LYNDA E. RUCKER
YOU THINK I’M A CLOWN?
Humour and horror. They go together like – well, like pancakes and syrup or pancakes and prawns, depending on your point of view. It’s a somewhat facile observation that setting up a scare and setting up a joke can be remarkably similar if only because this suggests that both are little more than the rough equivalent of jump scares, with the same mechanism of tension and relief. It’s one way of scaring someone or telling a joke, but it is by no means the only way, and it ignores the rich palette that both humour and fear have to offer. When either goes wrong, though, it can segue into the other: a bad joke can horrify, a scare that falls flat can provoke laughter.
But where do these two really intersect? Do humour and horror well up from the same dark vein? And what of comedy-horror, or is it horror-comedy?
Too often, efforts to mix comedy and horror in film result in a movie that feels as though it was made by people who have contempt for the “horror” part of the equation. Moreover, the “humour” part of these hybrids often works better than the “horror”, even in films that feel like good-faith efforts, in part because it’s very difficult to keep the humour from diluting the horror.
However, I’ve recently seen two films that achieve that balance effectively and epitomise two different approaches that do work.
Both films are examples of what I privately think of as “mumblecore horror”, a juxtaposition I thought didn’t exist outside of my own head until I saw it written down somewhere in relation to one of the films, followed by finding out that “mumblegore” is A Thing. I’m not particularly fond of the first construction and I kind of hate the second, but they do both make the effort to describe the aesthetic terrain somewhere between indie naturalistic filmmaking and horror that these movies inhabit.
The first film, They Look Like People, is still making the festival rounds, and examines a man’s descent into apparent madness (or is it?). TLLP is not a comedy, but it is an achingly humanistic film, and what humour it has is used in a beautifully effective manner that I wish more horror would adopt: the humour in it arises naturally from the characters, being themselves, being human, doing silly things together as friends do. While I’m no proponent of the “they must be likeable/identifiable” school of character development, some characters for some types of stories do need to be likeable, and most of the time, characters need to be engaging. Humour is one of the best ways to make characters engaging – and it also encourages us, the audience, to let our guard down. Horror can sometimes suffer from an overseriousness, a relentless po-facedness that actually ends up distancing us and making the viewing or reading of it a safer experience, because the horror is starting from a place that is already so relentlessly bleak that we feel removed from it. That’s not to say I want characters in a Thomas Ligotti story to suddenly start cracking wise or that there are not writers or directors who effectively mine that pitch-black territory. And the humour doesn’t have to be the kind that TLLP deploys either; characters who are bastards deploying savage black humour can lull and engage the audience as well. But humour that arises naturally from characters and circumstances, and characters with wit: this is one type of humour I think horror could use more of.
The second film is the found-footage Creep, which you’ve probably seen by now if you tend to haunt horror film festivals or the “Horror New Releases” section of Netflix streaming. Co-written with director Patrick Brice by Mark Duplass, who also stars in it, Creep, the story of a young videographer who takes an unusual assignment which, naturally, goes horribly wrong, manages to sustain hilarity and horror for the entirety of its 78-minute run time. The film is almost unbearably tense from the very beginning, and much of that hilarity and horror is onscreen simultaneously. We, the audience, are laughing because what is happening is genuinely funny but it is also genuinely unsettling. In fact, Creep is a film of almost unbearable tension throughout, unfolding as it does with a kind of nightmarish inevitability. And yet the humour is integral to maintaining that tension. The situations are simultaneously very funny and absolutely horrifying. Creep locates itself firmly at that humour/horror intersection, at the very moment when screams of laughter just turn into screams.
I think of David Lynch as the master of this sort of discomfiting horror/humour blend, and I say the master in part because Lynch’s approach so thoroughly disorients. In Creep, it’s pretty clear that the intent of the filmmakers is for us to laugh and be scared at the same time. Lynch doesn’t help us out much. It’s hard to know what to make of characters like Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth, or of the scene in Wild at Heart where Marietta is smearing lipstick on her face prior to phoning Johnnie Farragut to try and save him from the death she’s plotted for him. When Leland Palmer, mourning his murdered daughter, disrupts Ben Horne’s guests with a “dance” in Twin Peaks, is this comedy, horror, bathos or all three?
Scenes like these remind us that there is an amorality to both horror and comedy, a resistance to social mores, an undercurrent of sadism. It’s no accident perhaps that so many comedians are said to have dark sides, and maybe it’s why the belief persists as well that women aren’t scary or funny; it would contradict their roles as compassionate nurturers of the species. I suspect it’s also why both genres are resistant to exhortations that artists check their language, check their potential for offence, check their likelihood of causing inadvertent pain. That’s not to say artists of any stripe should dismiss subtext – subtext, after all, is one of the great strengths of both horror and comedy, the ability to discuss taboos that would be unacceptable if met head-on – but both genres must retain the freedom to shock and offend, and to make mistakes. Developing comedy in particular can be an improvisational process of trial and error. It’s true that some will use this freedom as an excuse to fall back on the reactionary elements of comedy and horror, but ignoring context and intent in art and flattening nuance is no solution to old-as-humankind struggles with racism and sexism and how we treat our fellow humans. Horror and comedy can never and should never be made safe spaces.
There is nothing quite so deflating as being laughed at, and it is the reason satire can be such a powerful tool. For all their similarities, horror and comedy make strange bedfellows because laughter can defeat horror, yet sometimes horror wins. In 2000, I saw the The Exorcist in the cinema on its re-release, and two teenage boys walked in after it had begun and started mocking the movie, laughing and talking back to the screen, determined to demonstrate to everyone the film’s powerlessness over them. But something happened as the film progressed. They fell completely silent. The jokes stopped. The laughing stopped. The darkness of it stole over them and shattered their bravado. For the duration of the film, even we atheists in the audience, even scornful teenage boys, were convinced of the truth of possession, and terror of the howling void that is the loss of faith. Here perhaps is where horror and humour diverge, the fork in the road, and horror is the road less travelled. There is something comfortable embedded even in the bleakest humour, because laughter feels good to those who are doing it, however devastating it may be to the object of that laughter. Maybe horror is the place we come to when even the defiance of laughter has deserted us, and perhaps managing that tension is the essence of successfully merging the two.