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.
The third in a trilogy of satirical films from director Lindsay Anderson and star Malcolm McDowell, this takes a biting crosscut of British society as a hospital prepares for a royal visit
Martin Scorsese returns to the vision of urban hell he gave us in Taxi Driver with Nicolas Cage as an ambulance driver haunted the dead he sees. Powerful, blackly funny at times, if not quite up there as another Taxi Driver
The first sequel to the 1931 Boris Karloff Frankenstein, which many prefer to the original. Director James Whale comes into his element and provides a whole other level of droll humour that the first film did not have
Terry Gilliam’s satire on Nineteen Eighty-Four is a darkly brilliant work – it is a madly out of control film but is filled moments of wild imagination and black-than-black humour than make it an unnerving ride
A wickedly irreverent and even occasionally blasphemous comedy in which God is a scruffy, bad-tempered man living in Brussels who spends all his time devising ways to make humans miserable
A very black Norwegian comedy in which a man who committed suicide wakes up in an afterlife very much like this world but where everyone suffers from a maddening blandness
A flop comedy based on a Dave Barry novel about various characters trying to obtain a nuclear weapon. Despite a reasonable name cast, this becomes slapstick inanity in director Barry Sonnenfeld’s hands
British comedy made with an acerbic bite featuring Dudley Moore as a hapless loser who makes a pact with Peter Cook’s Devil to win the love of his life but has the wording of each wish contorted around on him
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
Hollywood noir from the Coen Brothers, this takes us inside the crumbling mental state of a screenwriter in the 1930s. Like a David Lynch remake of Day of the Locust, this comes rich in the Coens’ black uncomfortable humour
Blackly funny Frank Capra comedy adapted from a very popular Broadway play of the era in which Cary Grant discovers that his two old dear aunts have been killing off their boarders
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
Psychological thriller where an uptight Colin Firth gets a handsomely charming roommate in Hart Bochner who proceeds to seduce everybody in the building with sinister intent
Tobe Hooper makes a film where Chad Lowe becomes the supervisor an apartment building filled with strange tenants. However, Hooper misses the intended black comedy tone by a mile
John Landis brings the werewolf film into the modern era with this revisionist work where a modern character is forced to confront it as real, while depicting the transformation with an arsenal of top-drawer effects.
Mary Harron takes on Bret Easton Ellis’s controversial work about a yuppie serial killer and refines it to a blackly funny satire on 1980s pop culture and corporate greed
Sequel to the live-action Addams Family film that reunites the same cast who fine-tune their roles, while the black comedy has an even more barbed bite second time around
The big screen Addams Family films ended with the death of Raul Julia. Subsequently the rights were sold to Saban Entertainment who made this cheap, terrible direct-to-video film with a new cast
The big screen version of the 1960s tv series and Charles Addams’ cartoons is a highly enjoyable Hollywood Halloween Party, a chance for name actors to put on costume and ape life with a ghoulish, mildly perverse, moderately subversive spin
The success of Trainspotting gave birth to this anthology that adapts three Irvine Welsh stories, including episodes in which a man is transformed into a fly and a man swaps minds with a baby