The 10 Funniest Horror Comedy Movies You Need to Watch This Year

I was speaking with Clown in a Cornfield writer/director Eli Craig recently.

Craig, whose cult hit Tucker and Dale vs. Evil pioneered modern horror comedies, told me that we probably shouldn't be writing straight horror comedies anymore.

Yeah, you read that right.

They're too difficult to get made, he said, and execs tend to view them as campy or silly, which is a negative in this case.

I was pretty surprised by this statement, since I love the subgenre. But instead, he advised, write a horror film with comedic elements. They're easier to pitch and market, and they won't immediately turn a reader off if they aren't sure what a horror comedy can be.

Admittedly, this type of movie is extremely difficult to get right. Some of the strongest examples tend to walk a very fine line. Get Out, for instance, might be viewed broadly as comedic, although the elevated social commentary and equally serious subject matter would land it more squarely in horror territory for me. It has funny moments but is serious enough to win an Oscar.

Many movies of the 1980s could be campy one moment and deathly serious the next. Think An American Werewolf in London or Fright Night. They have moments of grim humor but are pretty dark, still.

All this to say, horror comedy is really hard. And it might be easier, these days, to sell your script as straight horror (and then sneak in some humor where you want it).

So after sharing that advice, we wanted to show you how rich the genre can be and compile our favorite horror comedies for you—uh, that is, the best horror movies with strong comedic elements.

Shaun of the Dead

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Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's zombie comedy is pretty much the pinnacle of horror comedy filmmaking. The film follows Shaun as he battles both a zombie apocalypse and his own quarter-life crisis. Characters around him act like zombies even before the outbreak, but then there's the whole brain-eating issue he has to face later.

Wright learned that preparation was his best friend when it mattered most. In a 2024 IndieWire interview, he revealed how he handled skeptical crew members.

"I had a discussion with my director of photography, who was convinced the long scene of Shaun going to the shop was 'shoe leather'—meaning it was boring and was going to be cut. After he said that, whatever detail had been in that shot tripled. I wanted to make a shot that was so cool, so amazing it was impossible to cut it."

Wright's commitment to proving his vision paid off. That meticulously planned sequence became one of the film's most celebrated moments.

Companion

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Released this year, this one has already become popular in horror circles. Drew Hancock's feature directorial debut is a dark relationship comedy. The film follows Iris and her boyfriend Josh on a weekend getaway that takes a shocking turn when she's revealed to be a robot.

Hancock realized the story needed comedy to really work. In a Bloody Disgusting interview, he discussed the script's development.

"Honestly, the comedy came a little later. ... I had this draft of the script, and I was sending it to trusted friends. I was getting their opinions, and there was a lot of, 'Yeah, it's good. Yeah, yeah, great job.' But I could tell. ... I think a lot of people that work in comedy think, because it comes easy to them, that they shouldn't be doing it. I realized it's easy for me because that's my voice. So I went back and did a pass that added the humor into it kind of late. That's when it really started to click."

If you feel like your script is missing something, maybe it's some humor.

Freaky

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Christopher Landon's body-swap slasher puts a supernatural twist on Freaky Friday, with high schooler Millie switching bodies with a serial killer (played by Vince Vaughn).

The movie explores gender and identity in a fun and engaging way through the lens of horror, flipping the script on many tropes. Writer Michael Kennedy and Landon were excited about this from the start, as he told us a few years ago.

"[Landon] goes, 'The audience knows they're safe, but they don't know.' And he is like, 'You're playing with the genre tropes here.' So, we started looking at each scene that way. 'Well, what are we saying in the scene? Oh, well, with the body swap, it's doing this.' Once we realized what was going on with the body swap [...] It just immediately changed things by being what it is. We really started fucking around with stuff because it was just like, 'Oh wow, we have this great opportunity to upend a lot of stuff here.'"

What We Do in the Shadows

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Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement's mockumentary about vampire flatmates showcases how to find fresh comedy in tired tropes. At a time when vampires were fairly played out, this felt totally fresh. The film follows four centuries-old vampires struggling with mundane modern life.

Clement shared valuable advice about managing creative projects at SXSW: "Open three documents on your computer so none of them will intimidate you. That way you'll feel better dropping the ones that don't seem to hit, but you can keep revisiting the one that does."

Even accomplished filmmakers battle intimidation. By reducing the pressure on any single idea, creators can explore more freely and ultimately develop stronger concepts.

Evil Dead II

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Sam Raimi's sequel pretty much perfected the splatstick formula. Bruce Campbell's Ash Williams is an icon of horror comedy, fighting demons with a chainsaw hand and endless one-liners.

Raimi understood that constraints could lead to creativity on his ultra-low-budget films. But he still had standards for how he wanted it to look, which is why they created the remake.

"We really felt it was a good ghost story and deserved to be told once on the big screen with high-quality visuals and great acoustic treatment," he told Emanuel Levy. "So, we decided to remake it because it is, after all, just a ghost story. It's like a campfire ghost story that is best if somebody retells every generation

Happy Death Day

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Christopher Landon's time-loop slasher is Groundhog Day meets Scream. College student Tree must solve her own murder by reliving her death day repeatedly.

In The AU Review, Landon emphasized the importance of character-driven storytelling.

"I've always come from a place of character, I think that's how you pull off the horror and the comedy. If you present your audience with a likeable lead character that they feel comfortable spending an hour-and-a-half, 2 hours with, you can kinda throw anything at them."

Genre films should still focus on character development, not overshadow it.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

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Eli Craig's genre deconstruction follows two well-meaning hillbillies who become the unwitting victims of horror movie tropes when college kids mistake them for killers. Horror comedies can subvert audience expectations to play with expectations and worlds.

Craig pointed to the importance of emotional authenticity in Flixist.

"There are a lot of horror/comedies where the comedy is supposed to be derived from the blood and gore. Peter Jackson's early stuff is like that, with that sort of over-the-top gore and camp that makes it funny. To me, the humor has to come from elsewhere. It's not funny because it's gory; it's funny and gory. I wasn't going for a campy, gory comedy, but a real comedic comedy with gore."

The humor in your film must have its own foundation, independent of the violence, to create a film that works on multiple levels.

The Cabin in the Woods

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Drew Goddard's meta-horror film turns the genre inside out, revealing the puppet masters behind typical cabin-in-the-woods scenarios. Cowritten with Joss Whedon, the film creates a fun world to explain horror tropes as a necessary ceremony for an ancient deity.

Goddard learned lessons about collaboration from his television work. In Behind the Lens, he shared what he learned from working with Whedon.

"I guess it would be, be fearless in your storytelling. Don't be afraid. Whatever that means, because each story is different. But don't be afraid. It could be, don't be afraid to be different, don't be afraid to do what no one wants you to do, don't be afraid to be hard on your characters. I've never seen Joss back away. He's always pushing forward to try to do something different and tell bold and interesting stories."

Beetlejuice

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Tim Burton's gothic fantasy comedy is a horror film that embraces the "strange and unusual" while maintaining its whimsy. The film follows a recently deceased couple, Adam and Barbara Maitland, who hire a "bio-exorcist" to remove the living family that's moved into their home.

In 1988, Burton told Rolling Stone that he appreciated the script's randomness and surrealism.

"The things that interest me the most are the things that potentially won't work," Burton said. "On Beetlejuice, I could tell every day what was gonna work and what wasn't. And that was very invigorating. Especially when you're doing something this extreme. A lot of people have ragged on the story of Beetlejuice, but when I read it, I thought, 'Wow! This is sort of interesting. It's very random. It doesn't follow what I would consider the Spielberg story structure.' I guess I have to watch it more, because I'm intrigued by things that are perverse. Like, I was intrigued that there was no story."

Ready or Not

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In Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett's wedding night nightmare, class warfare is hilarious and horrifying. The film follows a young woman who marries into the wealthy Le Domas family, only to discover their tradition requiring a game on her wedding night. In her case, it's a deadly game of hide-and-seek.

In a ComicBook.com interview, Bettinelli-Olpin explained their approach to tone.

"We don't want this to be goofy. We don't want it to be silly," Bettinelli-Olpin said. He added. "At the end of the day, it all came down to just grounding the characters and making sure it all felt very real and very lived in and very natural, and in the shooting and in the edit, we spent a lot of time walking that line."

We know there are tons more. Let us know your favs.