8 Creepy Movies That Are Hysterically Funny (If You Have a Dark Sense of Humor)
“Okay, reality check. Liz is in the trunk of this car and she is dead.”
Black comedies utilize humor to make a morbid situation funny. Also called “gallows humor”, black comedy is irreverent. It serves the function of making dark subject matter more palatable and easing tension during an uncomfortable experience.
The movies on this list cover morbid topics like death, murder, serial killers and blood-sucking vampires, but the subjects are played for laughs. At least, if you have a dark sense of humor. These are the 8 best dark comedies for horror movie fans to watch:
Heathers (1988)
Winona Ryder stars as Veronica, a high school student who is part of the school’s popular clique known as the Heathers — as her three other friends are all named Heather. Tired of her vapid friends and entranced by badboy new student J.D. (Christian Slater), Veronica accidentally becomes an accomplice to J.D.’s murder of the queen bee Heather. Subsequently, Veronica takes a more active role in J.D.’s murder plots.
Death Becomes Her (1992)
Madeline (Meryl Streep) and Helen (Goldie Hawn) are petty rivals obsessed with outdoing each other and winning the affection of Ernest (Bruce Willis). In a desperate attempt to stay young both women consume a potion that promises them eternal youth. However, they also receive a (belated) warning to care for their bodies. Instead, the women try to murder each other and end up uglier than before despite mortician Ernest’s best efforts. The women come to realize that the potion doesn’t offer eternal youth; instead it gives them eternal life and will eventually make them walking corpses. Death Becomes Her‘s CGI effects earned the film an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Serial Mom (1994)
John Waters’s comedic homage to the genre is about a wholesome-looking mom played by Kathleen Turner. What’s not apparent to most people is that she is also a serial killer who slays people for the most unassuming slights—such as taking a parking space from her, standing up her daughter for a date, and wearing white after Labor Day. She becomes a celebrity killer known as “Serial Mom,” and in a commentary on how American media makes stars out of psychopaths, her children Misty and Chip profit from their mom’s infamy.
To Die For (1995)
Gus Van Sant directed this movie that stars Nicole Kidman as the narcissistic and beautiful Suzanne Stone-Maretto. Suzanne is a small town New Hampshire woman who has grandiose ideas about becoming a famous television journalist. She marries into an upper middle class family via her husband Larry (Matt Dillon) and begins her career at the local cable access station. When Larry pressures Suzanne to quit her job to become a mother, she seduces a high school boy (Joaquin Phoenix) and convinces him to murder her husband.
Fargo (1996)
This black comedy film sees Frances McDormand (wife of co-screenwriter Ethan Coen) in an Oscar-winning performance as the folksy and pregnant police detective Marge Gunderson. Gunderson is tasked with solving the murders of a state trooper and two witnesses killed in botched traffic stop. Under her gentle yet unremitting questioning, car salesman Jerry Lundegard (William H. Macy) loses his temper, and Marge begins to unravel a twisting plot. But, everything goes wrong–as wrong as things could possibly go.
Jawbreaker (1999)
Writer and director Darren Stein’s original vision had been for a horror movie about a terrible accident that happens as a group of high-school girls prank a friend for her birthday, but as he wrote the script, it became more of a comedy. A good way to think about Jawbreaker is that it’s the 90s version of another teen black comedy cult classic, Heathers (1988). Both films revolve around fashion, pastel colors, gallows humor, and a group of popular high-school girls flippantly responding to their friends’ death(s).
What We Do In The Shadows (2014)
What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary about a group of vampire roommates. The humor comes from the character’s lack of self-awareness and the juxtaposition of ancient vampires and typical low-stakes roommate drama. The movie has created two spinoff television series, What We Do in the Shadows and Wellington Paranormal.
The Lobster (2015)
A dystopian black comedy with light horror elements. It follows David (Colin Farrell), a man who moves to a hotel after his wife left him. Hotel guests have 45 days to find a partner or they will be turned into an animal of their choosing. Guests can extend their time at the hotel by hunting single people in the nearby woods.
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