The thing that stood out to me the most from the start of the Cynthia Miller reading was the similarities she highlights between horror and comedy films, as initially it seems as though the two genres oppose each other. Miller shows this not to be true and states that the “mechanisms by which they operate are strikingly similar”. She expands upon this point to state that the most obvious overlap is the way that “both comedy and horror depend on the shock of the unexpected”.
One film that came to mind when thinking about the way horrors and comedies utilise this shock factor was The Menu. The film tells the story of a group of people who have been selected to come to an island and try a world renowned chef’s latest menu. The film constantly blurs the lines between horror and comedy. When I saw The Menu in the cinema, through many of its most shocking moments, the audience were unsure whether to laugh or jump, and the crowd’s reactions to certain scenes were split. What is clear is that each scene is meant to incite either one of these visceral reactions.
Miller explains that the way that both genres create these shocks is through “shattering the viewer’s assumption that the placid normalcy established at the beginning of the scene will last until the end.” In The Menu, with each course the horror and absurd comedy of the situation escalates, with the turning point of the film coming when the head chef encourages one of his cooks to kill himself.
Miller states that the “cumulative effect is to dissolve normalcy into chaos, overturn the rhythms of the characters’ everyday lives”. This can be seen in the ending of The Menu as Anya Taylor Joy’s life has been completely turned on its head. She is the sole survivor from the island and now has to carry what she had witnessed with her for the rest of her life; she has been forever changed.
Whilst I think that Miller makes a valid argument here, I do not believe that the extent to which she emphasises it is entirely universal to all horror and comedy films. Miller uses the term “mayhem” to describe the environment created by the shock of the horror/ comedy. My understanding of this, from the way she described it, is for the previously mentioned end result to be achieved, the film must create total “chaos” (either through comedy or horror). Whilst this does happen in The Menu, I don’t believe it happens in every single film that falls into these two genres. As such, despite her arguments being valid, I believe she overemphasised them a little.