Odd antics and other stuff.

Some time ago, I was doing a Peter Weller video-thon and rented Of Unknown Origin, which my video guide assured me fell into the category of horror. I watched the movie and found myself a bit concerned about it ever having made it to film. Then I re-read the review for it. It mentioned the film was unintentionally funny and if viewed with that in mind, was actually a somewhat enjoyable piece. So I hit play and watched it a second time. Sure enough, the film was more entertaining as a humorous bit than a scary one. It's still not a great film by any means, but looking at it askance made all the difference in the world.

A number of horror films--many considered "classics" fall into this same category. Unintentionally funny. In their day, perhaps they scared someone, but with the seeming increase in random wackos in any given neighborhood and the fantastic advances in cinematic special effects, the horror of old often appears to be little more than fodder for us fans of MST3K to mutilate.

Modern horror is also falling short of brilliance, I'm afraid, with the better stuff often more psychological thriller than true monster/horror, and the rest intentionally or otherwise getting lobbed into the humorous horror corner. Last night it was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, current release. The best part about it was the "cop" who was absolutely Hitchcockian hilarious! He made everyone in the audience squirm and laugh and pretty much stole the show. Leatherface seemed more pitiful than psychotic, until the end, where he was made into a monster/legend demi-god, able to survive anything that might kill a mere mortal and keep making sequels until long after his truly scary days are over. Overall, the movie scared me because I personally fear more realistic things than fantastical ones. It had me 'til the end when Leatherface truly joined the ranks of Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers...

Speaking of Freddy and Jason, they have now totally gone the way of humorous horror. In their latest buddy flick, there were far more stunts and laughs than anything resembling horror, and this was clearly intentional. How could you possibly make a serious horror film with these two after all they've been through seperately already? The last Nightmare On Elm Street I actually enjoyed was the one in which Robert Englund was pondering the possibility of the existence of Freddy as a seperate entity...something brought to pseudo-life via the imaginations of all those who've seen and enjoyed his many movies. It was more intriguing than horrific, but it was also refreshing after portraying Fred as a wise-cracking punster of nightmares for so long.

The Scream films were intended for humorous horror, and they succeeded brilliantly, taking place alongside Army Of Darkness, House and House 2: The Second Story, Vamp, Fright Night pts. 1&2, Ghostbusters (yes, more laughs than fear, but still solidly in this genre), F/X, and several others. I personally have a delightfully macabre sense of humor, so it's hard, though not impossible, to offend me with black humor. This, obviously, explains why these types of movies appeal to me.

Let's explore the odd cocktail of humor and horror, shall we? For I know of few people whose sense of humor runs as dark as mine, let alone darker still, so how on earth does the genre of humorous horror succeed?

For over eight years I worked in live broadcast TV. I was a techie behind the scenes in the news department. Let me remind you of something you may already be aware of--people who are forced to deal with death and tragedy often develop and/or refine their sicker senses of humor. Possibly, it's a way to keep the shock at bay. Make light of the monsters you think exist in your bedroom at night and you begin to think yourself silly for ever believing in them before. Humor allays fear. Schlocky haunted houses that spring up in carnival type settings or at Halloween are designed to make you roll your eyes more than really frighten you, though, of course, some people may find moments with them genuinely, briefly, terrifying. I spent part of one Halloween gripping an electrified fence until a bunch of guys arrived to yank me free of it. Did you laugh or smile when you read that? It's true , and I wasn't laughing or smiling at the time it occurred, but I can relate it now with a smirk and a goofy look in my eye, knowing that my private terror and hour of desperation makes people laugh out loud. I've been struck by lightning. I was hit by a car--just in the ass. When I last had a concussion, I was so convinced I was gonna die, I left a note beside my bed explaining what had happened to me in case I didn't wake up again in the morning. Even if I tell the stories behind these admissions with a straight face, people laugh at me. Is it because I lived to tell the tales?

At the TV station, we received a news feed...that is, we received an almost constant stream of footage shot around the world that we could record for use on any of our news programs so long as we edited them to suit our viewers. In their "raw" state (unedited), we sometimes got to watch people die or just view the aftermath of some terrible carnage far too disturbing to broadcast on live TV. Ever watch Faces Of Death? Same thing--but nobody's sitting there going, "Aw, c'mon--that ain't real!" Because it was all real. And all the more horrifying...

A plane crashed in South America. Fascinated by the on-site footage, we in the control room spent a good half hour rolling the footage back and forth frame by frame going, "Look--a shoe." Then, "Hey! That's a leg sticking out of it!" The leg wasn't attached to anything. Not anymore. Just the sock and shoe. We treated the footage like we were looking for Waldo, except Waldo was in little pieces now...

We got to see ATF agents in Miami gun down some guy who came out of a house they'd surrounded.

A sniper picked off a guy involved in some crime, who'd then tried to run from the police, strangely deciding to stop his vehicle in the middle of a blocked-off highway. He never saw the man in black belly-crawling through the runoff ditch beside his car. We're not sure he saw the specially trained cop when he hopped upright after slithering up beside the car, planting a bullet nicely into the suspect's head.

A blackened corpse hung partially from the back of a burned-out bus in India. We kept wondering what had gone through his/her head just as he/she was able to perceive freedom at hand, then perish in the midst of it.

One of the girls I worked with became almost obsessed with the footage of a guy trying to walk between two buildings in NYC on a highwire. There was no net. He didn't make it. For half an hour she played and rewound the footage, freezing frames of it, asking us repeatedly, "What do you think he was thinking THERE? What about right THEN?"

Maybe to a small degree, and maybe to a large one, you should be getting disturbed by what I'm relating to you right now. Even if you've been laughing, some tiny part of you must be wondering what kind of sickos we all were, commenting on actual death like it was something keen from a mega-budget action flick. Well, it gets worse.

A guy I knew worked in a hospital. They have lots of crazy stories that they can laugh about--hospital people do. Anyway, this guy was brought in. Shot himself through the head. Very dead. There was no rush to get him anyplace special, so he was left in a corridor for awhile, only partially covered by a sheet. With nothing better to do, a couple of the security guards started trying to shine their flashlights into the hole in his head to see if they could get a glimpse of the guy's brain. They even got brave enough to poke around the hole, where the flesh lay torn over weakened chunks of skull--sort of like when you crack a hard-boiled egg and maybe some of the shell kinda remains hinged to the rest of it by that membrane underneath. Could you do that? I couldn't--despite my morbid sense of humor, I do have some respect for the dead. They encouraged themselves to toy with a fresh corpse by joking about it. Just like little kids do when fascinated by something yucky. "You touch it!" "I'm not gonna touch it!" "What is it?" "Looks like your sister's face!" How this type of joking begins is beyond me. I've never paid much attention to it. I suffer from it, too, but at least I don't go 'round poking at dead people.

When my grandmother died, it was suggested I find something black to wear since I was to be one of the pallbearers. "How 'bout my SWAT team uniform? It's black!" I replied cheerfully. Maybe in your household, this would have started an arguement or made somebody faint, but in my house, where people know me and my wit, I got a laugh. Later, when my cousins and I were carrying the ungodly heavy steel casket to the gravesite some outrageously distant yards away and the sheer awkwardness and weight of the thing was causing it to droop badly, I mentioned, "Why don't we just take her out and carry her there? She only weighed about 85 lbs.!"

I don't just joke at funerals (please understand that I only crack jokes at the funerals of my own family members), my sense of humor seems to erupt in spades when I'm sick. I can better deal with pain or other severe symptoms if I can laugh. Laughter can ease pain and discomfort. That's one of the reasons I crack jokes quietly to my own family members at our funerals.

Humor is a powerful force. Its origin is not always easy to locate. The girl watching the guy fall from the highwire kept tittering, unable to tell us exactly what was so funny about the event. People can be heard both screaming and laughing on rollercoasters and at local Halloween haunted houses. Humor can keep the nightmarish aspects of life at bay. Another brilliant example of humor mixed with horror would be a number of different episodes of the TV show M*A*S*H. It's pretty much a cleverly funny show, sometimes even slapstick, yet if you think about it, the characters in that show are in the middle of hell, never sure if they'll live to see tomorrow, forced to work shift after shift, dealing with thefts and faulty equipment, side by side with people they sometimes can't stand on a daily basis, subsisting on substandard fare in substandard conditions, trying to save lives with the dead piling up all around them. The most adept survivalist of that show was, of course, Benjamin "Hawkeye" Pierce, fighting for human decency and the bare necessities of life clad in a shining suit of highly polished humor. I've often thought a sharp tongue (humor-wise) must denote a sharp mind, and have often been known to hover 'round those who can make me laugh. Are they merely entertaining, or are such people subliminally heroic to me? Let's take the woe of the world and make light of it, for if we wallow in it seriously, then we shall certainly all drown. People without a sense of humor give me the creeps. I rank them down there with folk who say they don't like animals. And if you have no sense of humor and you don't like animals, I'm moving away from you before I end up dead on the news. How often do casually funny people turn on us? When's the last time a known comedian committed some heinous act (that we know of)? How often do wackos in the news start out by abusing animals (often enough! It's a warning sign! Duck!) How many doctors and policemen and paramedics and news reporters have a black sense of humor? Go ask--they'll usually admit it outright, then start telling you some really bizarre story to prove it!

I'll conclude by bringing up my favorite example of humorous-horror of all time. The classic film Psycho. When I tell people it cracks me up, they often look at me like...well probably the way you're looking at your computer screen right now. Alfred Hitchcock understood that tempering horror with humor made it all the more realistic, therefore all the more frightening. He is a master of the genre. While Scream may mix equal parts humor with horror and Ghostbusters may trump up the humor instead, Psycho's humor is subtle and sly, keeping this film firmly in the horror category...except for conisseurs of the genre like me. I've seen all but the fourth film (including the newer release with Vince Vaughan as Norman). I'm sorry, but when Anthony Perkins pushes that Ford Galaxy into the swamp and watches it, calmly snacking on the mysterious contents of his plain brown paper bag, and then the car stops sinking for a moment...he loses his cool, glances around, a perfect, "Oh, shit!" look on his face. He hears bubbling, the car resumes sinking, and all is well in Norman's twisted little mind again. It kills me! (So to speak...)

I think it's the second movie in which we begin watching Norman stuff dead birds with sawdust on his kitchen table. Then he uses the same spoon to put penaut butter on a cracker. Almost no one I know has ever noticed this! It's so freakin' funny!

And the sheriff sucking the ice with the blood all over it? Man, I could go on and on... Did you notice the ghost in Ghostbusters 2 who was checking his pulse while jogging in the park? Here's a great, often missed line from the first movie...Dan Aykroyd says, "Listen..." and everybody's concentrating nervously. "Do you smell something?" he concludes, altering the looks on all of his fellow actors' faces.

Jurassic Park can be categorized as adventure/humorous horror, Re-Animator is humorous horror, Robert McCammon can pull off good humorous horror, Stephen King is adept at it, Child's Play, Leprechaun, Scooby Doo(?), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Sleepy Hollow, The Haunted Mansion, The Addams Family films, even Jaws has some hilarious moments, Six Feet Under, Scary Movie (okay, there's nothing really scary in that series aside from how delightfully wacky the scriptwriters are)... Humorous horror can encompass realistic terrors, disturbing imagery, fantastical nightmares, TV, film, cable, anime, books, short stories, and even music nowadays. It doesn't have its own sign at Blockbuster, or its own category at the library, but it's a growing trend sucking in all those old horror classics we can chuckle at now and all those badly written or edited or even acted movies and programs that two robots and a guy trapped on a small spacecraft can pass away the time with. It's either Stooge funny or it's discerning viewer hilarious, but it's better than a lot of the serious attempts at horror some people are trying to sell to us nowadays, and any chance you get in life to laugh should always be taken.

Especially if it also gives you chills...