It was considered newsworthy when Zach Cregger revealed he’d cut jokes from Resident Evil after test screenings, even though the film’s final version isn’t exactly lacking for gags. Horror and comedy are natural bedfellows, and their relationship has become so committed that it’s unusual to see horror in theaters without at least a couple of lighter moments easing the tension.
Horror has always been ripe for parody; Frankenstein became the subject of Victorian burlesque shows decades before the monster famously met Abbott and Costello, and we’ve been awash in winking, self-referential horror since Scream arrived in 1996. But Cregger’s school of gory tension and ridiculous relief traces back to the 1980s, when horror was getting more extreme and more ridiculous. Evil Dead is the quintessential example, but An American Werewolf in London was a landmark too, and it just received a 45th-anniversary 4K UHD Blu-ray release.
