As Noel Carroll explores, horror and comedy are fundamentally philosophical opposites: “horror oppresses; comedy liberates… comedy elates; horror stimulates depression, paranoia and dread.” It is in the expert balancing of the two mental states that the genre finds its success, for the more tension that the horror builds up, the more cathartic the eventual laughter becomes. Horror audiences are only so prone to laughing (as Stuart Gordon comments) because it is the best mechanism to deal with the shock of what they witness; audience members who are too frightened (which, in theory, is what the films are meant to elicit) are unlikely to revisit the cinema. Thus, comedy is intrinisically part of the horror genre’s mainstream success.
Yet as Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) exemplifies, there must be an extra element that ties the two together, for the film came at a time where the slasher/splatter genre became stale for its lack of self-awareness, a phenonemon that turns humour into boredom as audiences accustomed to the tropes no longer found the interplay of emotional states satisfying – or “inadvertently funny”, which Gordon points out causes the very stability of the film to collapse. The Scream franchise (now with its 6th installment having released recently) was born out of this paradox, as a slasher film where the Ghost Face ‘monster’ – that Carroll identifies as the defining feature of all horror – is hidden until the very end, the twist revealing it to be one (or multiple) of the friends all along. As Michael Arnzen explores, splatter films are essentially a game “that teases the spectator’s ability to predict outcomes, much like a mystery thriller.” The fun of Scream is in figuring out who the ‘monster’ is, which is a game that even the characters decide to play, inviting viewers to act in “collusion with the film by playing [the same] narrative games”. There is always at least one character in these films who is obsessed with the genre that they are currently suffering, utilising the knowledge they know to survive; while the ‘monster’ is similarly obsessed, but in the sense of desiring to recreate the thrills they witnessed on film. Most recently, the resident ‘slasher expert’ lays out the rules of the game as a “sequel to the requel”, implying a grander scope (they are now in New York, where it seems any random stranger could be the Ghost Face), more gruesome deaths (the cold open sees a fake Ghost Face being brutally murdered after finding his accomplice butchered and stuffed in the fridge), and the lack of safety for its ‘legacy characters’ (which is subverted as the “core four” ultimately survive the ordeal). It is this postmodern dissection of the genre that makes Scream effective, turning the fun of the viewing experience away from merely the subjugation of visceral screams, towards a state of mind where the very fabric of the horror film is intellectualised and transformed to humourous effects. Scream thus revitalised the genre by turning the tropes of horror into the very object of the joke, adding a metatextual layer onto the horror-comedy dynamic to keep the two opposite forces in perfect harmony.