Punchlines, Jump scares – Why Comedians Make Great Horror Writers
Eilidh Paterson
The comedy genre seems antithetical to that of horror. One makes you laugh, the other makes you scream. But that popular notion postulated by the likes of Jordan Peele – that the only real difference between the two is the music – rings true. It’s a trick of atmosphere: frightening moments can easily give way to humour under softer lighting, sound, and a sense of safety. It’s why the plots of so many light hearted films verge on the horrific when they’re reframed: Mall Cop (Stalking), Teen Beach Movie (gang warfare), The Switch (non-consensual impregnation), Evan Almighty (religious psychosis), to name a few. (Actually, The Switch is unforgivable from every angle.)
But that overlap between “haha” and “AHH” lies in the same machinery: tension, timing, and then sudden subversion. It’s the rhythm of both a punchline and a jump scare, and the scream is the laugh’s ugly twin.
What makes these genres so testing is their inconstancy: not everyone scares the same, not everyone laughs at the same thing. They demand an almost forensic understanding of human behaviour; what shocks, what embarrasses, what we repress, and what we can’t help but respond to. This binds the two; comedy can become scary when the bleak realities it conceals surface; horror can be so excessive that we can’t help but laugh.
This trend has become increasingly visible in modern cinema – The Office US’s John Krasinski writes incredibly tense horror in his A Quiet Place films, David Gordon Green directed Pineapple Express before moving onto Halloween (2018) and The Exorcist: Believer. Some of the most exciting horror creators today share an origin in comedy or sketch content. Peele, Zach Cregger and Danny and Michael Philippou are proof that fluency in absurdism is central to crafting a good scare.
Before Get Out, Us, and Nope, Peele was best known for Key and Peele. The ludicrousness of sketches like a burn victim rasping, “do me… I can take it” at a comedy show seems worlds away from the claustrophobic terror of Get Out. But structurally, are they that different? Meeting your girlfriend’s parents, being hypnotised into paralysis by the stirring of a teacup, discovering that a handful of old white elites have been parasitically inhabiting black bodies – might you not be in Key and Peele, live studio audience and all? As Daniel Kaluyah enters the “Sunken Place” a distant echoing of “SHUT UP MOM. Silence from you!” sounds out. It is so exaggerated, so absurd, yet it is precisely this that allows Get Out to reflect genuine anxieties around systemic marginalisation and erasure.
Similarly, in Us, the haunting yet outlandish premise of a family hunted by their own doppelgängers gestures toward the grounded reality: millions literally hidden beneath the surface, living under a system of oppression and abandoned by the government meant to sustain them. As Peele put it in a CBS interview, both comedy and horror are “about truth. If you’re not accessing something that feels true, you’re not doing it right.” In other words, push a situation beyond plausibility until it cracks, revealing something uncomfortable underneath.
Zach Cregger – formerly one of The Whitest Kids U' Knew – builds horror through escalation and misdirection. Speaking with Last Podcast On The Left, he likens his process to mental gymnastics: “What would be crazy? … How can I go left when I should go right?” That method is what transforms Barbarian from a movie about a suspicious Airbnb to a web of genealogical mutilation, and Weapons from missing children to a labyrinth of witchcraft – the art of snapping a stick shrouded in a lock of hair. A monster becomes generational trauma, a witch means substance abuse. Cregger’s monsters aren’t as scary as the reality they allegorise, construing horror that is both wildly pervasive and beyond unsettling.
The Philippou brothers (RackaRacka) started with YouTube chaos – wrestling videos, stunt sequences, violent CGI. The exceptional gore of Talk to Me and Bring Her Back retains the tenacious, kinetic energy of sketch content, this time coupled with emotional undercurrents. Grief and vulnerability sit alongside the paranormal, and talking to the dead is not just for kicks but is a desperate attempt to locate what has been lost. The effect is multifaceted; horror that is excessive and uncontained, yet startlingly intimate and confrontational.
Across all three, the pattern is the same: the ability to dig into discomfort, rupture expectations, and expose something emotionally. It’s a stand up comedian’s checklist.
Comedy and horror are not opposites, but mirror images. It’s the same wind-up, pitch, and, hopefully, a home-run. Comedians make such extraordinary horror writers because they’ve spent years learning how to break patterns and shatter expectations.
The gist is: if you’re funny, the capacity to scare is within you. It’s waiting to be unleashed.
