As tempted as I was to write about one of my favorite films of all time; the sequel to Evil Dead 2, Army of Darkness (or “Medieval Dead”), I thought that writing about something I’d thought of as genuinely fear-inducing would work better in this context.
I’ve only ever seen the Final Destination films out of context, my theatre class decided to watch them in the green room backstage during our production of Clue (fittingly, a murder mystery and a comedy). However, my stage nerves and my general anxiety when presented with horror movies prevented me from laughing at it like they did. The idea that the characters’ mortality was inevitable and would be gruesome filled my neurotic mind with images of set pieces falling and prop knives switched out for real ones by some trick of fate.
Watching scenes from it now, I’m able to appreciate the film for the comedy that my friends were wrapped up in. Some of the deaths in Final Destination are so ridiculously over-the-top that, despite their gruesome nature, they are frankly comical. The Rube Goldberg-esque mechanics that allow for the tanning bed death, in particular, were so ingenious that I genuinely couldn’t help but find the whole thing a bit funny. My personal experience with these films illustrates how horror comedy is incredibly contextual. In one moment it can be a genuinely horrifying film, and in another it can be a morbidly enjoyable dark comedy. I think the key difference is whether or not we engage in a Bergsonian distancing between ourselves and the subject, as Cynthia J. Miller points out in The Laughing Dead. If we allow our fears to give us sympathy for the plight of the characters on screen, it is harder to contextualize our surprise as a positive one (thus transforming the shock response to laughter instead of fright).
I will link the tanning bed scene here, but won’t embed it as it really is quite gruesome. However, if you’re not as squeamish as me it may help illustrate my point to watch the scene:
I did not read the warning and proceeded to watch anyway. Despite how horrifying this is, the elements that make it funny (the ditsyness of the girls, the ridiculous nature of how this all happened, the circumstances that led tot heir deaths) all culminate in something that’s almost so funny and unrealistic that it’s no longer scary.
This is a great example of comedy horror! I personally think that the main comic aspect of this movie is that it is so ridiculous that it does not even look scary! Final Destination is just a long “wtf just happened” moment: the deaths in this movie are extremely absurd and unrealistic.
I feel like the unexpected turns and sudden movements throughout the film, build up, gradually making each hyperbolic forthcoming action that occurs incredibly funny. It’s the disbelief and strange acts of fate that momentarily condense the horror element, allowing laughter to take hold.
Your story about stage nerves and anxiety is really impactful; it reminds me of what Carroll says on page 151 about fear being influenced by mental state and how we intellectually understand objects around us rather than only being about feelings. To me, your experience speaks to this subjectivity horror comedy operates in and even further complicates it by showing it can shift not just person to person based on static ideas but even moment to moment.
To be completely fair, after watching the scene once, I completely get where you were coming from. That being said, everybody’s different, and I intuitively found the scene quite whimsical and silly in a quite concrete way – the way the upbeat music intercuts perfectly with the typical ‘suspense’ scoring is hilarious, and the general sequence of events definitely resemble Miller’s point on horror/comedy both over-encumbering their protagonists with complication after complication until they are left with nothing.