In his essay Noel Carrol talks about how the defining character of the horror film is the monster. For the monster to work in the horror context, he said the monster needs to be both fearsome and gruesome.
While there are several examples of horror-comedies that intentionally reduce the monster to a comedic parody: The Scary Movie franchise and Key and Peele’s possessed Make-A-Wish child. There are perhaps just as many examples of the horror monster that is comedic unintentionally. Whether it is poor execution or the passage of time, some monsters do not illicit fear but laughter.
In the case of The Mummy returns the horrendous CGI makes the monster become instantly less threatening because the illusion of danger is shattered. It may suggest that audiences look for comedy in horror as a way of safety from the terror they are potentially subject too. As Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper pondered at the start of their essay: ‘Does laughter mitigate our fears of things that go “bump” in the night?’. In many ways both genres offer the audience a release both rely on subversion and eliciting pleasure from the incongruous, both use the safety of the screen to show.
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However, such categorical failure has resulted in the scene attaining infamy it an affectionate sense. The film’s star Brenden Fraser defending the films CGI by saying:
“The guys who did the CGI of the Scorpion King, [I saw them] at the premiere, and they were like, ‘Hey, how are you? We did the Scorpion King CGI. Yeah, we needed a little more time. It was very last minute.’ Some of the charm of it now is…it could get remastered I guess, but it wouldn’t be as fun if you didn’t see this janky video game character of Dwayne. It’s somehow just perfect, how it works.”
The readings often talk about how horror and comedy operate on different sides of the same coin, it is curious that failed horror can so quickly become comedy and failed comedy can become uncomfortable and quasi-horrifying.