Much like comedy, horror is the only genre that relies on a visceral reaction from its audience.  Both laughs and scares are automatic responses we have when we find something amusing or frightening.  And you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would disagree with the statement, “comedies should be funny”.

The fact is, there’s nothing more awkward than sitting through a comedy movie or a stand up routine where the jokes just aren’t landing and no one is laughing.  Things get awkward pretty quickly.  Similarly, people have often criticized horror films that didn’t manage to scare them.  And while on the surface this may seem fair, the comparison is a bit of a false equivalency.

And to be fair, what people find funny and what people find scary is incredibly subjective.  But the simple fact is to disregard a horror movie as “terrible” just because it didn’t personally scare you is a mistake that overlooks a lot of great films.

Comedy ≆ Horror (Most of the Time)
Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to get a laugh than get a scare.  Scares usually require buildup, suspense, and then either a jump scare, or something that makes people frightened.  Whereas a standup special or a comedy movie could do a joke every 60 seconds and you miss a few because you’re still laughing at the last one.

Given the inequality in terms of frequency, when a comedy isn’t getting laughs it’s a lot more noticeable a lot faster.  Most comedies are also paired up with other genres.  You have romantic comedies, buddy cop comedies, family comedies or even horror comedies.  Very few comedy movies lack a second genre that they’re attached to.

This is because comedy is more a vibe and style of movie than a specific genre. Granted, you have something similar with horror as they have slashers, supernatural, monster movies, but these are all subgenres of horror, not necessarily horror pairing up with other genres.

Comedy is to laughter what oxygen is to breathing, you can’t have one without the other.  Whereas scary is to horror what sprinkles are to an ice cream cone.  You can have a perfectly delicious ice cream cone devoid of sprinkles and you still enjoy it.  But adding those sprinkles (or scares) makes for a nice bonus that makes it stand out even more.

Disturbing, Not Scary
Another thing that people often forget is that just because a horror movie doesn’t scare them personally doesn’t mean it’s not disturbing.  Very few people would say that the admittedly overly CGI monsters from The Mist scared them.  But people have been talking about that ending for the 15+ years since the movie came out as something that disturbed them.

Some of the best and most effective horror movies are ones that didn’t jump out and scare you, but rather left you disturbed and thinking about it long after you’d watched it.  The types of movies that you were still thinking about that night, while you were struggling to fall asleep in the dark, suddenly noticing every tiny sound coming from the creaks of the house and the wooshes of water running through pipes..

In fact, it’s arguably much more effective to leave an audience disturbed, unable to get the movie out of their head, than it is to get them with a jump scare.  There’s nothing wrong with jump scares, and some of them can be absolutely brilliant (like Insidious and Exorcist III), but the fear you get from them mostly expires immediately after the moment is over.

Appreciating the Art
It’s also perfectly possible to just enjoy the genre of horror for the art that it is.  For many diehard horror fans who feel like they’ve seen just about everything, it’s very easy to get desensitized (myself included).  It gets to the point that you get excited when you find a movie that does actually scare you.

But that doesn’t mean you’re not enjoying watching all the other movies.  Horror fans know what it’s like to feel like an outcast and to like something that’s considered weird or looked down upon (especially by snobby film critics and award shows).  Horror fans will watch a monster movie and relate more to the monster being hunted rather than the self-righteous monster hunter trying to destroy what is different.

And for a lot of horror fans we’ve simply developed into twisted individuals that find comfort in watching movies where people are violently disemboweled or decapitated, or where killer clowns saw people in half or gouge their eyes out.  I’m of course being (slightly) sarcastic, but it’s something that “normal” people don’t quite understand.  Which is why likely the only people you’ll hear complain “this movie sucks, it didn’t scare me” aren’t diehard horror fans.

Horror = Comedy (Sometimes)
One thing that most horror fans will say about horror is just how much fun it is.  It’s a genre that allows you to take ideas and frustrations and run with it to the nth degree.  You can watch something like Carrie and simultaneously be horrified at what she’s doing, but feel vindicated that the people who mistreated her are getting what they deserve as well.

Additionally, horror and comedy go hand in hand.  You can have a slasher movie filled with jokes, or scares and kills that go so far over the top that you can’t help but laugh.  Sam Raimi’s entire career is because of that fact.  So a more accurate question that horror fans will ask themselves, rather than “did this scare me?” is “was this movie fun?”

Because ultimately, the worst sin a horror movie can commit isn’t a lack of scares, it’s being boring or uninteresting.  Granted, that could just as easily open up another debate about the nature of “elevated” horror and whether slow burn movies are better than faster paced one, but that’s an argument and article for another day.

Point being, there’s so much more to horror movies than just whether they scared you or not.  And if you go into them expecting to be scared or hate it, the result will be missing out on so much great horror!

Do you have to be scared by a horror movie in order to enjoy it?  Let us know in the comment!

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