The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Black Humour is a special type of comedy. While most mainstream Comedy derives its laughs from plays on words, incongruities, embarrassments and absurdities, black comedy is that which laughs at matters that people usually take seriously. Typical subjects in black comedy are matters like death and murder, war, illness, suffering and the general miseries of life.
A protagonist in a black comedy may be akin to a character in a Franz Kafka novel, finding the world and society around them seemingly run by madmen or to operate on insane principles that frequently seem to be conspiring against them. In the horror genre, Black Comedy will also laugh at murder, dismemberment, bloodshed and cruelties inflicted on people – there is a strong vein of Black Comedy in Horror Comedy.
Black Comedy also frequently maps over onto absurdist humour. This derives from the popular Theatre of the Absurd movement and involves characters caught in frequently surreal and nonsensical situations. The mix of absurdism and black comedy is frequently prevalent in British humour. Many of the entries here are listed under Gonzo Cinema.
A comedy in which office staff working overtime gradually realise their efforts are in preparation for the end of the world. This needed more of a dark bite to fully work but has occasional amusement
Directed by and starring actress Alice Lowe, this comes in a blackly funny vein. Lowe plays a pregnant woman driven by the voice of her baby as she starts dispatching everything from sleazy men to those who annoy her
Ready or Not was a reasonable hit with audiences. Now Samara Weaving and the same creative team are back with a sequel that expands the game and polishes the black humour to a point of perfection
Darkly funny comedy where two girls in high school conduct a series of murders to create publicity for their true crime blog
Lars von Trier, who I would argue is the best director at work in the world, makes a film about a serial killer. The results, as you might expect from von Trier, are outrageous, blackly funny and challengingly provocative
Dark, sardonic comedy where Amanda Crew rents a house to get away for a weekend only to face a murderous Robert Patrick. The humour is barbed and quite hilarious
Belgian film that starts out as a blackly funny work about a cut-price East European hospital before seguing into a zombie film
Essentially a women’s version of Fight Club, a black comedy about a girl being dragged on a killing spree by a murderous life coach
This is a strange and not particularly accessible deadpan Greek-made film where people are affected by a plague of amnesia. Similar to early Yorgos Lanthimos
Alex van Warmerdam makes a very strange black comedy, so deadpan you are not sure if you are meant to be laughing or not
A darkly funny Danish film about a couple who accept an invite to visit another couple who seem to have no boundaries, before everything gets nasty
Another of Quentin Dupieux’s hilariously gonzo comedies made up a series of deadpan surreal vignettes, including a witty parody of the modern superhero film
Hilariously black horror comedy that works as a sublime satire of fine dining – with a nasty sting underneath
Lars von Trier returns to finish off his haunted hospital saga The Kingdom after a 25 years absence, despite the death of several principals, and again milks the same darkly hilarious vein
Noah Baumbach makes a bitingly satiric adaptation of a Don DeLillo novel about the panic caused by a toxic cloud
Very loosely based on a real-life incident, this is an Animals Attack film about a rampaging bear wired on cocaine. Director Elizabeth Banks makes a play for darkly funny humour
Ari Aster’s third film had many audiences scratching their heads. It follows Joaquin Phoenix on an allegorical journey that becomes a dark comedy and an entirely surreal Freudian nightmare
Yorgos Lanthimos has become a critically celebrated name in recent years. Here he has made an anthology of three surreal tales that come in his customary black deadpan
A black comedy that comes in a very broad tone concerning an ordinary man trying to record an album who accidentally kills people around him only for them to refuse to stay dead
A insanely madcap work of meta-fiction. Imagine stupider versions of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction mixed with Stranger Than Fiction as they discover they are fictional characters