Unfortunately, I haven’t watched anything really cool or interesting in the last month, so I’m going to talk about one of my favorite movies of all time, Army of Darkness.
Way back in the long ago of my youth, I was introduced to horror through camp.
It’s probably because of this introduction that humor and horror are inextricably linked for me. While I write straight horror, in my daily life I’m probably more funny than spooky.
I often wonder why that is. The best explanation that I can come up with is: the surprise.
Humor takes something we experience in everyday life and points out the absurdity of it. Or it uses language to draw a connection that didn’t exist before. I know there are more forms of humor, but those two are my favorite. And my favorite thing about them is the surprising nature of jokes.
When I first read Thinner, by Stephen King, the story surprised me in a way that I had never experienced as a reader before. I probably became a horror writer, in part, because I wanted to be able to deliver that same kind of surprise to readers.
And even though it was pretty funny, Army of Darkness was also kind of scary to a kid of 11. And I think without that movie, I might not have been primed to pursue horror as my genre of choice.
Other, more recent, examples of campy horror that’s still scary are Cabin in the Woods and Tucker and Dale versus Evil. Cabin in the Woods had me so fooled with the first five minutes that I pulled the DVD out of my player, convinced that I’d rented the wrong movie. And Tucker and Dale versus Evil takes an absurdly cliched horror trope and turns it on its head, both surprising and satisfying.
But if you haven’t seen Army of Darkness, do yourself a favor and watch it, if only for Bruce Cambell’s mighty chin.
The Chimerical Dark 