I've just finished the latest article for AlienSkin (it's changeover time - new mag comes up in a few days so if you haven't read everything that's up now, time is running out). So I was already in the article vault when I had a request from David de Beer, a fellow devotee of the macabre, to see again one of the old articles. Specifically, the one from the June/July 2007 issue.
I intend to compile these articles one day. Something I've been promising myself I'd do for a long time, but never yet managed to staple my backside to the chair for long enough to do. Perhaps I should skip the staples. They aren't very comfortable. Anyway, I thought of calling it 'Frank Herbert' by Dume. No reason, the title just seems to fit somehow. I'd better check there isn't already a book called that. I've heard it somewhere before, I'm sure.
Without further ado, then, here's the article:
Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry; make ‘em chuckle, make ‘em die.
AlienSkin magazine, June/July issue 2007
"I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you cheer up.” Something there from those old stalwarts of comedy, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But wait, does this mean I have forsworn the Pen of Fear for the Chuckle Pencil? Has Dume gone over the edge, fallen from the abyss of horror into the pothole of merriment?
Not a bit of it. Horror and comedy can mix. It’s not easy, but when it works, it works extremely well. It works the other way, too. Comedians have long recognised that death and pain can be funny. Watch Monty Python if you don’t believe that – the programmes, and especially films like ‘The Meaning of Life’ and ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’. In the former, you’ll laugh at the exploding Mr. Creosote, complete with still-beating heart in burst ribcage. In the latter, you’ll split your sides at the Black Knight, who keeps fighting despite losing limbs, one by one. There’s blood and gore aplenty, and you’ll enjoy every minute of it.
The Pythons use confusion and shocking visual effects to amuse. In horror, we scare people with exactly the same techniques. How can the same scenes produce totally opposite results?
When you start watching ‘Night of the Living Dead’, you expect to see a gruesome, gore-filled horror movie with jump-out-at-you effects. You expect partially decomposed corpses biting people’s brains out. You are not disappointed.
When you start watching ‘Shaun of the Dead’, you are expecting a comedy, and again, you are not disappointed. However, this film uses exactly the same effects, the same wandering dead, the same blood and gore. So what makes one scary, the other funny?
A large part of it is expectation: how the film is presented. Most of it has to do with the main characters, their dialogue, how they react, what actions they take.
In ‘Night of the Living Dead’, the main characters scream and run at the sight of the zombies. In ‘Shaun of the Dead’, Shaun wanders, hungover, along the street and says ‘Good morning’ to the shambling bodies around him. If the characters in Shaun’s film screamed and ran at the first sight of the zombies, it would have been a horror. If the characters in ‘Night’ had tried to escape by pretending to be zombies, it would have been funny.
The effects and techniques used in ‘Young Frankenstein’ were pretty much the same as those used in the original Frankenstein films. Yet ‘Young Frankenstein’ was funny, not scary. Those masters of horror acting, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre came together in a film called ‘The Raven’, which uses their horror talents to the full to make the whole thing hilarious. In the UK, we have ‘The League of Gentlemen’, in which nobody who enters the local shop leaves alive, the veterinarian kills every animal he treats in dreadful ways, the joke shop only sells jokes that maim, and the butcher sells ‘special’ meat under the counter. All of this is comedy. All of it will work equally well as horror.
Horror and comedy can use the same scenes, the same gore and blood, to produce perfectly opposed reactions. This is where you have to be very, very careful.
It’s possible to produce what you think is the greatest, most terrifying story of all time, only to have your audience split their sides laughing at it. Try ‘Plan 9 from Outer Space’ for an example.
If this happens, the first thing to check is your dialogue. Horror stories can have jokes in them, but don’t overdo it. In ‘Van Helsing’, the character of Igor has a couple of great comic lines but he doesn’t play it as comedy. Despite raising a few chuckles, he remains a sinister and threatening character. That would have been lost if every line he had was a smart-alec comment, a double entendre or a straight-out joke. When Dracula asks Igor why he torments the captive werewolf, Igor responds with a shrug, “It’s what I do”. It makes you smile for a moment, but you soon realise that tormenting living things is, indeed, what Igor does.
Next, check your action. For horror, your hero has to face apparently impossible situations, yet find a plausible way to escape. Or not. Your villain has to have a reason to do what he does to the hero. Even if you don’t tell the reader what that reason is, you should know. The reader should be able to work it out. In comedy, plausibility is optional.
If your hero escapes by battering the monster with a frying pan he found in the dungeon, or your villain’s reason for killing everybody is that he failed to learn the piano, then you have a comic scene, not a horror scene.
Funny moments in horror provide a little relief from what could otherwise be an intense and disturbing story, but there is a line. It’s a hard line to see, but step over it and you’ve fallen into that abyss that lies between terror and mirth.
Nothing wrong in that, as long as you realise you’ve done it. Horror-comedies are always popular, but silly horror stories aren’t. Unless you can get it into the ranks of the ‘classically bad’. To do that, you first have to sell it, and selling something that falls into neither horror nor comedy will be very difficult indeed.
Read through your work, get someone else to read it, and listen to their reactions. If they laugh, don’t just abandon the work. The darker side of comedy is a wonderful place, almost as wonderful as the true horror world. Just don’t fall into the gap that lies between them.
