Comedy horror  

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In 1963, Roger Corman directed The Raven, a horror-comedy very loosely based on the poem The Raven
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In 1963, Roger Corman directed The Raven, a horror-comedy very loosely based on the poem The Raven

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Horror comedy, is a literary and film genre that combines elements of comedy and horror fiction. The genre almost always inevitably crosses over with the black comedy genre; and in some respects could be considered a subset of it.

The short story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is cited as "the first great comedy-horror story". The story made readers "laugh one moment and scream the next", and its premise was based on mischief typically found during the holiday Halloween.

In film

In comedy horror film, gallows humor is a common element. While comedy horror films provide scares for audiences, they also provide something that dramatic horror films do not: "the permission to laugh at your fears, to whistle past the cinematic graveyard and feel secure in the knowledge that the monsters can't get you".

In the era of silent film, the source material for early comedy horror films came from stage performances instead of literature. One example, The Ghost Breaker (1914), was based on a 1909 play, though the film's horror elements were more interesting to the audience than the comedy elements. In the United States following the trauma of World War I, film audiences sought to see horror on screen but tempered with humor. The "pioneering" comedy horror film was One Exciting Night (1922), written, directed, and produced by D. W. Griffith, who noticed the stage success of the genre and foresaw a cinematic translation. While the film included blackface performances, Griffith also included footage of a hurricane for a climactic storm. As an early experiment, the various genres were not well-balanced with comedy and horror, and later films improved the balance and took more sophisticated approaches.

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Comedy horror" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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