The 15 Best Horror-Comedies Of All Time

Think back to the last time you watched a really scary, extremely graphic horror movie with a bunch of friends, or in a crowded movie theater. And recall the audience’s reaction when the big fright moment happened, whether it was a perfectly timed jump-scare or a clearly shown dismemberment or murder—most of them laughed, right? Not the kind of chuckles that come from Judd Apatow films, though, but, rather, a certain defensive, if-I-don’t-laugh-at-this-I-might-have-a-heart-attack response.

That’s only natural. Human nature teaches us to fend off possible traumas by laughing, the easiest way to show others, and ourselves, that everything’s all good, even when it’s not. The horror movies tap into that truth better than any other form of entertainment, because, really, what’s the experience of buying a ticket to see a slasher flick if not an excuse to raise one’s adrenaline?

Oftentimes, genre filmmakers erase this blurred line of frightening-versus-funny altogether and make what’s simply known as the horror-comedy, stylistic mash-ups that afford viewers the opportunities to both shriek and howl in equal measure. Two new examples of this subgenre are set to hit theaters tomorrow: The Cabin in the Woods, the bigger and better of the two, co-written by Joss Whedon and director Drew Goddard, and music video director Joseph Kahn’s hyperactive, kitchen sink romp Detention, about 1990s-obsessed high school students dealing with a masked killer named Cinderhella, time travel, and peer pressure.

Only one of this week’s new entries makes it onto our definitive list of The 15 Best Horror-Comedies Of All Time. It’s a ballsy move, for sure, putting a movie that hasn’t even opened yet amidst a “greatest ever” countdown, but, trust us, the flick in question is really that good.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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15. Ghostbusters (1984)

Director: Ivan Reitman
Stars: Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton

It’s never a bad thing when a horror movie works just as well for grown-ass men as it does for pre-teen boys—there’s very little in life that’s more heartwarming than a father sitting on a couch next to his son while monsters and evil are infecting the TV screen before them. Ghostbusters, Ivan Reitman’s supernatural matching of the 1980s’ best comedic talents (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis), is just that kind of ageless amusement.

The aforementioned funnymen are all in rare form as paranormal investigators getting paid to eradicate Manhattan’s nastiest ghosts, many of which provide Ghostbusters with its craziest moments of laughter. Slimer, for instance, munches down on hot dogs while scaring the piss out of Murray; the absurdly funny-looking Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, for its part, terrorizes New York City streets with the destructive qualities of Godzilla. And who can forget the cartoonish panther-on-steroids that chases Rick Moranis around a hotel and into the Big Apple’s busiest blocks?

14. Night of the Creeps (1986)

Director: Fred Dekker
Stars: Jason Lively, Jill Whitlow, Tom Atkins, Steve Marshall, Wally Taylor, David Paymer

Back in October 2009, fanatics who know a superlative ’80s horror flick when they see one all breathed a huge sigh of relief when writer-director Fred Dekker’s Night of the Creeps finally arrived on DVD and Blu-ray; before then, the only home video option was the dated VHS from 1986.

And why were fans so tired of waiting? Because Night of the Creeps is a B-movie mash-up of the best kind, cramming together zombie movie tropes, old drive-in-cinema styled science fiction, and dashes of slasher flick butchery into a snappy horror-comedy concoction.

Set around a college campus, Dekker’s nutty gem shows what happens when slug-like alien parasites start turning frat guys and Summa Cum Laude geeks into killer, slow-moving cadavers. As for the humor, look no further than ’80s genre staple Tom Atkins, whose angry cop character, Detective Cameron, alerts a sorority house full of excited chicks prepping for their dress-up formal via an immortal exchange with one of the girls:

Cameron: “I got good news and bad news, girl. The good news is, your dates are here.”
Sorority girl: “What’s the bad news?”
Cameron: “They’re dead.”

13. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Director: Charles Barton
Stars: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney, Jr., Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange, Lenore Aubert, Jane Randolph, Frank Ferguson

For folks raised on black-and-white movies and classic comedy, what could be better than pairing Bud Abbott and Lou Costello with the icons of 1930s/’40s-era, Universal Pictures’ horror? A movie in which the Marx Brothers rescue Los Angeles from Godzilla’s reign of gigantic terror, perhaps?

No worries, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is more than adequate—to be precise, it’s an undisputed classic. Minus the O.G. Frankenstein’s monster, Boris Karloff (Frank is played by Glenn Strange here), Abbott and Costello’s horror-comedy hoot welcomes the venerable Bela Lugosi (star of 1931’s Dracula) and Lon Chaney, Jr. (he of the 1941 classic The Wolf Man) into the Jersey-bred duo’s world of harmless slapstick punchlines and intelligently written situational comedy.

Wisely, Lugosi, Chaney, and Strange never break from their serious-minded character traits, each of them treating Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein as they would any credible frightening monster movie sequel. Think about it: It’s not as if they were going to be able to out-funny Bud Abbott, comedy’s all-time greatest straight man, and Lou Costello, the king of sweet buffoonery.

12. The Cabin in the Woods (2012)

Director: Drew Goddard
Stars: Chris Hemsworth, Kristen Connolly, Anna Hutchinson, Fran Kranz, Jesse Williams, Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford, Amy Acker

Yes, first-time director Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods isn’t even out yet (we’re still a day away from its nationwide theatrical debut), and, indeed, its inclusion here instantly knocks off an older, more established genre classic. But just wait until you see the damn thing.

Cabin’s endlessly meta script celebrates and sends up nearly every horror movie cliché known to man, and it does so with an admirable sophistication that’s cleverly masked by sheer anarchy and wonderful goofiness. Much of the film’s humor aims directly at know-it-all horror fans, with its biggest laughs addressing topics like Japan’s one-time dominance over Hollywood (remember these two words: “happy frog”) and the neverending big-screen absence of a certain creature from a specifically colored lagoon.

Yet, fortunately, Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon don’t let their fanboy sides get in the way of accessible, all-quadrants humor. You don’t know who Pinhead is to appreciate The Cabin in the Woods, but it sure will help.

11. Shaun of the Dead (2004)

Director: Edgar Wright
Stars: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton

Hailing from England, buddies Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg caught stateside audiences completely off-guard in April 2004, when Shaun of the Dead, their feature debut, bestowed moviegoers with some bloody-great, virtuosic horror spoofing.

To whip Shaun of the Dead into shape, the English duo pooled their shared affinities for the classic George A. Romero zombie movies of old together; more importantly, though, they saw the spot-on correlation that can be made with lifeless corpses shuffling around aimlessly and disenchanted and uninspired adults drifting through life in dreary jobs and mundane surroundings. That’s where the nonstop comedy derives from.

The palpable horror, meanwhile, rears its ugly head in Shaun of the Dead’s grand finale, a zombie siege on a local watering hole that’s a creative home run because Wright and Pegg know when to cease the mirth and let their wicked-looking flesh-eaters bring the onslaught.

10. Scream (1996)

Director: Wes Craven
Stars: Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, Skeet Ulrich, Rose McGowan, Drew Barrymore, Jamie Kennedy

The Cabin In The Woods owes a lot to Wes Craven’s Scream, which was, up until now and Cabin’s debut, the only mainstream meta-horror film that mattered. For his genre targets of choice, the screenwriter opted for the then-dead slasher flick template, unleashing a masked killer onto a band of unsuspecting youngsters, all of whom are pin-up-level attractive.

Except, in Scream, the potential victims all knew a great deal about how slasher movies work, and Williamson’s script deftly uses their consciousness to routinely subvert the audience’s expectations. Eventually, the Scream franchise would devolve into passable flicks that focus too much on the comedy and hardly at all on the scares (see: last year’s sadly uneventful Scream 4). But we’ll always have Craven’s original to cherish.

9. Re-Animator (1985)

Director: Stuart Gordon
Stars: Jeffrey Combs, Bruce Abbott, Barbara Crampton, David Gale, Robert Sampson, Al Berry

For gore-hounds, Stuart Gordon’s cult favorite Re-Animator truly has it all: blood, guts, boobies, cunnilingus with severed heads, and the darkest of comedy. And, surprisingly, critics such as Roger Ebert and old New York Times writer Janet Maslin loved Gordon’s flick back when it premiered in 1982, the latter going so far as to call Re-Animator “ingenious.”

Not even stuffy film purists can hate on this totally fucked up take on legendary horror and sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “Herbert West—Reanimator.” Jeffrey Combs, who quickly became a genre icon thanks to his role, plays Herbert West, a college student who gets mixed up with unruly medical experiments designed to rejuvenate dead human tissue. They do, but, in good horror fashion, the side effects include zombies, mind control, and dismembered bodies that maintain horny libidos.

Those who complain about the lack of originality in cinema should give Re-Animator a look—if they’re not already in the know, they’ve assuredly never seen anything else like it.

8. The Monster Squad (1987)

Director: Fred Dekker
Stars: Andre Gower, Robby Kiger, Brent Chalem, Rayn Lambert, Michael Faustino, Duncan Regehr, Tom Noonan, Carl Thibault, Jonathan Gries, Ashley Bank, Stephen Macht, Mary Ellen Trainor, Leonardo Cimino, Lisa Fuller

If you were born after, say, 1975, Richard Donner’s 1985 youth classic The Goonies is basically a rite of passage; tell someone that you’ve never seen Chunk and his friends’ treasure-guided misadventures and you’re likely to see a screw-face. The downside to The Goonies, however, at least to those of us who live and breathe horror, is that its longstanding ubiquity has always overshadowed its greatest imitator: Fred Dekker’s 1987 Universal-monster-inspired blast The Monster Squad.

Many people know The Monster Squad as the flick that gave the world the witty piece of dialogue, “Wolfman’s got nards!” And that’s a great reputation to have, no doubt, but Dekker’s film is so much more than that. Aside from the kids themselves, who never veer into obnoxious or unbearable terrain, The Monster Squad’s best attribute is its stone-faced horror; whenever Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, or Gil-Man (an obvious ripoff of The Creature from the Black Lagoon) enter the frame, the film plays its scariness totally straight, and it’s often legitimately disturbing for it.

Again, though, you’ve also got kids calling a mummy “bandy breath,” and a good-guy Frankenstein saying, “Bogus!” You don’t need to be in junior high school to get the jokes here.

7. The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Director: Dan O’Bannon

Stars: Clu Galager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews, Beverly Randolph, John Philbin, Jewel Shepherd, Linnea Quigley, Miguel A. Nunez, Jr., Brian Peck, Mark Venturini

Within the horror genre’s storied history, Dan O’Bannon is largely overlooked, and that’s a crying shame. An old college pal of acclaimed director John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog), the eccentric O’Bannon was a man of many excellent ideas, one of which turned out to be Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi/horror masterwork Alien, co-written by O’Bannon, though his contributions to that 1979 outerspace nightmare generator are rarely heralded.

When the mid-1980s came around, O’Bannon must’ve gotten fed up with being slept-on, so he decided to direct his feature film. The magic that derived from his do-it-myself attitude is The Return of the Living Dead, a clever and rapidly paced zombie flick in which the ghouls run faster than Carl Lewis, chow down on human brains, and lure the fuzz to their place-of-slaughter over police car walkie-talkies by drolly requesting, “Send more cops.”

Going all out with the film’s inside joke, O’Bannon posited The Return of the Living Dead as “based on true events,” and had his characters directly reference 1968’s Night of the Living Dead only to have them subsequently abandon all of George A. Romero’s ideals. Simply off this triumph, O’Bannon should’ve went on to have the career of someone like Wes Craven; unfortunately, he was never able to match the prolific nature of onetime buddy Carpenter before his death in 2009.

6. Fright Night (1985)

Director: Tom Holland
Stars: William Ragsdale, Chris Sarandon, Amanda Bearse, Stephen Geoffreys, Roddy McDowall

Honestly, we’re not entirely sure why most horror critics and fanboys hated last year’s Fright Night remake so much—it’s far from A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 bad. But that’s just the way it goes when you’re revamping a film as beloved as director Tom Holland’s 1985 original, starring Chris Sarandon (in a kick-ass performance) as a suave bloodsucker who moves next door to nerdy high school kid (William Ragsdale). A fan of late night monster movies, the gullible and easily shook teenager detects his new neighbor’s undead ways, and, naturally, nobody believes him—until it’s too late, of course.

Holland, who also wrote the film’s script, approached the material from a real horror lover’s standpoint, taking all of Fright Night’s genre elements seriously, especially the insane final act’s descent into a maelstrom of excessiveness—giant deformed wolves, vampire chicks, and random transformations are all par for the course. That Holland honors the genre while also staging all of Fright Night’s supernatural moments with a cheerful smile on his face gives the flick a timelessly fresh quality.

5. Evil Dead 2 (1987)

Director: Sam Raimi
Stars: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Danny Hicks, Kassie Wesley

In 1981, a then-unknown Sam Raimi recruited some close friends to make a little gore-fest called The Evil Dead, a balls-to-the-wall exercise in demonic possession, crimson geysers, and mostly lighthearted horror-comedy. Six years later, Raimi and leading man Bruce Campbell completely lost their minds, and the genre community reaped the secondhand perks.

The greatest benefit, of course, is the celluloid result of that combined lunacy: Evil Dead 2, an out-of-control sequel that goes above and beyond in its silliness and gory slapstick. The folks behind the camera, as well as in front of it, know full well that the film’s wild images, like a man’s severed hand trying to kill him and the same guy killing demons using a chainsaw jammed into his wrist-stump, are inherently ridiculous, and, subsequently, tons of laughs.

Using that awareness to their advantage, Raimi and company jump into the mayhem early and never pull back. And with a physical comedian/proficient actor like Campbell at its center, Evil Dead 2 doesn’t skip a beat.

4. Dead Alive (1992)

Director: Peter Jackson
Stars: Timothy Balme, Diana Penalver, Elizabeth Moody, Ian Watkin, Brenda Kendall, Stuart Devenie

Before he was raking in the cash and winning Academy Awards as the director of those breathtaking Lord of the Rings movies, New Zealand-born filmmaker Peter Jackson was a champion within the low-budget gore circuit. And Dead Alive, a zombie laugh-machine that starts off gross and culminates in an orgy of viscera and splashy blood, is Jackson’s crown jewel of endless entertainment.

Yes, we’d actually prefer it over any of the Rings movies, which certainly says something about us—after all, Dead Alive features such revolting high points as someone unknowingly eating soup that comes complete with an elderly woman’s fallen-off ear. But that is child’s play compared to what happens in the film’s unbelievably vile finale, when lunk-headed protagonist Lionel (Timothy Balme) fires up a chainsaw and slices through a reasonably sized army of the living dead.

With the vigor of Charlie Sheen running wild in the Playboy Mansion, Jackson shoots all of the supercharged carnage in such a way that it’s impossible not to flash a big old cheese-grin. Once again, we’ll take a guy cutting his way out of an enormous monster’s womb over that little dude Gollum any day.

3. Gremlins (1984)

Director: Joe Dante
Stars: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, Hoyt Axton, Frances Lee McCain, Corey Feldman, Keye Luke, Dick Miller, Jackie Joseph, Judge Reinhold, Glynn Turman

Enough with Ralphie, that Red Ryder BB gun, and the joyful yet overplayed A Christmas Story already. From here on out, we’re starting a new holiday tradition: a 24-hour marathon of Joe Dante’s Yuletide horror classic, Gremlins. It’s fun for the whole family, especially if your parents and siblings are the types who find the sights of hideous little creatures joyriding in snowmobiles and terrorizing sporting goods stores to be hilarious, like we do.

So what if Gremlins is never actually all that scary for anyone older than the age of nine? At its core, Dante’s energetic romp is a monster picture, one in which the villains, in the tradition of Freddy Krueger, are the coolest motherfuckers in the room.

2. Creepshow (1982)

Director: George A. Romero
Stars: Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Stephen King, Ted Danson, Leslie Nielsen, Ed Harris, Viveca Lindfors, E.G. Marshall, Fritz Weaver, Joe King, Tom Atkins, Jon Lormer, Carrie Nye, Don Keefer, David Early, Gaylen Ross

To passionate supporters of the quintessential, and hopefully resurging, “horror anthology” format, 1982’s Creepshow, the brainchild of Stephen King (who wrote the screenplay) and George A. Romero (director of zombie movie classics like Night of the Living Dead and the original Dawn of the Dead), is the genuine article. Because, unlike most genre omnibus features, those jam-packed efforts that feature anywhere from three to five individual segments, Creepshow doesn’t have a rotten apple in its bunch. Not all of the five stories are golden, of course, but even the film’s weakest link—arguably the Leslie Nielsen-led, zombie-inspired revenge tale “Something to Tide You Over”—is still a hell of a lot of fun.

Inspired by the old E.C. horror comics of the 1950s and ’60s, King and Romero joined forces to recapture the old E.C. tradition of watching awful people get their gruesome and ironically humorous comeuppances. Even when Creepshow is, pun intended, really creepy (see: the two best segments, “The Crate” and “They’re Creeping Up on You!”), though, its scares are always punctuated by riotous sight gags and a sharp playfulness that invites applause rather than gasps.

1. An American Werewolf in London (1981)

Director: John Landis
Stars: David Naughton, Jenny Agutter, Griffin Dunne, John Woodvine, Lila Kaye, Frank Oz

An American Werewolf in London, directed by comedy legend John Landis (National Lampoon’s Animal House, Coming to America), does a pitch-perfect job of melding the two most important elements of any successful horror-comedy: legitimate scares and genuine laughs. In the scare department, Landis benefitted immensely from Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning makeup effects, which morphed tourist turned lycanthrope David Kessler (David Naughton) into one of the most horrifying werewolves ever caught on film. And that first transformation sequence, shot with a steady camera and convincingly looking as if David’s bones really are stretching, hasn't lost any of its impact.

Being that Landis is such a comedic master, An American Werewolf in London is also funny as hell, particularly whenever David’s undead best friend, the wisecracking Jack Goodman (Griffin Dunne), appears on screen to drop a one-liner and show his worsening bodily decay. The fact that Landis was able to so effectively combine his standard funny business with serious, tongue-out-of-cheek horror makes An American Werewolf in London a brilliant case study in this list’s subgenre of choice.