a Beautiful Day not quite a horror comedy but rather a dramedy. However, it still has really intense moments.
- Mickey's House of Villains leans extremely heavily on the comedy side. The shorts however are balanced.
- Monster House is more lighthearted with its cast of three kids and climactic final showdown with the bumbling Chowder using an excavator to fight the house. That being said the children are always in extreme danger and the vengeful ghost of Constance Nebbercracker is trying to kill the main trio and anyone who gets too close to the house.
- The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Wallace & Gromit playing werewolf movie tropes for kid-friendly laughs. The filmmakers billed it as the first "vegetarian horror movie".
- Wendell & Wild
Films — Live-Action
- 12-Hour Shift has Organ Theft, but Played for Laughs thanks to Comedic Sociopathy.
- 13 Sins has the hapless protagonist committing more and more horrific crimes for the accumulating prize money.
- 100 Bloody Acres
- Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the definitive parody of vintage Universal Horror. While Abbott and Costello generate their share of wisecracks, slapstick, and Large Ham, the Universal Horror monsters are real and played just as straight as in their own movies. The result is unmistakably a comedy but with several genuinely scary moments. The duo starred in a number of other films of this type, including Hold That Ghost; Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff; Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man; Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; and Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.
- The ABCs of Death
- The Abominable Dr. Phibes
- An American Werewolf in London has quite a bit of comedy in it but also has one of the most horrific transformation sequences ever put to film and the comedy drops when the titular werewolf shows up.
- Anna and the Apocalypse is a zombie musical, played for all the camp one can imagine, complete with zombies that are Made of Plasticine so that the protagonists can pulp them more easily in between and during their musical numbers.
- Arachnophobia has several comedic bits, mostly involving the Eccentric Exterminator played by John Goodman. The Primal Fear of the spider threat is played very seriously all throughout the movie however.
- Army of Frankensteins
- Attack of the Killer Donuts
- Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! is nearly pure comedy; the only real "horror" aspects it has are those that are unavoidable when you decide to parody the B-movie horror genre.
- Ava's Possessions
- Axe Murdering with Hackley
- The Babysitter (2017) is very firmly on the comedy end of the scale, with the gore being mostly Played for Laughs.
- The Babysitter: Killer Queen is even funnier but also gorier than the first one.
- Bad Taste
- The Banana Splits Movie makes good use of Body Horror, but it balances this with Black Comedy.
- Barbarian starts as a fairly creepy Psychological Horror film but after the introduction of AJ Gilbride the movie quickly becomes very comedic.
- Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon starts out closer to the middle, as a parody of the slasher genre, but very quickly becomes a straight Slasher Movie at the end.
- Big Ass Spider!
- Big Bad Wolf
- Big Tits Zombie, a J-horror flick that slides much more towards the Sex Comedy genre.
- Billy Club (2013): The movie as billed as a horror comedy, but seems to be pure horror.
- Bio Zombie
- The Blackening
- Black Friday (2021)
- Black Sheep (2007) by its premise alone, but almost all of the plot plays for jokes and laughs. Could you even imagine a flock of blood-thirsty sheep as anything else?
- Blood & Donuts
- Blood Drips Heavily on Newsies Square
- Blood Fest
- Blood Junkie
- Bloodsuckers from Outer Space
- Bloody Bloody Bible Camp
- Bloody Mallory
- The Bloody Video Horror That Made Me Puke on My Aunt Gertrude
- Boy Eats Girl
- Boys From County Hell
- The Boy Who Cried Werewolf
- Braindead, also known as Dead Alive. The movie is extremely gory and violent to the point of holding the record for the most fake blood ever spilled in the making of a movie. However said violence is so intentionally over the top and absurd that it becomes hilarious.
- Bride of Frankenstein
- Bubba Ho Tep
- Bubba the Redneck Werewolf
- A Bucket of Blood
- The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie.
- Butt Boy
- Cabin by the Lake: The sequel moreso than the first. The Villain Protagonist is a Serial Killer who is also a horror movie writer. There are therefore several self-referential elements than can be taken as parody. The bad guy is still an utter monster, though.
- The Cabin in the Woods. Despite being a Deconstructive Parody the horror tropes are played very straight in terms of tone; the parody is derived from austere deconstruction without heading into outright comedy. The humorous parts that it does have are mostly derived from the self-reflective aspects of the movie on the horror genre, mostly embodied in the manipulative Controllers.
- Carnage for the Destroyer
- Carry On Screaming!, being a Carry On film, relies on comedy with a variety of horror movie Shout Outs. Despite this, it still earned an entry on the The 100 Greatest Scary Moments list.
- Child's Play has been all over the map with this. The first few films were mostly straight horror flicks, albeit with a killer with more personality than the usual masked madman, much like the below-mentioned A Nightmare on Elm Street series. Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky, however, were comedy-dominant, while Curse of Chucky returned to a horror focus.
- Cannibal Girls
- Chopping Mall
- Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things
- A Chinese Ghost Story has some suspenseful and terrifying moments, and some legitimately hilarious ones.
- Class Of Nuke 'Em High was the darkest of the movies, but the next two were more comedic.
- Claw (2021)
- Club Dread, Broken Lizard's parody of slasher movies by way of Jimmy Buffett.
- Cocaine Bear: Comedy dominant, but with plenty of man against nature horror in the vein of Jaws.
- Colonel Kill Motherfuckers
- The Columnist
- Come To Daddy: Rife with Black Comedy from start to finish.
- The Comedy of Terrors is a slapstick comedy about two morticians (played by Vincent Price and Peter Lorre) orchestrating deaths in their town to keep their business running.
- The Cottage
- The Creeps: The movie can be considered this, as the monsters in the movie are three feet tall because the procedure to bring them to life was incomplete.
- Creepshow, with its intentional pulp-comic style (a Genre Throwback to the EC Comics of the '50s), has many comedic moments, but also manages to have some good horror. The scariest person in the film is played by Leslie Nielsen, who manages to be both funny and scary at the same time.
- Cryptz
- Dance of the Dead
- Darby and the Dead
- Dark Shadows
- Dave Made a Maze
- The Day of the Beast
- Day Shift
- Dead and Deader
- Dead Before Dawn
- The Dead Don't Die
- Dead Heat
- The Dead Next Door
- Dead Snow: The first film relies more on traditional horror elements. While the sequel cranks up the black comedy significantly.
- Deadtime Stories
- Death Proof
- Die You Zombie Bastards!
- Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: The film is essentially the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s first true horror film. Featuring plenty of brutal deaths, terrifying imagery and a tense atmosphere. However, the MCU’s penchant for humorous quips combined with director Sam Raimi’s own style of campy, over-the-top, horror make for a macabre superhero experience that will make you scream and laugh at the same time.
- Doctor X
- Doll Factory seems to fall mostly on the humourous side.
- Don't Kill It
- Dr. Giggles has a villain who is very cartoony and unleashes a Hurricane of Puns whenever he makes a kill. Despite that, it's a straightforward slasher film.
- Dracula: Dead and Loving It
- Drag Me to Hell is a truly scary film, but coming from Sam Raimi, it manages to also be hilarious at times (sometimes at the same time even).
- Eight Legged Freaks, an Affectionate Parody of and Genre Throwback to the giant insect movies of The '50s.
- Elvira's Haunted Hills
- Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988)
- The Enchantress is the Ur-Example to A Chinese Ghost Story above, made 4 years earlier. Also contains quite a bit of comedic moments in between the haunting stuff.
- Errementari, in particular almost everything that has to do with Butt-Monkey Sartael and its depiction of Hell, very much in the line of Little Nicky. Other parts aren't funny or easy to watch.
- Evil Bong is advertised as a "horror/comedy", but is predominately comedy. The sequel, Evil Bong 2: King Bong, isn't even a horror movie, but a combination of fantasy/adventure and stoner comedy.
- Evil Dead: While the first film plays the horror completely straight...
- Evil Dead 2 begins the franchise's slow slide into comedy. The horror here is at the forefront, with a few darkly humorous flourishes thrown in, such as the slapstick scene of Ash fighting his possessed hand and the scene of Ash going Laughing Mad.
- Army of Darkness continues the trend of Evil Dead 2 by sliding further into comedy. There are still horror elements, but Ash has become a wise-cracking smartass, and the emphasis has shifted toward a comedic, action-adventure tone.
- Excision (2012)
- Extra Ordinary (2019): A film about a psychic and he friends trying to save a teenage girl from being sacrificed by a satanic Will Forte.
- Fear, Inc.
- The Fearless Vampire Killers
- Feeding Frenzy: A horror film by the internet comedy crew of RedLetterMedia, the film is mostly a black comedy with lots of No Budget gore.
- Fido is first and foremost a comedic spoof of a Zombie Apocalypse genre, in style of Leave It to Beaver. People still die horrifically and the entire setting might be a Cosy Catastrophe, but it's still a post-apocalyptic one.
- Final Cut: It starts off as an embarrassing cheap zombie flick named Z until the last two thirds of the film explain how this No Budget horror film came to be.
- Final Destination: Early movies were mostly horror, but it was so over-the-top that it ended up having the opposite effect. Later ones are intentionally funny while still keeping tension.
- The Final Girls, being a PG-13 homage to 1980s slasher movies, can't become quite as scary or gory as the genre it is parodying by design, so it instead relies on poking fun of various slasher tropes and the Deliberate Values Dissonance of 2010s teens interacting with 1980s teens. It also spends more time focusing on grief and the sadness of the death of one of the characters than the average slasher movie, making this more of a dramedy than a pure comedy.
- The Fly (1986), being a Sci-Fi Horror story hinging upon a Slow Transformation, is more humor than horror for the first half-hour as it sets up three central characters (Veronica and Stathis are snarkers while Seth is a cute nerd), their Love Triangle, and Seth's telepod technology. The only gruesome bit is the fate of the first baboon, which is seriously played. After Seth teleports himself and begins to transform, with only the audience initially aware of what is actually happening to him, the mood slowly, significantly darkens. The snark from Veronica and Stathis is replaced by Seth's Gallows Humor once his Body Horror sets in, and the final 20 minutes are straight-up Tragedy — which works as well as it does because the humorous opening stretch gets the audience deeply invested in the characters. Critic Drew McWeeny, in the Screen Drafts episode covering writer-director David Cronenberg's filmography, describes Seth archiving his molted human body parts in his medicine cabinet thusly:
I find the Seth Brundle Museum of Natural History simultaneously the funniest thing in any David Cronenberg film and the saddest thing in any movie ever.
- Francis in the Haunted House. The main character is a talking mule. You do the maths.
- Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island
- Freaky combines a slasher film with a body swap comedy, and while being by the same makers of Happy Death Day, which emphasized the comedy, ends up playing the horror elements much more straight, with gruesome murders compared to the other film's Bloodless Carnage, and a very sinister villain.
- Fresh Meat
- Friday the 13th has a few entries landing here:
- Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter definitely played up the comedy elements, with the first part feeling very much like a teen comedy that could easily be called National Lampoon's Friday The 13th. But the deaths are some of the bloodiest in the series, and the ending when Tommy kills Jason is played very seriously (and manages to be genuinely horrifying). This is one of the reasons it remains a fan favorite.
- Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives is very self-aware of the franchise and has quite a few comedic breaks, but plays many parts much more serious than the rest of the series (especially parts focusing on Tommy), and due to the reduced gore, it relies more on pure suspense (and succeeding).
- Jason X took the "Jason IN SPACE!" angle and ran with it, most notably when Jason is locked in a holodeck simulating Camp Crystal Lake with two counselors who just love to have premarital sex.
- Friend of the World
- Fright Night (1985) and its remake Fright Night (2011), as well as their respective sequels Fright Night Part 2 and Fright Night 2: New Blood.
- Frightmare (1983)
- From Dusk Till Dawn gets most of its humor by playing off the interaction of a bunch of hardened gangsters with bloodthirsty vampires.
- Frostbite
- Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo
- The Funhouse Massacre
- Get Out (2017) has a fair share of tongue-in-cheek humour and a comic relief character (who actually ends up saving the day), but the humor is fairly subtle overall. Given the director, it's surprising the comedy elements aren't played up more.
- The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
- The Ghost Breakers
- Ghostbusters, both the original film and the reboot (the sequels are much more comedic). The ghosts are portrayed seriously and often have quite menacing appearances, with the original in particular based on Dan Aykroyd's actual research into the paranormal. The human characters, however, are all Played for Laughs. According to the DVD Commentary for the first film, Ivan Reitman said they knew they got the film right and it would be a smash hit when the audience was laughing and screaming at the same time during the librarian Jump Scare.
- The Giant Claw, thanks to the silly Muppet bird!
- Ginger Snaps uses its "lycanthropy/puberty" metaphor as much for laughs as for horror, but when it gets dark, it stays there.
- Glorious is a Lovecraft Lite story where the portal to the eldritch horror is a gas station glory hole.
- The Gore Gore Girls
- Gory Gory Hallelujah
- Grabbers
- Grandmother's Farm
- Great Choice is a Short Film with a premise that's equally disturbing and terrifying and hilariously absurd: a woman who finds herself trapped inside an ever-looping Red Lobster commercial.
- Gremlins:
- Gremlins. There are some comedic moments scattered throughout, but it mostly plays the premise straight. Notably, this is toned down from the original conceit, which was a lot darker in tone and contained several very gruesome deathsnote , with the Gremlins being far more violently evil than their 'cause general disruption' attitude in the movie.
- Gremlins 2: The New Batch is far more comedic than the first movie, even opening with a cartoon intro. It's more an Affectionate Parody of monster movies, including of its own predecessor.
- Grindhouse. Specifically, Planet Terror is balanced, while Death Proof is more serious. The film as a whole (including the trailers) plays the Grindhouse conceit mostly for the camp value while retaining a lot of genuine scares.
- Halloween at Aunt Ethel's
- The Happening
- Happy Death Day is a slasher film, but most of the deaths are Played for Laughs, and the story centers around the comedic journey of the protagonist from the mean girl meant to die (in her case, a lot) to the Final Girl that draws the audience sympathy. (the filmmakers stated the movie is
"horror fun", as the term "horror comedy" apparently is not well liked among producers for being hard to sell) The sequel, even more so, as the slasher plot is ultimately secondary to a sci-fi one regarding the protagonist being sent to an Alternate Timeline.
- The Hatchet series is a Genre Throwback to '80s slashers, turning all of the tropes of the genre up to their logical conclusion and playing many of them for laughs in the process. The actual killer, however, is played completely straight.
- A Haunted House, a parody of the first Paranormal Activity.
- The Haunted Mansion, a 2003 family friendly horror comedy based off the beloved attraction from the Disney Theme Parks.
- Muppets Haunted Mansion: A 2021 Halloween Special crossing over the ride with The Muppets.
- Haunted Mansion: A 2023 film reboot for the 2003 film.
- HauntedWeen
- Hausu
- Hellbenders
- Hello Mary-Lou: Prom Night II takes itself far less seriously than its in-name-only predecessor, and has a much lighter tone. It could be considered a black comedy, however it also has enough genuine terror to split it about 50/50.
- Highway to Hell
- Hillbillys in a Haunted House
- Hocus Pocus
- Unlike many horror anthologies, the shorts in the movie Holidays are quite varied in tone. Halloween is pretty much entirely comedy; St Patrick's Day is largely comedic, but with a pronounced horror undertone; Christmas and New Year's Eve are a largely even balance of horror and Black Comedy; Valentine's Day and Easter are chiefly horror, but arguably have some slightly light elements to them; and Mother's Day and Father's Day are straight horror.
- Hold That Ghost
- Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers
- Hostel series. Hostel: Part III leans slightly more into the Black Comedy side of the Hostel films than the more horror dominant first two.
- House
- Housebound
- House of the Long Shadows
- House on Bare Mountain: The Wolfman, Dracula and Frankenstein spy on a girls' school in the mountains, where most of the girls sunbathe in the nude.
- House Shark could fit in here, mainly because the movie's low budget means that the titular shark is beset by Special Effects Failure.
- Hubie Halloween
- The Human Centipede: The Final Sequence, as opposed to the first two movies being regular Torture Porn, attempts to also be a Black Comedy. (The tagline is even "100% Politically Incorrect".)
- Idle Hands
- Innocent Blood starts out balanced, but once the Big Bad turns into a vampire half-way through, it just goes into a straight and very self-aware comedy and doesn't even bother to pretend to be anything else.
- Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer has a few very bloody scenes, but the film is played for laughs.
- Jennifer's Body combines a demon-possession plot with Diablo Cody's wiseass dialogue, and a devil-worshipping emo band.
- Julia X is about two sisters who turns the tables on a Serial Killer and imprison him in their home where they plan to torture and kill him. A lot of decent one-liners, but the overall mood is too dark for the humour to ever be dominant.
- Killer Klowns from Outer Space is largely balanced. The film is played surprisingly straight for such a silly premise which the filmmakers wisely didn't take too seriously. The klowns are very often Laughably Evil, but the movie keeps some genuine scares for even non-coulrophobes.
- Killer Party starts as Wacky Fratboy Hijinx and later morphs into a Slasher Movie.
- The Killing Tree
- King of the Zombies uses Uncle Tomfoolery and mystery/suspense in about equal measure.
- Kiss Me Quick!: In this fleshy comedy-horror romp, a Mad Scientist aids an alien who has been teleported to Earth on a quest to find the perfect female specimen.
- Knights of Badassdom is pretty much a straight, if black, comedy. There are slasher bits to it and demonic possession, while people die in droves, but this is done entirely for the absurd humour of a LARP session going crazy after accidentally summoning a demon.
- Krampus is about a Dysfunctional Family celebrating Christmas who get besieged by the titular Krampus and his minions. The main characters are textbook Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonists (particularly Howard and Linda, who bear more than a passing resemblance to Burt and Heather Gummer from Tremors), and while the very real threat that the monsters pose is played straight, the fact that said monsters are demonic versions of old-fashioned toys (like Jacks-in-the-box and teddy bears) and Christmas iconography (like gingerbread men and elves) makes it hard to not smile at the sight of them wreaking havoc. The bloodless deaths and PG-13 rating help.
- Lake Placid: It's very tongue-in-cheek for a killer croc film (including such highlights as Betty White cursing at the cops for "mistreating" the crocodile), but not a lot of reviewers seem to have noticed this.
- The Last Circus
- Lavalantula
- Leprechaun
- Lesbian Vampire Killers
- Life After Beth
- A Little Bit Zombie: A more comedy-oriented zombie movie about a guy slowly zombifying.
- Little Evil
- Little Monsters (2019)
- The Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
- Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
- Long Pigs
- The Lost Boys
- Love at First Bite
- M3GAN
- Malignant
- The Mansion veers between bloody horror and sight gags, and plays up the stereotypical nature of the ten students being killed off.
- Men in Black, to the point that even the horror scenes are quasi-comedic.
- Mom and Dad: The film is about a signal that causes parents in America to try to kill their own children, but some of these instances make use of Soundtrack Dissonance to give a darkly-comedic edge to the violence. It also features a typical over-the-top performance from Nicolas Cage.
- The Monster, a silent film starring Lon Chaney, is one of the earliest examples of this trope, mixing the geniunely scary Mad Scientist played by Chaney with the bumbling misadventures of Johnny Goodlittle, who winds up trapped in Chaney's Old, Dark House.
- Monster in the Closet
- Monster Man
- Mr. Vampire
- Murder Party is a film about a group of homicidal Mad Artists who, despite being a bunch of insane idiots, fancy themselves as criminal masterminds and pure horror material. However by the second half of the movie, the story becomes too twisted and surreal.
- My Best Friend is a Vampire
- My Name is Bruce, as a parody and homage to the Evil Dead franchise, continues its trend of focusing more on comedy than horror.
- National Lampoon's Class Reunion has a lot of comedy that outnumbers the horror elements (if there are any, it is a National Lampoon movie after all).
- Nekrotronic
- A Nightmare on Elm Street began to progress into this as the series went on. The first two films are mostly straight horror films (well, okay, not so straight in the case of the second one) with only the occasional wisecracks from Freddy Krueger, the third had more of a balance between comedy and horror (but still focusing more on horror), and later films became more comedic as the series went on, to the point where the sixth film, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare is essentially a somewhat gory cartoon. The seventh film, Wes Craven's New Nightmare, jettisoned the comedy elements and brought the focus back to horror, a focus that was shared by Freddy vs. Jason and the remake - Freddy is still wisecracking, but his cracks are now played more for horror than laughs.
- Night of the Comet
- Night of the Dribbler leans HEAVILY on the comedy side.
- Night Of The Living Bread
- Night of the Living Dorks
- Office Uprising
- The Old Dark House (1963) is much more comedic than the 1932 version.
- Once Bitten
- One Cut of the Dead: The first act is a played-straight schlocky No Budget horror sequence, but the next two acts readdress what you've already seen for comedy.
- Parents
- The People Under the Stairs
- Planet Terror: This one is more comedic and lightheared than its companion Death Proof, with a lot of hilarious deaths.
- Popcorn
- Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead
- Premutos: The Fallen Angel: As a tribute to the aforementioned Braindead, the balance is a given. It leans a little more towards comedy of the slapstick variety, and very little (if anything) is Played for Drama.
- President's Day
- Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is an Affectionate Parody of the Jane Austen classic and so contains many funny re-workings of the original scenes - Darcy's first proposal and subsequent argument with Lizzie is now a kung-fu fight between them for example. But the horror elements are played pretty straight - as the zombies are still quite gruesome and becoming a Zombie Infectee is played for drama rather than comedy.
- Prom Night III: The Last Kiss is even more light-hearted than the previous film, and most of the deaths are played for laughs instead of scares.
- Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
- Ravenous (1999) is for the most part a straight horror, getting into works with Wendigo myth and lots of gore. However, it has just as much of a (very dark) humour to it, the cast is a comedic group of rejects, witty dialogues follow throughout the whole thing and there is one famous Mood Whiplash - silly music included - done deliberately for the sake of easing the audience after particularly tense moment.
- Ready or Not (2019) treats the gruesome deaths in it as Bloody Hilarious mistakes and deconstructs the Hunting the Most Dangerous Game plot.
- Re-Animator mixes extreme gore with dry, witty one-liners, with some deaths that are Played for Drama and others that cross the line twice (not to mention the "giving head" scene). Even the Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus for the film noted that it "perfectly mix[ed] humor and horror."
- Renfield (2023)
- The Return of the Living Dead series
- Return of the Scarecrow: The majority of the movie's focus is on the antics of various townsfolk while Virgil is running around with who he thinks is Wyatt, but is really a killer scarecrow.
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Fitting, since it's a parody of B-movies (they even lampshade it in the opening tune). It's remembered more for its sexual innuendoes and homoeroticism than for the horror elements.
- RSVP is a straight dark comedy, with Jason Mewes as one of the secondary leads, and an invoked homage to Rope.
- Satan's Cheerleaders has a wildly uneven tone, but the conclusion makes it apparent that the director was aiming for horror to be dominant. This is in spite of the movie's tagline ("Funnier than The Omen...Scarier than Silent Movie") making it sound like an out-and-out horror spoof.
- Satanic Panic (2019)
- Saturday the 14th
- Scared Stiff, starring Martin and Lewis.
- The Scary Movie series. Mostly spoofs horror movies, except for some of the more recent sequels which predominately spoof sci-fi movies.
- School's Out Forever
- Scream is practically the Trope Codifier for the horror-dominant variety. The comedy comes from the characters lampshading the various horror tropes and being Genre Savvy. But the deaths are still gruesome and the comedy is pretty much shooed out in the third act.
- Secrets In The Hot Spring
- The Seventh Curse
- Severance (2006)
- Sheitan combines anarchic, knockabout comedy with nerve-shredding suspense, jet-black humour and bloody horror.
- Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th. Predictably, since it's an outright horror spoof.
- The Signal (2007) is composed of three vignettes. The middle one is mostly a black comedy (mostly) while also showing us the first signs that things are even weirder than they seem.
- The Slaughter
- Slaughterhouse Rulez
- Slaxx: Most of the humor is front-loaded. The first half is a mix of a Slasher Movie and a satire of retail work and corporate "social responsibility", but after the halfway point, only the goofy nature of the villain — a sentient, murderous pair of jeans — keeps it a comedy.
- Slither, a film about alien brain-slugs turning a bunch of small-town bumpkins into zombies. The graphic gore and visual effects come packaged with jokes about marriage, the characters, and the infection.
- Some Guy Who Kills People where the Black Comedy comes the reactions of characters attempting to cope with a series of bizarre murders.
- Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
- Stage Fright (2014)
- Strippers Vs. Werewolves
- Student Bodies
- The Foo Fighters movie Studio 666, which, while mostly comedic, still delivers some gory death scenes.
- The Stuff is a Satire of 1980s consumer culture in which a Blob Monster Puppeteer Parasite is able to turn humans into zombies because it is also an Impossibly Delicious Food that they just can't get enough of and which Corrupt Corporate Executives are happy to put on the market, leaving it to eccentric heroes (a greedy industrial spy, a Right-Wing Militia Fanatic, a cookie mogul/martial artist, etc.) to try and save the day. Writer-director Larry Cohen noted that New World Pictures expected a straight horror movie, and when they didn't get that still marketed it as such, giving no hint to its comic elements.
- Suburban Gothic
- Tales of Halloween
- Teen Wolf
- Teeth: The only real humor is the absurd premise and some potential Narm. All else considered, it's played about as straight as you can get for a killer vagina movie.
- TerrorVision
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is very comedic compared to the original. Hell, one poster has the villains posing exactly like The Breakfast Club.
- Thanks Killing, a film about a foulmouthed turkey demon murdering teenagers on Thanksgiving.
- Theatre of Blood is a Vincent Price production, so Camp is all but guaranteed, with the casualness of the increasingly-gory murders underscored by a deadpan humour and snide one-liners from everyone.
- The Third Saturday In October Part I
- The Third Saturday In October Part V
- This Is the End: The Biblical Apocalypse is strictly played for laughs, with small moments of horror sprinkled in throughout, yet even these scenes have a punchline to them, including one part where a man getting decapitated leads to an impromptu game of soccer.
- Tomie: Unlimited
- Too Many Cooks is, at its core, a surreal Overly-Long Gag, but as more unsettling and mind-screwy elements are thrown in, the question of "when will it end?" becomes a much more urgent one. And yet, the whole time, it's still pretty easy to laugh, given the sheer ridiculousness.
- Three... Extremes: Anthology Film of three horror shorts; the first is a horror-dominant horror comedy, the second is quite balanced and the third is straight horror.
- All three films in the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy:
- Shaun of the Dead. The Zombie Apocalypse is played almost entirely for laughs. The only real horror comes from when the zombies make their true presence known.
- Hot Fuzz. It's a comedy, but most of the film is an homage to slasher flicks and there are some bona fide gory bits in there. It's something of a three-way hybrid, among a Badass Cop movie, Comedy and Slasher. The slasher elements also segue into Town with a Dark Secret. The climax reveal that most of the town is in on the killings, and all victims were killed because they hurt the town's chances to win a best village contest is equal parts terrifying and ridiculous.
- The World's End. It starts out with 5 friends in their late 30s dragged into redoing a pub crawl they failed to complete in high school, right until they drunkenly stumble upon an alien invasion attempting to take over the town with an Assimilation Plot. The title refers to the last pub in the crawl (which the group never made it to the first time), but also to The End of the World as We Know It.
- The Toxic Avenger is the landmark for Troma's schtick of making absurdly-violent fight scenes and deaths cross over from being disgusting to hilarious.
- Tokyo Gore Police - While the movie is full of Gorn and Body Horror, it's still very tongue-in-cheek.
- Tragedy Girls. It's a Black Comedy satire, with most of the deaths being so absurdly over-the-top that they circle back around into being funny, especially with the Villain Protagonists cracking jokes as they commit their crimes. However, the effect their crimes have on good people isn't glossed over, their sheer Lack of Empathy is unnerving when it's not crossing the line twice, and the prom night massacre is genuinely horrifying.
- Transylmania
- Transylvania 6-5000 - Is about two tabloid reporters who travel to modern-day Transylvania to uncover the truth behind Frankenstein sightings. Along the way, they encounter other horror film staples — a mummy, a werewolf, a vampire — each with a twist.
- Tremors. The first film was more horror dominant, but every installment after that struck the balance.
- Trick or Treats: The movie is quite comedic for the most part, with the tone shifting to horror at the climax.
- The Tripper
- Troll (1986)
- Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. It's a straight Deconstructive Parody that flips the Hillbilly Horrors genre on its head by making the hillbillies the heroes. Even the most gory deaths are Bloody Hilarious and not really played for horror.
- Tusk. It's an intentionally ridiculous story based on an intentionally ridiculous premise, but that doesn't stop it from being genuinely creepy and body horror-tastic.
- Undead, a campy Australian Affectionate Parody of classic zombie and sci-fi B-movies.
- Vampire in Brooklyn is one of the 90s Eddie Murphy's vehicles to play more serious roles. Focus on "more" rather than "serious".
- Vampire's Kiss
- Vamps
- Van Helsinki
- Versus
- Visitor Q is a very Black Comedy with some horror elements.
- Wasting Away, a zombie film from the zombies' point of view.
- We Have a Ghost
- Werewolves Within
- What a Carve Up!
- What We Do in the Shadows is a Mockumentary film that plays with the hilarious notion of vampires living in modern-day New Zealand and making fun of all the tropes associated with vampires. The only real horror comes from the blood, and even that is played for laughs.
- Willy's Wonderland
- The Wolf of Snow Hollow
- WolfCop
- You Might Be the Killer
- You're Next. It's a Deconstruction of many horror tropes, especially the Final Girl, that happens to be thick with Black Comedy, yet it plays the horror aspects much more straight.
- Young Frankenstein, an Affectionate Parody of the Hollywood classic.
- Zombeavers most definitely has a silly premise, and even when things get dark towards the end, the narmy shots help relieve the tension.
- The Zombie Apocalypse in Apartment 14F
- Zombie Cop
- Zombieland. Even the zombies are mostly Played for Laughs, the focus being less on the horror of the Zombie Apocalypse and more on the protagonists' displays of badassery and one-liners as they kick the zombies' asses.
- Zombieland: Double Tap follows suit, as it's even more focused on the characters rather than the zombie menace.
- Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!
Literature
- American Psycho: the book leans more towards horror and the film more towards Black Comedy. This is one of the few comedic works to feature a Complete Monster as the protagonist.
- The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde is a parody of Haunted House stories.
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a Comic Fantasy, but it turns out to run on Lightmare Fuel once Augustus Gloop falls into the chocolate river and faces the threat of being turned into fudge. Adaptations may go Lighter and Softer or Darker and Edgier with regards to the tone and look of the story and the fates and personalities of the characters (the darkest version is the 2013 stage musical, in which several characters may or may not receive Death by Adaptation and Willy Wonka is Ambiguously Evil), but it is always comedy-centric.
- In Creed, wryly reflective narration pits cynical paparazzo Joe Creed against a murderous demonic cult. While Creed's audacious exploits and occasional undignified mishaps are drolly presented, a grim humour prevails, albeit with rather less levity, when the cult's macabre tendencies are revealed. Mention of their leader's ritual child murders is played entirely straight.
- Dan Shamble, Zombie P.I. is a Monster Mash detective series that makes no secret about it being an excuse for humor.
- Some Discworld, notably The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents and Hogfather
- The Dresden Files tends heavily towards the horror end of things. Most of the comedy is in the form of Harry wisecracking to save in his sanity in the face of soul-destroying horror and almost certain death. His adversaries range from utter bastards to Nightmare Fuel.
- Eden Green contains body horror and mass death, as well as moments of self-effacing Deadpan Snark from the title character.
- The John Dies at the End series by David Wong:
- John Dies at the End is pretty balanced, and it's not unusual to find comedy and horror on the same page. This is partly because the protagonists seem to use humor as a coping mechanism, and partly due to the sheer ridiculousness of the things they encounter, like the wigmonsters, or the ghost that possesses an entire fridge full of meat to give itself a corporeal body.
- This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It features a more cohesive story, helping to heighten the horror angle, and also delves a bit more into the ill effects that being a supernatural sleuth/deadbeat can take on a person.
- What The Hell Did I Just Read: A Novel of Cosmic Horror keeps the humor but goes Darker and Edgier by making the worsening behavioral health disorders of the protagonists' an important part of the plot.
- If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe
- It. Heavily horror based, but still has some comedic elements thanks to the wisecracking protagonists and the (creepily comedic) presence of Pennywise.
- Gil's All Fright Diner is a Monster Mash featuring vampires, werewolves, zombies, witches, ghosts, and ghouls. And every one of them is incompetent.
- Goosebumps. However, both the film and its sequel are a Genre Throwback to the books, with more comedy than horror.
- Is This A Zombie?. Heavily on the comedy side.
- My Best Friend's Exorcism
- The Postmodern Adventures Of Kill Team One is tonally schizophrenic with regards to this. Villains range from incompetent parodies to exemplars of raw Nightmare Fuel. Regardless of the level of horror involved, the Blood Knight protagonist never seems impressed, and is usually bewildered by the terrified reactions of the normal people around him.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events is shockingly dark for a children's series, but still focuses mainly on Black Comedy rather than horror.
- The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was: A fairy tale in which the protagonist tries to find out what fear is and is confronted with a lot of creepy events and creatures. Yet, at the same time, his total lack of knowledge about being scared also provides many funny moments.
Live-Action TV
- The Addams Family is the other definitive horror parody. It intentionally clashes horror characters with a Nuclear Family sitcom, mostly just using the occasional jump scare from the carnivorous plants as a breather from the comedy.
- American Horror Story, most notably in the third season Coven, frequently likes to dabble in the campier side of horror, which shouldn't be a surprise given that its creator Ryan Murphy also made Glee, Nip/Tuck, and Popular. By and large, though, the more horrific elements were played terrifyingly straight.
- Angel: Although slightly more horror-focused than Buffy, Angel still follows the Joss Whedon blend of horror and comedy.
- Ash vs. Evil Dead picks up where Army of Darkness left off by focusing on the action hijinks of Ash Williams, now thoroughly a blowhard loser who nevertheless fights horrifying monsters.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: One reason Joss Whedon wanted to do it as a series was that the movie had been more comedy-dominant than he hoped.
- The Charmed (1998) episode 'Chick Flick' features psycho killers being released from Slasher Movies to attack the sisters. The attempts to kill them are played entirely for comedy - as the sisters can't use their powers on the killers, forcing the Action Girls to essentially behave like stereotypical Damsels in Distress. Piper also has a moment of Genre Blindness.
"I get stalked by psycho killers and I hide in the shower?"
- Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is usually described as a darker and more serious take on the Sabrina the Teenage Witch franchise. It has a much deeper plot than the previous works in the franchise, and its antagonists are definitely a lot scarier than before. However, it is still very much tongue-in-cheek, and has lots of undeniably goofy moments.
- Dead Set: Most of the laughs come from the dark absurdity of the premise and the dialogue of the cast, many of whom are Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist types or The Ditz (Justified by the reality show setting). However, the main character is mostly serious, the premise is Played for Drama and once people start dying most of the laughs are in the form of Satire, Black Comedy, and Refuge in Audacity (zombie Davina McCall!) rather than the witty dialogue and jokes.
- Doctor Who has slid all over this spectrum as part of its general Genre Roulette nature with some individual seasons being rather unbalanced (Season 22 is heavy on the horror, Season 16 is rather heavy on the comedy) but belongs here overall - partly because of law of averages but mostly because the series is very good at being horrific and hilariously funny simultaneously when it's at its best.
- Jam is a strange TV example of this, being a surrealist sketch horror-comedy, that leans HEAVILY to the horror side. It is designed to make you feel horribly, horribly uncomfortable.
- Kolchak: The Night Stalker: Due to the idiosyncratic nature of its protagonist, who walked from the mostly comedic scenes of the newsroom and witness interviews to the mostly horror scenes of investigations and monsters without changing his style one bit.
- The League of Gentlemen
- Li'l Horrors, an Australian children's comedy puppetry television series about young monsters attending an All-Ghouls School.
- Pretty Freekin Scary, a Disney show about a teenager who dies and is resurrected by the Grim Reaper of the Underworld, and becomes her assistant.
- Psychoville
- Santa Clarita Diet combines gory zombie horror with screwball domestic comedy, and practically every single death is Played for Laughs.
- Scream Queens (2015) is an extremely campy series that, while it can be suitably gory and violent to fill the needs of horror fans, has a shockingly low body count for an entry into the slasher genre, as it spends more time focusing on the snarky comebacks and utter ridiculousness of its characters rather than gore effects.
- Shadow Chasers
- Stan Against Evil follows much the same formula as Evil Dead; Horrid monsters and violence, with a ton of comedy.
- Stranger Things
- Supernatural. The entire character roster are a bunch of snarky bastards who can't resist making wise-ass comments all the time, and the humor is largely found in the absurdity of some deaths and the meta-fictional episodes. It still never manages to upstage the genuine horror and drama or eclipse it.
- Tales from the Crypt: Mostly the TV series and its two theatrical movies, but the stories from EC Comics upon which they are based count too.
- WandaVision pinballs between a loving, humorous sitcom homage and uneasy Psychological Horror without missing a beat.
Music
- Now Eat
- The music of the Insane Clown Posse can at times get downright chilling in its depiction of various horrors. Other times, however, their Monster Clown personas are Played for Laughs in songs filled with Bloody Hilarious violence.
- Eminem's The Slim Shady LP and The Marshall Mathers LP contain strong horror elements, but they're cartoonish, filled with outrageous rhyme schemes, over-the-top tales of woe and ludicrous, uncool violence. If you're genuinely scared by "My Name Is" or "Kill You", you're probably a parent or a senator. The comedy gets pitch dark for his Muse Abuse Anti-Love Song "Kim", but it still features good jokes. His 2009 Horrorcore Concept Album Relapse is a lot darker, using Slim to symbolise Eminem's drug addiction and our ghoulish relationship with the famous in a way that edges into Tear Jerker, but is still tongue-in-cheek more than it aims to be scary. Eminem has said that if you can listen to his songs and not laugh at them (even the seemingly serious ones), you don't understand what his music is about.
- The Misfits are the progenitors of horror punk, and reference old horror movies in a tongue-in-cheek fashion for the sake of the aesthetic, mixing these lyrics and Hardcore Punk songs with crooned Frank Sinatra-style vocals. Many of their lyrics can still genuinely be pretty gnarly, though.
Podcast
- The Alexandria Archives, while having a framing story that leans more to the comedic side, features a more or less self-contained horror story per episode. A few of these stories are quite lighthearted and harmless, but many of them are quite horrific and, on rare occasions, include truly disturbing elements.
- Jar of Rebuke: a Midwestern gothic horror comedy mystery with a slight slice-of-life twist. The series gets darker over time, but the comedy remains even as it gets dryer. It follows immortal, amnesiac cryptozoologist Dr. Jred Hel as they work to remember their forgotten past.
- The Last Podcast on the Left: A podcast that goes over true crime topics such as cults and serial killers and supernatural events like cryptids, hauntings, and UFOs, all the while cracking jokes and treating the horrible people involved with all of the respect they deserve: None.
- Less is Morgue. This show has an overall light-hearted and silly tone, despite its main characters being a flesh-eating ghoul and a peppy dead person, who regularly encounter monsters, murderous maniacs, and Eldritch Abominations.
- The Monster Hunters is an outright parody of vintage horror. Its genuinely frightening moments are few and far between.
- Pretending to Be People: An Actual Play podcast that draws most of its humor from the interactions of the players, while having a horror-laden plot.
- Welcome to Night Vale: The podcast's style of absurdism alternates frequently between comedy and horror in just about every episode, and the overall podcast doesn't really show a strong preference either way.
Tabletop Games
- Die Laughing leans more towards the comedic side, with its very informal tone of writing throughout the book, the frequent, joyous use of horror movie tropes, and the odd Precision F-Strike.
- Dinosaurs Attack!
- Mortasheen
- Sla Industries
- They Came From Beneath The Sea!: The game itself tries to adopt a roughly balanced level between its horrifying and comedic elements, and advises the Storyteller in sidebars to adjust the emphasis on horror or comedy to suit the tastes of their players.
Theatre
- The Hatchetfield series by Team Starkid (consisting of the stage musicals The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals and Black Friday followed by the Web Video series Nightmare Time) is an homage to horror comedy in musical format a la Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Show, veering from the more comedic end of the scale with TGWDLM to the dramatic end with Black Friday (and individual episodes of Nightmare Time tending to go back and forth).
- The Lieutenant of Inishmore
- Little Shop of Horrors
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. There's some levity given it's a musical, but ultimately is still about a killing barber whose victims are used by his landlady in meat pies - and the woman turns out to be quite the Manipulative Bastard.
Video Games
- Baldi's Basics in Education and Learning is a Survival Horror game taking place in an intentionally terrible edutainment game from the 90s.
- The Binding of Isaac has its disturbing moments, but it also has plenty of puns and fart and poop jokes as well.
- The Coffin Of Andy And Leyley tells the story of two emotionally unstable siblings who gaslight and manipulate each other into murder and cannibalism. It's played just as much for Black Comedy as it is for horror.
- Cruelty Squad has many genuinely horrific Body Horror and Surreal Horror moments, but also derives a lot of humor from its satirical skewering of capitalism, its bizarre world and morality, and the Black Comedy comments of your employer.
- Dead Rising. Outside of the earliest stages of the first game before Frank West levels up and gains new skills, the zombies are barely a threat despite their enormous numbers, especially once you discover or unlock the more powerful weapons that can dispatch dozens of them easily. If you're doing so while dressed as a toy robot or a ballerina, all the better. The human villains, on the other hand, are played straight. Even at their most comedic, they're often Tragic Monsters with very depressing backstories behind their outlandish behavior, and the central Myth Arc of the series is a viciously satirical one in which blame for the Zombie Apocalypse is laid directly at the feet of ravenous American consumers. Finding ways to create Mood Whiplash between the serious storyline and the ridiculous (and often optional) physical comedy is a key source of the games' humor.
- Death Road to Canada is a Lighter and Softer take on a zombie story between quirky characters and traits, a jaunty soundtrack, and even amusing death quotes if a character is Devoured by the Horde. It has the occassional Mood Whiplash back into horror.
- Deltarune leans more on the comedy side than Undertale in the surface level interactions but there's a dark intrigue and themes of existential horror running throughout. This is best exemplified by the character of Spamtom G. Spamton, a literally insane crazy salesman whose rantings pinball between hilarious and deeply unsettling.
- Killer Frequency: Officially described as a horror-comedy by the developers, this game's tone is an ode to not only horror films of the 1980s, but its affectionate parodies like the Scream film series. The serial killer plot involving the Whistling Man is consistently taken very seriously, but some of the scenarios, avoidable deaths, and lively personalities of the callers range from cheeky running gags to Gallows Humor. The player can allow the game's protagonist, Forrest Nash, to engage in Bond One Liners if they fail to save one of their callers.
- Compared to the original Kinder, Re:Kinder has the same dark premise of toddlers fighting to escape a town turned deadly and avoid gruesome deaths, but has a lot more emphasis on humor. In particular, Big Bad Yuuichi is now Laughably Evil, spouting references, non-sequitors, and wisecracks left and right.
- Pizza Tower starts out as pure comedy, but shifts slightly towards horror with the boss of the fourth floor, Fake Peppino, with the fifth and final floor having a bit more of a horror focus than the rest of the game.
- Plants vs. Zombies is where you fight off a Zombie Apocalypse Played for Laughs by planting anthropomorphic mutant plants on your lawn. The zombies, even when their desire is explicity to eat your brains, are far too comical to classify the game as horror.
- Resident Evil 4: Between Leon being a smartass, extremely goofy villains, and generally absurd enemy encounters, it's is easily the silliest game in the franchise. Still, it's got copious usage of Body Horror and Jump Scare, and there are some legitimately terrifying moments.
- Shadow Hearts series is a sequel to a Survival Horror game Koudelka, that grows increasingly more light-hearted as the series goes on. Shadow Hearts: Covenant in particular almost perfectly balances horror and comedy, and constantly goes back and forth between dealing with the zaniest characters possible (wrestling superhero vampire, anyone?) and fighting demons and otherwordly horrors.
- Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion is framed as an Affectionate Parody of cheap indie horror games reliant on Jump Scares, with a Cute Ghost Girl host and "scares" in the form of goofy haunted house-style wooden pop-outs... then quickly develops with actual scares of its own once it becomes clear that not all the presented threats are harmless, including a menagerie of monsters with graphic death scenes. Even past that point, however, there's still a mix of lightheartedness and deliberate absurdity to keep it from becoming a full-blown horror game, largely thanks to Spooky herself being a mix of adorably snarky and genuinely unsettling.
- Undertale has a quirky sense of humour not unlike EarthBound (1994), and similarly gets increasingly terrifying as you progress. While the neutral and pacifist routes balance the two, the No Mercy route is very horror dominant.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa
- Higurashi: When They Cry starts off each chapter as a lighthearted Slice of Life comedy, until someone dies mysteriously. From there, things quickly spiral out of control, usually culminating in the gruesome murder of several major characters.
Web Animation
- Alfred's Playhouse: Likely intended to be in the middle, but the backstory surrounding the series creation (as well as what the creator herself became as person) and the overarching plot of the series make it lean more towards horror.
- CliffSide
- Confinement is an Affectionate Parody of the SCP Foundation, which plays most of the death and violence found in its source material for Black Comedy.
- Dead End
- ENA
- Hellaverse
- Happy Tree Friends
- Humans-B-Gone!
- Internecion Cube
- Let's Split Up
- Though Little Runmo has a ton of Surreal Humor such as the Meatbal Man scene and the game show in the Temp King’s stomach, it also features a surprising amount of Surreal Horror, such as the scene where Runmo quite graphically (albeit bloodlessly) rips off Jumpmo’s dead body’s head thinking it’s a 1-Up and the following scene where the entire universe breaks apart.
- Lumpy Touch
- Mari-Kari
- MeatCanyon
- Monster Lab (2021)
- Murder Drones
- Pamtri: Which side is more leaned on depends on the video, but even the most comedic videos generally have a very unsettling atmosphere to them. The Stylistic Suck nature of the videos can serve to heighten both the comedy and the horror.
- Salad Fingers starts out as pretty straightforward (very) Black Comedy, but slides further and further into horror as it goes on.
- Skibidi Toilet Series
- Spooky Month: Rapid-Fire Comedy (some of it Black) involving two kids in Halloween costumes running around celebrating the titular "Spooky Month". Horror elements are present in the background and occasionally take the forefront.
Webcomics
- Awful Hospital
- The Bikini Bottom Horror
- Camp Counselor Jason, being an Affectionate Parody of the Friday the 13th and other horror film series.
- Erma is a comic about a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl that plays horror movie scenarios for laughs.
- Frankie and Stein
- Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name
- Homestuck, comedy dominant, but whiplashes so hard you can break your neck. This is especially evident during ACT 5 Part 2.
- The Last Halloween
- Mieruko-chan is full of tense and horrifying moments, but also milks a lot of comedy out of Miko's struggles to keep a poker face during her encounters with "Them" and the contrast with her ordinary life.
- Nightmarish
- Silent Horror: Several genuinely horrific moments often topped off with a moral. But there are several horrific moments Played for Laughs.
- Sluggy Freelance
- Teaching Fear
Web Original
- ClickHole is mostly comedic, but sometimes has very dark articles that get pretty close to the middle, which is impressive for a satire of Buzzfeed.
- Feet In Smoke, an essay by John Jeremiah Sullivan, about an accident featured on Rescue 911. It starts out in the Horror territory and swiftly dives into Comedy after Jeremiah and his family learn his brother will live, which is where the episode in question ends. This is Lampshaded by the Author
"The experience went from tragedy to tragicomedy to outright farce on a sliding continuum, so it's hard to pinpoint just when one let on to another."
- My Property Isn't Normal
- Most works found on the SCP Foundation wiki are horror-drama stories played straight, taking themselves very seriously for the most part. However, some stories may contain surprisingly tongue-in-cheek or even goofy humor; while the Joke articles are light-hearted parodies which spoof the SCP Wiki's more serious content for absurdist Black Comedy.
Web Videos
- Board James, in Mr. Bucket and Dream Phone. Season 3 becomes Darker and Edgier and more horror dominant.
- Boots to Reboots
- Dad
- Each installment of the Don't Hug Me I'm Scared series is mostly comedy with one scene of pure horror plus some mildly creepy imagery, with the exception of the last two, which are closer to the middle of the spectrum.
- Generation Loss starts off more comedic and wacky, but still has a few creepy moments. The end of the second episode and the entire third episode becomes pure horror
- Gilbert Garfield
- Lasagna Cat is mostly comedy-dominant during the first phase but shifts closer to the middle in the second season before diving into full horror dominance with the only humorous parts being the premise during the finale.
- Mushroom Land
- Pizza Time Pizza starts mostly comedy and shifts more into horror.
- Mario Party DS Anti Piracy, due to the final video.
- RedLetterMedia. Yes, the Star Wars reviews. Mr. Plinkett's humorous deconstruction of the Star Wars prequels is occasionally broken up by sequences revealing that he's a serial killer with women locked in his cellar.
- Sex House: It's from The Onion, so it's to be expected.
- Sponge Bob Conspiracy (also made by alex bale) starts normal (and comedy). but in newer videos it shifts to horror where we found that the muse is sercetly making spongebob theories and forces alex to read and narrate them.
- Shaye Saint John
Western Animation
- Courage the Cowardly Dog is mostly a slapstick comedy cartoon with some added supernatural creepiness.
- Dead End: Paranormal Park.
- Extreme Ghostbusters takes its horror elements more seriously than The Real Ghostbusters, but still has plenty of humor thanks to the snarky heroes.
- Garfield's Halloween Adventure plays its horror elements surprisingly straight, but it's still ultimately Garfield, which means that it has plenty of snark and slapstick to go around.
- Gravity Falls. Though for a (mostly) comedic kids' show, it can get pretty damn terrifying. Appearances with the main characters are comedy dominant, though appearances with Bill Cipher are horror dominant.
- The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy began as a dark comedy, before transitioning into absurdist comedy with some horror elements has the series went on.
- Invader Zim
- LEGO Star Wars: Terrifying Tales leans heavily on the comedy side.
- Little Demon
- The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack
- Over the Garden Wall has a tone leaning more towards horror, but the actual story tends to lend itself more to comedy, as more often than not the ending reveals that there was never an actual threat despite the creepy overtones.
- The Owl House
- Pibby
- The Real Ghostbusters is a little Lighter and Softer than the first movie, but still has some scary elements.
- Rick and Morty
- Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated. Of all the Scooby-Doo incarnations, this is the one that takes the horror elements most seriously, with the usual criminals in costumes gradually being replaced by an Ancient Conspiracy built around an Eldritch Abomination; while at the same time deconstructing many of the series' well-worn tropes for both laughs and drama.
- The Shivering Truth really depends on which season you're watching. Season one leans more towards comedy, while season 2 leans more towards horror. Both are still a mix of both though.
- The Simpsons:
- Treehouse of Horror is an annual series of non-canon Black Comedy Halloween Episodes with 3 segments each, usually parodying horror films. However, some segments can be genuinely scary.
- "Halloween of Horror"
- "Thanksgiving of Horror"
- Sprite Fright is about Asshole Victims being killed by cutesy Sprites. There are a couple of tense scenes, but most of the deaths are too absurd to be scary.
- Teenage Euthanasia: It centers around a young girl who unwittingly brought her mother back from the dead by resurrecting her as a zombie.
- Villainous
