10 Horror Comedies To Watch If You Like An American Werewolf In London

The horror comedy genre is an interesting one, because it would seem as though laughter and terror are mutually exclusive. However, some directors have managed to balance the two excellently. Arguably the greatest example of this is John Landis’ 1981 masterpiece An American Werewolf in London, a movie that’s as hilarious as the best comedies and as terrifying as the best horror movies. No horror comedy since then has played with the hybrid genre quite as masterfully, but a few have come awfully close. So, here are 10 Horror Comedies To Watch If You Like An American Werewolf In London.

Zombieland

Ruben Fleischer’s undead-infested comedy Zombieland jump scares and hysterical jokes in equal measure.

Scream

Wes Craven’s Scream was a satirical slasher movie that broke down a lot of the genre conventions that Craven himself pioneered in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It was strange when the makers of Scary Movie decided to spoof Scream, because targeted by a masked serial killer, but it’s set in a world where all the characters are familiar with slasher tropes. The killers turn out to have been inspired by those very movies, so there’s an extra meta commentary about the effects of screen violence on real-life violence.

The Visit

The Visit, a found footage chiller about two kids’ trip to their grandparents’ house that might be more sinister than it seems, was a return to form for M. Night Shyamalan. The creepiness, smart plotting, and subversions of tropes that he built his career on had been gone from his filmography since Unbreakable and Signs.

With The Visit, he brought them all back. As we learn more about the grandparents, more and more tension is built until the big plot twist and the third-act terror. But the movie also has a sharp sense of humor, balancing cringe comedy with escalations of fear.

Night of the Creeps

When he sat down to write Night of the Creeps, a brilliant homage to the classic sci-fi/horror B-movies of the ‘50s, Fred Dekker set out to cram in as many references to old scary movies as he could. He ended up writing the script in a week. It doesn’t feel rushed, because there’s a clear love for old genre movies in there. Dekker is obviously a huge fan of those movies, and he relished the chance to make one of his own. (He reportedly insisted on directing it himself, and wouldn’t let anyone else do it.) With zombies, alien invaders, and a terrifying serial killer, this is a grade-A B-movie tribute.

This is the End

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg had written some of the greatest comedies of the 21st century – Superbad, Pineapple Express etc. – when they decided to playing fictionalized versions of themselves. When the apocalypse breaks out during a crazy drug-hazed housewarming party at James Franco’s house, the actors are stuck together in disaster lockdown, trying to figure out why the world is suddenly on fire.

Evil Dead II

He might be known as a horror director, but Sam Raimi always brings his dark sense of humor to his work. It can even be seen in his Spider-Man trilogy. The Evil Dead was an indie horror delight that set the trend for filmmakers with no money to make a movie about a group of friends visiting a haunted cabin in the woods. It was a more or less straightforward horror film, with an abundance of gore. But the sequel, Evil Dead II, became something of a comedy, incorporating Ash’s “boomstick” and culminating in time travel.

Slither

James Gunn will now Slither’s sick sense of humor made it a box office failure, but it’s since garnered a cult audience.

What We Do in the Shadows

A collaboration between Thor: Ragnarok’s Taika Waititi and the team behind Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows is a mockumentary about the lives of some vampires in New Zealand. They have a housekeeper to whom they’ve promised eternal life, they have a rivalry with a local group of werewolves, and they bicker about the same things that we mortals bicker about with our own roommates.

There isn’t a single gag that doesn’t land in What We Do in the Shadows, which has since spawned an equally hilarious, if slightly American-ized TV adaptation that airs on FX.

Drag Me to Hell

Sam Raimi brought a twisted sense of humor to this dark tale about a loan officer who denies an old lady an extension on her mortgage, prompting the old lady to place a hex on her. Raimi and his brother had written the script years before production began – before he can be seen peppered all throughout Drag Me to Hell.