“And some extended ways of understanding the notion of incongruous juxtaposition include: simultaneously presenting things that stand at extreme opposite ends of a scale to one another […] Just as the mental state of fear must be directed at a particular object subsumable under the category of perceived harmfulness, the mental state of comic amusement requires being directed at a particular subsumable under the category of apparent incongruity. Moreover, since apparent incongruity is a matter of the transgression of standing […] commonplace expectations, the relation of horror to humor begins to emerge, since […] a necessary condition for being horrified is that the emotional state in question be directed at an entity perceived to be impure- where impurity, in turn, is to be understood in terms of violations of our standing […] commonplace expectations.” (Carroll, 154)
As Carroll discusses, the incongruity threory when applied to horror and comedy works beacues the the humor derived from the extreme juxtaposition of two things and from the percieved impurity of the person or thing creating the fear response in the viewers. This is seen in a lot of horror comedy films, as they often uses one liners, deadpan, and dark humor to juxtapose the horror type situations. M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Visit does a great job of this, as the movie manages to be scary, while simultaneously carrying a comedic tone throught the film, without ruining the fear response it induses.
The Visit uses the incongruity theory to great effect, which helps establish both tones of the movie. The two scenes I have included happen almost right after each other. The first scene shows Tyler and Becca hearing weird noises in their room in the middle of the night. They open the door to see their grandmother running around like a possessed or crazy person. Both grandparents have exhibited strange behaviour before this. The second clip shows Becca and Tyler the day after, on a walk with their grandparents in the woods. Once their grandparents are out of sight, Tyler mimics the strange running that their grandmother had been doing the previous night. These scenes juxtapose each other in tone for both the characters and audience– one is freaky, the other funny, in setting and time– the first is inside at night, the second is outside during the day, and the instigatiors of the actions– the first is the grandmother, and the second is Tyler. Tyler’s rendition of the scene before adds humor and makes light of the previous situation. The grandma is made fun of, because she (and her husband) are this movie’s “impure” entites. They are shown as potentially insane individuals who no longer understand or follow “commonplace expectations.” The other possible “impurity” that the grandmother has that allows here to be looked at in a comedic light like this, while still being scary by herself is her age. She seems to embody the grotesque “old hag” stereotype. In a horror setting, this is also what makes her scary. The juxtaposition between the her impurities in a sense of genre makes it easier to drift between both horror and comedy.