The Burbs’: The Era of Slapstick Horror

This week on the podcast we talked about the cult classic The Burbs. Pete and I tried to discern the elements of the movie which were horror. It was a difficult time because the movie was a good mix of comedy and horror. It tended to blur the line, sometimes lending itself more to the comedy genre. Nonetheless, certain horror troupes did appear. Thus, this leads me to my blog topic for this week; the emergence of the slapstick horror genre in the 1980s.

The domination of the horror genre in the first half of the 1980s by the stalk-and-slash, splatter, exploitation film formula and the increasingly grisly special effects that often superseded narrative, set the stage for a subgenre rejecting the former and transcended the last; slapstick horror. The first film to exemplify and champion this style was “Re-Animator.’ A tremendous boundary setting film all our listeners should view – even though Pete claimed it to be underrated in a previous podcast. Such a silly man.

The 80s were a time when the horror genre relied on spectacles of bodily destruction, sexually titillating splatters, and mass produced sequels. This happens to be Pete’s favorite area for horror. A solid era for horror with many classics, but the return on investment for the successful film churned out many more lackluster, narrative devoid pictures.

The result? A subgenre integrating the techniques and troupes of horror with physiologically discomforting moments of well-placed Meta comedy.

Slapstick comedy success relies on synthesizing stylistic and thematic strains of classic and contemporary horror while hewing to the principle of social transgression inherent in the most audacious horror and comedy. The Burbs’ doesn’t perfectly brew these elements together, but it tries its best to intertwine. The Burbs’ creates production design which juxtaposes bold, saturated colors with the genre’s typically shadowy, high-contrast lighting, most notably in the film’s cover. Tom Hanks stands with a green hose and a spatula in his hand with a blue robe set behind a dark, black tumultuous background. It evokes the science fiction films of Frankenstein with the saturation of a comic book.

The distinct visual approach further separates it from the low-budget slasher’s of the era. A few other notable films of this caliber around the same time include Evil Dead, Dead Alive, and Fright Night – two movies we previously discussed on this podcast. The slapstick horror is right in the wheelhouse of director Joe Dante who directed films such as Gremlins.

The comedic take on horror are sometimes condescending in a shallow way that does little justice to the power of the form. Such movies shrewdly decline to mix laughs with genuine fright as the attempt usually flounders on issues of audience identification and sympathy. We need to empathize with the victims of horror while comedy requires more of a distant, so we can laugh at their pitfalls and misery. This is where The Burb’s falls slightly short of the meter. The zoom in, zoom out effect when they find a femur bone dug up from the neighbors next door is hilarious, but on a superficial level. It is not conjured up from a well-placed psychological discomfort from the horror on the screen.

We have a farther distant from the hapless characters and we spend more time laughing at their mishaps then worrying about their inevitable death from the Klopecks. The Burbs’ in this vein would work better as a satire than a slapstick horror.

With this being said, I believe what makes The Burbs’ still a favorite, a cult classic, or a contender for slapstick horror is the experience it provides. More specifically, The Burbs’ is a funhouse. The common proximity of these two seemingly disparate emotional responses {comedy and horror}, a phenomenon noted by Freud (he is becoming a common footnote for my blog notes), marks the outward physiological reactions to the experiences that momentarily overwhelm our rational faculties. The funhouse effect of The Burbs’ by creating the odd pleasure in disorientation, a challenge to the participant’s sense of mastery. This is not only found in terror or horror. The most transgressive horror and comedy effects occur in the festive or funhouse experiences of an audience taking in the spectacle together, enjoying a collective release from social structures and conventions, and revealing in recognition of truths otherwise denied or suppressed (Freud again!). The truth that we all are the crazy ones! (Hanks eloquently states at the end of the film.)

Anyone who feels disappointment after watching a recommended comedy alone at home is likely to experience the negative truth of this point; Horror films viewed alone tend to remain unnerving for the reverse reason.

Hanks and the neighbors are immersed a in a classic horror narrative. The neighbors in a gothic home are digging up holes in the backyard and emitting large light storms from the basement. The innocent neighbors try to get to the bottom of the mystery before anymore neighbors go missing. Meanwhile, the vibrant tapestry of visual puns from eccentric characters, to lighting, to one-line dialogue keep the audience rolling until the climatic horror ending.

This explanation could be a little deeper than The Burbs’ initially meant to run, but the elements are still there. People are still to this day are drawn to this film for the sheer festive nature – including this podcaster.