Content warning for for gore and violence!
The comedy of horror-comedy, Jonathan L. Crane argues, lies in its ability to self-reference and make ironic gestures toward its genres with abundant extravagance. It is referencing itself, in other words, with all the tact of hitting someone over the head with a shovel.
1985’s Re-Animator, a (very) loose reworking of the short story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft, sees Herbert West, underappreciated genius and certified oddball, perfect a “re-agent” which re-animates dead specimens. This information comes much to the chagrin of West’s professor, Dr Carl Hill, who maintains that the location of the will in the brain means that reanimation of dead tissue is impossible, and who, after seeing West’s serum in action, attempts to steal his work. To prevent this, West kills Dr Hill and then reanimates his severed head to gloat.
(Excuse the DIY-ness of the clip; I have never and would never rip my own DVD copy of the film to isolate this scene.)
Re-Animator brilliantly toes the line between splatterpunk horror, science fiction, and slapstick comedy in a send-up of its “style lacunas” (146), as Crane puts it. Its exaggerated moments of violence and gross-out allow “laws common to convention” to be “suspended, rewritten, or otherwise altered” (147) as West, in a moment straight out of Looney Tunes, clocks Hill with a shovel and props his severed head up using a spindle. The scene moves between comedy and horror, simultaneously thrilling its audiences with its gory effects and amusing them with the dismissiveness of its characters’ reactions to these horrific acts. It is an ironic, self-referential view of both genres which Crane characterizes as being unique to horror-comedy, arguing that “repudiating science necessitates the invention of irony […] the horror film must offer extravagant fantasy that is at once over the top and just right” (154). Re-Animator parodies the trope in horror and science fiction of the mad scientist (as well as his rival scientist who is willing to steal others’ work to obtain the fame he seeks), the violence inherent to the horror film and its association with the “kill”, the method of murder employed by the monster, and the gore associated with the B-film and the splatterpunk subgenre. Its combination of gleeful violence and ironic exaggeration creates a genre unto itself, a kind of goopy slapstick which delights and horrifies in equal measure. Its sense of exaggeration and irony, paired with its self-referentiality, create a film which, in Crane’s words, is “free to shift across registers, from horror to comedy and back again, without alienating or losing an audience” (154).