When we think of the horror genre, we think not only of unsettling images, but of unsettling sounds. We think of the scores: the screeching strings of Bernard Herrmann’s anxiety-inducing music for Psycho, the intensifying dread of John Williams’s iconic two-note theme for Jaws, the mid-melody modulations that derange John Carpenter’s piano pieces in Halloween.
We think of the screams of the scream queens (and scream kings), from high-pitched whistle-tone shrieks to guttural bellows. We think of the thwap of a smooth axe chop, the crack of breaking bones, the snap of twigs in a dark forest, the creak of footsteps on an old wood floor, and the susurrations of strange winds. We think of the creepy cadences of “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” of “You’ve always been the caretaker,” of “They’re coming to get you, Barbra.”
Yet, unsettling though they may be, none of these are the sounds that disturb us most in a horror film. No, the most off-putting things to hear in horror are neither score, nor scream, nor sound-effect, nor speech; they’re the paroxysms of laughter that erupt from villain or victim. It doesn’t matter which; they’re terrifying either way.
“Our laughter,” according to writer V.S. Pritchett, “is only a note or two short of a scream of fear.” Perhaps this is why humor and horror, which on the surface seem to be representations of opposing human emotions, make natural bedfellows. In fact, with the possible exception of romance, horror is the film genre most willing to rendezvous with comedy. Comic impositions in the genre have been with us since the dawn of cinema. Early forays into horror territory by the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès often included humorous elements: dancing skeletons, spectral pranksters, and plenty of scared people’s pratfalls.
As the film medium grew throughout the silent era, horror and comedy continued to further intertwine. By the advent of the sound era, certain aesthetic and thematic genre elements became codified in the Universal Studios horror template—and a little comedy came along for the ride. We laugh almost as much as we shudder when we watch those classic Universal movies: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, and The Invisible Man.
The success of 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein—where Universal poked fun at its menagerie of monsters—opened the door to parodies of both specific horror films and more general horror film conventions, a door through which many movies later marched: The Comedy of Terrors, Young Frankenstein, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Student Bodies, The Slumber Party Massacre, Scary Movie, Shaun of the Dead, Cabin in the Woods, etc. Sure, there are sci-fi-comedies and action-comedies and western-comedies, but the horror-comedy, like the rom-com, has almost graduated from a sub-genre to a distinct genre in its own right.
If laughter is indeed the best medicine, if it allows us to cope with the trauma of being in the world.Perhaps the only thing keeping horror-comedy from becoming a full-fledged genre is that it might actually be redundant: the horror genre itself is a genre of both horror and comedy. Few are the horror films that don’t evoke some laughs. Sometimes the laughs are broad and cheap, sometimes they’re dark and distasteful, but yuck needs yucks. Defining a distinction between horror and horror-comedy becomes useless when faced with films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, American Psycho, and Psycho. These are funny films—and they’re all the more terrifying because of it. All dread and no play would make horror a dull genre.
The horror genre uses comedy in two ways. The first is to relieve the tension that the terror winds tight. Here humor is respite and release valve. Levity allows the audience to breathe, to have a bit of fun between the frights. These light moments allow us to see the people in a horror film as human, to connect with them, to empathize with them. When we see some high school kids laughing it up at a party or ribbing one another between classes, we’re reminded of our own friends. This also makes the frights all the more successful because not only has the comedy gotten us to care for these individuals, but it’s lulled us into a false sense of security. Our body relaxes—but not for long.
Though fun is usually associated with positive traits and likable characters, the horror genre also turns this natural order on its head, by making the villains the ones that seem to be having even more fun than our heroes: Freddy Krueger with his slapstick of the abject, Ghostface with his taunting phone calls, the Invisible Man’s silly transparent pranks, Pazuzu’s jouissance in sacrilege, Annie Wilkes’s gleeful fandom, the dinner-table play of all the Sawyers and Leatherface’s jovial chainsaw ballet under the blistering Texas sun.
Even killers who seem less outwardly giddy, like Michael Myers, still manage to have some fun. In the original Halloween, Myers makes time to dress up like a ghost with glasses for one victim and sets up his bodies in house-of-horrors fashion for another. If we find ourselves laughing along with these monsters and murderers, the humor may be working in a second way: ratcheting up the tension rather than releasing it.
The jokes of the Joker—the greatest horror villain to never feature in a true horror film—might make us laugh, but they rarely make us comfortable. In The Dark Knight, which is more of a horror film than most realize, the Joker’s devil-may-care attitude tempts us to see the world from his point of view: “Now I see the funny side. Now I’m always smiling.” But the humor is always tinged with not just disregard for human feelings (a not uncommon thing for “edgy” comedians), but disregard for actual human life. The violence that undergirds the maniacal humor is perhaps best illustrated by the Joker’s Glasgow smile, but it is also perfectly expressed in the “S” he or one of his clown minions have spray-painted on a stolen semi-truck. The message on the side of the truck, which once read “Laughter is the best medicine,” now reads “Slaughter is the best medicine.”
If laughter is indeed the best medicine, if it allows us to cope with the trauma of being in the world, the Joker highlights how it can also become the worst disease. When everything is funny, then seriousness becomes suspect: “Why so serious?” But in a world without seriousness, there is no empathy, no care, no camaraderie, no civilization; there is only the cold, continuous laughter of a sociopath. Of course, the Joker is so scary precisely because we sense there might be some truth to his outlook, even if we see the horrifying consequences of venturing too far down that path.
The Joker is but one of a seemingly infinite rogue’s gallery of laughing villains, the most horrifying wretches of all: Freddy Krueger, who’s constantly howling at his own one-liners; Chucky, the chuckling homicidal doll; Dr. Giggles, whose tittering sounds exactly as you’d expect; Patrick Bateman, with his variety of laughs; and all the Deadites, and the objects they possess, like that wall-mounted deer head that erupts in the most cartoonish cackles.
Maniacal laughs are not unique to horror; they’ve been a staple of a particular baddie archetype since before cinema even existed. And they’ve become such a common cinematic trope that The Muppets was able to have a villain who just repeats the phrase “maniacal laugh” over and over rather than actually laughing maniacally. (A perfect Muppet gag.)
Laughing villains act as tricksters and jesters who mock us by holding a mirror up to society.The laughing villains need not be literal clowns, though evil clowns are quite common in horror: there’s Pennywise from It, the clown-shaped aliens in Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Art the Clown from the Terrifier films, Captain Spaulding from Rob Zombie’s Firefly Trilogy, the grinning clown toy in Poltergeist, even Michael Myers commits his first kill dressed as a clown in the original Halloween.
But the laughing villains do act as tricksters and jesters who mock us by holding a mirror up to society. They show us, in the words of the Joker, “how pathetic [our] attempts to control things really are.” They are cracked looking-glasses, in which we see a broken reflection of ourselves. In this act, we are confronted with how incongruous our beliefs, our rituals, and our rules are with the world in which we exist.
These laughing villains in a way reverse that V.S. Pritchett axiom, “Our laughter is only a note or two short of a scream,” to tell us that, in fact, it is our screams which are only a note or two short of a laugh.
In A Nightmare on Elm Street, dreams are called “incredible body hocus-pocus,” but the definition is as apt a description of laughter. Laughs are one of the most mysterious mechanisms of the body. We laugh for all sorts of reasons: we laugh to release tension and discomfort, we laugh to commiserate or empathize, we laugh out of schadenfreude or superiority, we laugh resignedly in the face of our own defeat, we laugh at absurdity and nonsense, we laugh amid confusion, and sometimes we can’t even explain—perhaps don’t even know—why we laugh.
But the one thing all laughs have in common is that they are a response to incongruity. In noticing such incongruities, we tiptoe around the madhouse. Yes, every laugh, from the smallest chuckle to the loudest howl, is a moment of minor madness making itself known. When Norman Bates says in Psycho that “we all go a little mad sometimes,” he’s not wrong. We do—we just call it laughter.
In this way, the laugh is never solely releaser or ratcheter of tension; it is always both. In our minor madnesses, we “see the funny side” of everything—which does, on the one hand, bring us joy—but we also, in the words of another Joker, “dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.” Through the laugh, we tango with the terrifying chaos at the core of existence; we become one with the horror.
This makes us, at least in the moment of our outburst, like the Invisible Man in The Invisible Man, whose experiments with invisibility have turned him “raving mad.” Our laugh, like his, can feel disembodied, like it erupts not from any visible self, but from some invisible navel-cord that links us back all the way to the primordial ooze of the universal incongruities from which we emerged.
But a laugh, even that of the Invisible Man, is always embodied. A laugh is a presence. A laugh implies a personality. There is no objective laughter, even if it arises from universal incongruities. We may not see the Invisible Man’s flesh and bones, but his laugh still originates from the meat of his body. Even if “the whole world” is the Invisible Man’s “hiding place,” he still has to physically be in the site of his laughter’s emanation: “I can stand out there amongst them in the day or night and laugh at them.”
If any horror film adequately expresses the meatiness of laughter, it’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which is a visual poem of meat, mirth, machine. The horrifying Sawyer family at the center of the massacre, we are told by one of the family members, have “always been in meat.” As much as they are a family of meat though, they are also a family of machines: the chainsaw that Leatherface wields and their property’s red generator with its mechanical rumble.
Bodies are merely machines of meat. Therefore, the question that runs through The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, for which there is no definitive answer, might go something like this: Is the laugh the sound of the meat machine working as it’s supposed to, like the whirring of a generator or a chainsaw, or is it the sound of the meat machine breaking down?
Early in the film, a drunk says, “There’s them that laughs and knows better.” The relationship between laughter and knowledge is never detailed further, but the line haunts the rest of the proceedings. When Sally Hardesty, the film’s final girl, finally escapes from this family of butchers, her screams in the back of the pick-up truck turn to frantic laughter, and it’s hard to tell why she’s laughing, what she knows, if she knows better.
We’re more used to hearing such maniacal laughter from villains not victims. There are filmic forerunners to her crack-up—even going all the way back to one of the original Universal horror movies, The Mummy, in which Ralph Norton, an archeological assistant, laughs himself to death after he reawakens the mummified remains of Imhotep—but these are always somehow even more unsettling than the laughs of the maniacal villains.
They seem even more inexplicable. We want to know why! Why does Sally Hardesty laugh so hysterically in that truck bed? Why does Ralph Norton? What are they thinking? What do they know? Perhaps we understand them more than we know—or else they wouldn’t trouble us so.
Maybe, in the end, we recognize that it doesn’t matter what Sally knows or doesn’t know, what her brain is thinking about or not thinking about, it’s all just another incongruity. When we laugh, the body admits what the brain cannot.
