Richard Gadz, author of the The House of all Sorrows, the third title in the Gothics Undead series, tells us how horror and comedy can very often be one and the same thing.
On screen and in print, horror fiction is going through one of its boom periods right now. These boom periods cycle round roughly every 30 years or so, and always coincide with times of great political/ social/ economic upheaval: the 1890s, when industrialisation was at a peak and the new labour movement was challenging authority; the 1930s, after Wall Street crashed and the Great Depression gripped millions; the 1970s and ‘80s, when social change and neoliberalism fought each other for headline space; the 2020s, when every glance at your phone spits out a new low in political stupidity, human greed and climate breakdown.
This coincidence of made-up and real-life horror underlines what psychologists are increasingly saying about the genre, that fictional scares can actually be good for our mental health. The netherworld of ghosts, vampires and serial killers is a kind of collective paracosm where we can play around with nasty ideas in symbolic or allegorical forms, as a way of helping us cope when bad things happen in reality. Horror fans, says the research, were among those who coped best with the Covid pandemic. I agree completely. I’ve always felt that horror is a soothing rehearsal for the worst of life’s emotions, in the same way as rollercoaster enthusiasts love the thrill of illusionary danger or arachnophobes feel better for touching a tarantula.
Horror and Comedy
Of course, psychologists say much the same about having a good laugh too. It wasn’t very long ago that Laughter Therapy was a hot topic for columnists and bloggers. I think horror and comedy, when you get right down into their inner mechanisms, work in exactly the same way.
Both love a surprise, for a start: the build-up-pay-off structure is common to jokes, which have a punchline, and to frights, which make you jump. Open the kitchen door thinking ‘I’m starving,’ monster jumps out and eats you (horror); open the kitchen door thinking ‘I’m starving,’ dog’s on the table eating your dinner (comedy). The semi-reverse is true too, i.e. dramatic irony, giving the reader or viewer knowledge which the characters in the story don’t possess. It’s what Alfred Hitchcock meant when he famously said it’s always better to give the audience several minutes of unbearable tension than a few seconds of sudden fright. For instance, back in the kitchen: if I as a writer have told you seven pages ago that the monster is there waiting, then the innocent ‘I’m starving’ thoughts of your main character are unchanged but the tension for you the reader is cranked up to the nth degree. Same situation, but show the dog sniffing the dinner seven pages earlier, and you’ve got a lot more giggles. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5 is a time-hopping textbook in this sort of narrative construction, and Susie in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones spills the beans in the first chapter. Cabin In The Woods (2011) is a horror film which plays around with dramatic irony to truly brilliant effect, switching information back and forth between characters and audience every few minutes.
Pushing Boundaries
Horror and comedy, at their best, are both about pushing boundaries, about poking at taboos and disturbing the peace with transgressive behaviour. In short, injecting the bizarre or the unexpected into the mundane world. Imagine a business meeting, and after five minutes of dull sales figures the CEO jumps up and slashes someone’s throat. Horror. Imagine a business meeting, and after five minutes of dull sales figures the CEO jumps up and shouts ‘Ooo, I’ve got a big bum!’ Comedy. The same narrative mechanism – bizarre behaviour – but used to create very different effects.
There’s a suspension of disbelief common to both horror and comedy. Characters in both genres share an element of exaggeration and overstatement as if, by being just a little bit over-the-top, they somehow fit their genre better. All the comic social gadflies in the stories of P. G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Parker would be good examples. In TV comedy you have grotesques like David Brent of The Office or Basil Fawlty. In real life, of course, people would never ever react as they do on screen to appalling people like Sheldon Cooper (in The Big Bang Theory) or Edina Monsoon (in Absolutely Fabulous). Such monsters wouldn’t last five minutes. To accept and enjoy them, they have to be surrounded by complicity. And, in exactly the same way, no actual vampire hunters would set off for the castle in the late afternoon, nobody in their right mind would creep around an unfamiliar house with the lights off, and hunting aliens in the woods at midnight is never best accomplished by splitting into groups of one or two.
All this is why even the darkest of horror stories often comes with a sprinkling of humour, and why ‘horror comedy’ can work so well. The genres are natural best buddies. Grady Hendrix (author of My Best Friend’s Exorcism) and Kelly Link (author of Get In Trouble) are writers who are particularly good at striking the balance between light and dark. And it’s no surprise that two films from 1985, Re-Animator and Return Of The Living Dead, have both reached their 40th anniversaries as loved and appreciated classics, reissued recently in lavishly boxed, 4K blu-ray sets. They’re not only darn good horror stories, they’re very, very funny as well.
Horror and Comedy: There are Limits
Ultimately, horror and comedy have something else in common too: there are limits. There are lines of both shock and send-up you cross at your peril. How many comedians have caused social media screaming frenzies with an ill-timed one-liner? How many horror films have taken one step too far and lost half their audience? These lines shift wildly as public tastes change (Wes Craven’s brutal Last House On The Left (1972) was banned in the UK for 30 years, but is now available uncut on DVD) and are entirely a matter of subjective personal opinion. One fan’s evening of entertainment is another’s trauma-causing lunch-loser. Personally, I can’t rewatch Brian Yuzna’s cleverly political Society (1989) because of its truly horrible last 10 minutes, or re-read the icy nihilism of Mendal Johnson’s 1974 novel Let’s Go Play At The Adams’s and its identical twin, Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door…
(c) Richard Gadz
About The House of all Sorrows:
Frederick and Lady Violet Jekyll cordially invite you to a celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, June 1897.
Jekyll is a man with a horrible, guilty secret. The results of the sinister experiments he conducts in the basement of Westwych House, the Jekylls’ country home in Somerset, are known only to a handful of people. All his family ever see is a dedicated scientist. All his servants ever hear are screams in the dead of night.
As guests gather for a genteel weekend, a web of events entangles a young historian in local legends of monsters and werewolves, and Frederick Jekyll’s nightmare past prepares to wreak bloody revenge on everyone present at Westwych House.
The House Of All Sorrows is a gothic chiller weaving elements of classics by Robert Louis Stevenson and H.G.Wells into a grisly, emotive story about eco-ethics and the endurance of love.
The House of All Sorrows by Richard Gadz (Deixis Press, £10.99) is available now from all good bookstores. Order your copy online here.
And you can read more from Richard Gadz on Writing.ie here.
