The Joke’s On Us: Why Horror-Comedies Killed It In 2025

The theatrical experience of breathing erratically, clenching one’s jaw and fits, involuntarily looking away, yet not being able to peel your eyes off the screen—it’s the experience every horror-loving cinephile craves. 2025 in particular has been a luminous year for horror thriller films and their subgenres, not only for their alt themes, character arcs, and eerie scares—but for their uncanny ability to tickle a funny bone amidst all the dread. If this year has taught us anything about horror, it’s that fear is funnier than we ever acknowledged it to be. The genre has always flirted with absurdity; but this year, comedy is the pulse of modern terror.

Films like Weapons (2025), The Conjuring: Last Rites (2025) and The Monkey (2025) lean unapologetically into humour—oscillating between gruesome shocks and ridiculous spectacle—and audiences respond with the kind of uneasy laughter that feels like survival instinct. Horror has now started delving into blending the surreal with contemporary internet-culture. Laughter isn’t just comic relief but also a defense mechanism; and films have used that to their advantage. Take Clown in a Cornfield (2025) for instance. A killer clown stalking a town is terrifying on paper, but the execution—with exaggerated gestures and cartoonish pratfalls—transforms the figure into a grotesque caricature that elicits both giggles and shrieks. Humour threads through the plot as well, from absurdly inventive ways to die to Gen-Z victims fumbling to call 911 on a rotary phone, and their frantic attempts to escape the clown’s relentless, ridiculous pursuit. In The Monkey (2025), our antagonist is a literal toy-monkey that shoots, stabs, and slaughters, while bewildered adults scatter in terror, outsmarted at every turn by its absurd urge to annihilate anything in its path. How does one take an indestructible, sheepishly-grinning toy-antagonist seriously? 

The campy violence and bloodshed remains a constant thread. Weapons revels in violence; but it also satirises the culture that consumes violence as entertainment. Innocent symbols like children become the film’s most biting commentary, as redemption and victory arrive in the shocking image of them gleefully tearing people limb from limb. While watching the final chapter of The Conjuring series, Last Rites, the same pattern emerged. Marketed as “the scariest farewell”, it was lukewarm at best but also humorous. The franchise is known for creepy spirits and exorcisms, yet here, it winks at ritualistic clichés, fighting old possessed furniture and using “I-hate-my-daughter’s-boyfriend” coded banter as plotline. Horror and humour now exist in a dialogue, bouncing off each other to create a rhythm that is simultaneously shocking, absurd, and satisfying. The result is a new breed of horror comedy that thrives on tension, timing, and the audience’s self-awareness.

Sinners (2025) and Longlegs (2024) both explored horror through the lens of ritual, belief, and moral tension, using objects and symbols as conduits of fear. In Sinners, amidst supernatural relics and racial commentary, the dialogue snaps like a whip. When Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke shoots a comrade, he casually asks if he’s okay—prompting the deadpan reply, “I was doing better before you shot me in the ass!” Similarly, Longlegs too employs occult tools, exploration of trauma and moral secrecy. Although Nicolas Cage’s over-the-top antics—imitating a cuckoo clock, singing, screaming, and delivering caricatured lines—made both him and the film memorably absurd and darkly funny. In these films, perhaps comedy works as a mirror, reminding us that while we are terrified, we are also participants in the absurd spectacle of our own fears. 

Many of the most discussed titles, from Weapons to Bring Her Back (2025), come from creators who honed their craft by being on YouTube. Their films bear the fingerprints of enduring online storytelling culture: non-linear pacing, contemporary humour, immersive worldbuilding, self-referential jokes and exaggerated absurdity to balance it all. These directors understand that the modern audience lives online, consuming horror in fragmented bursts, sharing clips, reacting and remixing. The result is what one might call “internet-literate horror”, perfectly suited for a generation that laughs, screams, and immediately records what terrifies or tickles them.

Parallel to this, sci-fi horror continues to carve out its own anxiety-driven territory. These films reflect cultural tensions about AI, surveillance, and control, transforming our unease with technology into visceral, often ironic, cinematic horror. The comedic nerve doesn’t dilute the terror, but amplifies it, making the audience laugh at what they simultaneously fear. M3GAN 2.0 (2025) straddles the line between menace and sass, making the titular AI doll as funny as she is frightening, while almost leaning unapologetically into subgenres of action and comedy. The contrast between the doll’s childlike design, absurd dance routines, and razor-sharp one-liners creates a tension that is both terrifying and hilarious, culminating in the trailer’s cheeky tagline: “This bitch vs that bitch,” set to Britney Spears’ “Oops!… I Did It Again”. While we’re on the topic of robot-ladies, in Companion (2025), directed by Drew Hancock, Sophie Thatcher portrays an AI-powered girlfriend who “loves” Josh (Jack Quaid), blending dark humour with meditations on obsession, ownership, and the absurdities of modern intimacy. In the same vein, this year’s best romance horror Together (2025), starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, examines co-dependency, soulmates, and fated connections through a lens that is as philosophical as it is unsettling. Horror has discovered that the heart can be just as frightening as the monster, and often far funnier, especially when love goes terrifyingly wrong. Who are we kidding, though— those dating apps still outdo the genre more often than these films.

Where slow burn psychological horror and thrillers of the past decade relied on restraint, this year’s horror plunges boldly into bloody pools, ear-piercing screams, and absurd monsters, insisting that terror is as much about communal thrill as existential dread. Camp has returned with fervour, as no longer a guilty pleasure but a celebrated strategy. Religion and ritual remain central tools for exploring the unknown, often deployed with a knowing wink that interrogates the performance of belief, rather than merely questioning faith, blending awe, irony, and terror into a seamless, exhilarating experience. Comedy thus softens the unbearable—a pressure valve releasing tension through the uncanny, the grotesque, and the absurd. 

This year saw an explosion of audacious, irreverent horror signalling an industry-wide shift. Horror is no longer marginal; it’s a playground for risk-taking, social commentary, and aesthetic ambition. Story-first visionaries, internet-literate creators, and socially attuned filmmakers have positioned horror as the crucible of contemporary cinema. In 2025, horror laughs at itself—and at us—but it also reflects the world we live in: ironic, fast-paced, saturated with objects, technology, and absurdity, yet deeply human at its core. It is the genre of our fears, anxieties, and contradictions, showing that the best horror today is not solemn terror alone; it’s the joy, the thrill, and the laughter of confronting darkness head-on. It hasn’t just been a good year for horror—it has been a year of liberation, a year when fear and fun finally found each other, and a year that reminds us why we keep returning to the dark: to laugh, to scream, and to recognise ourselves in the chaos of it all.