30 in 30: A MONTH OF HORROR. TUCKER AND DALE VS EVIL
DAY 15
TUCKER AND DALE VS EVIL (2010)
Dismemberment can be fun!
After watching horrible nightmares unravel before my eyes every night for the past 15 days, I was more than glad to watch this funny and horrific comedy.
Horror movies come with the supposition that they need to be scary, there are highly controversial arguments on the internet about this claim (and probably about everything else that exists). To me, that’s not the case. Horror movies don’t need to be scary to be great. “Scary” depends a lot on the circumstances you watch the film in. A lonely winter night can heighten the “scary” aspects of the film, but the horror is always going to be there.
Comedy-horror films are still horror films, just with a different perspective on the matter. And that’s why I love this movie so much. It plays on the classic tropes of horror but changes the perspective of the story from the victim to the “killers.”
TUCKER AND DALE VS EVIL is about the two titular characters. They are hillbillies repairing an old cabin in the back of the woods to serve as their vacation home. Their stay there takes a turn for the worse when college students start killing themselves all around their property in freak accidents.
This movie is a hundred times better if you are familiar with the structure of regular “slasher films.” A group of teenagers goes to a remote place to have sex and gets killed by a machete-wilding, mask-sporting, monster.
In this film, the teenagers have seen way too many horror movies, and as soon as they see Tucker and Dale, they suspect the worse. This suspicion leads them to horrible deaths in the woods around the vacation home. But why are these deaths funny instead of “scary”? After all, movies like FINAL DESTINATION have turned freak accidents into a prolific horror franchise.
The answer here lies on empathy. Chaplin said:
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”
That same idea is at play here. A close-up means we are closer to the character while a long-shot is the opposite. We need to understand “close-up” and “long-shot” as metaphors for how much we connect with the characters. If we are in a “close-up” with a character, then we are going to care a lot more than if we are in a “long-shot.”
In this film, we empathize with Tucker and Dale; the college students are, for the most part, cannon fodder. This means their accidents can be seen as horrific, but ultimately funny.
What can we learn from horror comedies?
Well, have you ever laugh at a lousy horror movie? Then it’s probably because you weren’t in a “close-up” with the characters. If we want to create compelling horror movies, then we need to be as close to the characters as possible, if not we’re going to be making a comedy.
Which might not be such a bad thing after all, we need more horror-comedies!
Tomorrow: TRICK ‘R TREAT (2007)
Yesterday: AUDITION (1999)
