6 Horror Comedies To Watch On Netflix This Halloween

It's never easy deciding what to watch. With a plethora of films available on even a single streaming service and new movies being added every month, even the most dedicated cinephiles among us have difficulty making a choice, never mind making it a good one. To assist our readers with choosing an awesome film, each week I’ll bring you six high-class selections available on Netflix Watch Instant to indulge your insatiable need for streaming options. With Halloween coming up this Saturday, there’s no better time to indulge in some scary-funny movies in the dark – so here are 6 horror comedies that you can watch on Netflix right now. 6) Scream It’s the original meta horror film, often copied and never equalled. Director Wes Craven kills off his characters with uninhibited glee here, referencing everything from his own films to those of his slasher-movie counterparts while building a truly scary, truly funny horror series all its own. Teenagers die, blood comes in buckets, a killer calls up and asks “what’s your favorite scary movie?” and you’d better not get the answer wrong. But underneath the humor and horror, Craven manages to sneak in some serious (and unanswerable) questions about the place of horror in the cultural zeitgeist. Bending and even breaking the very rules that Craven and his fellow slasher directors established to begin with, Scream and its sequels offer trenchant commentary on horror, its contradictions, and where it could possibly go next. This is the perfect time of year to watch Scream – or, indeed, the entire Scream series, which Netflix currently has on streaming (all but the underrated Scre4m). Since Craven passed away this year, it’s also a chance to experience one of the great works of a horror master. Don’t worry if you don’t know the rules; you’ll learn them along the way. 5) Tucker And Dale vs. Evil The hillbillies strike back in this horror-comedy about two perfectly nice guys hanging out in a creepy cabin in the woods. When a group of yuppie college kids stumbles upon their cabin, Tucker and Dale are faced with the prejudice of all horror films that casts them as crazed killers and the kids as hapless victims. But there’s real evil lurking in them woods, and Tucker and Dale are the only ones equipped to fight it. Like Scream, the film bends horror conventions without compromising its taste for murder and mayhem. Tucker and Dale are wonderfully hapless characters, confused by the terror that they seem to cause; it’s actually great fun to see the annoying college kids begin to fall prey to their own imagined fears. The film takes a few unexpected (but very satisfying) twists to get to its blood-soaked finale, and like Scream, it successfully brings the scares while also playing around with horror conventions. 4) The Hole I came across this one while searching for director Joe Dante, the man behind horror-comedy classics Gremlins and The Howling. The Hole is in the same vein, this time taking on the haunted house motif with a story of two kids who move into a new house for the umpteenth time. While there, they discover an apparently bottomless hole in the basement, and naturally just have to start poking around in it. As the hole unleashes untold horrors into the world, the kids have buckle down and start wrestling with their own demons – through the cunning use of paintball guns and baseball bats - before the demons defeat them. The Hole sneaks in a number of references to iconic horror images, including Poltergeist, the work of Salvador Dali and Tim Burton, and Dante’s own films. Also, watch for cameos from Dante regulars and a quick scene with a very creepy Bruce Dern. While not as iconic as Gremlins, The Hole succeeds in some real scares while staying in the PG-13 horror mode. 3) From Dusk Till Dawn If you’d rather your horror comedy contain plenty of blood, breasts, and bad language, try From Dusk Til Dawn. Quentin Tarantino and George Clooney are two criminal brothers who take a minister (Harvey Keitel, no less) and his family hostage, then hole up in a roadside cantina on the USA/Mexico border. As the sun sets, they discover that they’ve stumbled into a den of vampires that includes a nearly naked Selma Hayek and her pet snake. The brothers realize that they’re going to have to band together with the minister and his family if they’re to survive the night. Robert Rodriguez directs this one with his typical gusto, bringing out all the stops in vampire lore and injecting them with octane. In addition to Selma Hayek’s rather memorable strip-tease, there’s Cheech Marin hamming it up as a sort of vampiric commentator on the events. It’s a strange, twisted film, but it's guaranteed to elicit both groans and laughs 2) Housebound I watched this film entirely based on the recommendations of my horror-loving friends…and I’m very glad I did. Coming out of New Zealand, Housebound is a haunted house movie combined with a legitimate mystery/thriller and undercut by some wry comedy. After a failed robbery attempt, young felon Kylie is placed under house arrest and must return to her childhood home to live with her mother and stepfather; a sensor strapped to her ankle ensures that she can’t move beyond the property line. But her mother is convinced that the house is haunted, and has been for the entire time they lived there. Cue bumps in the night, a weird talking mechanical bear, the creepy guy next door, and a ghost-hunting parole officer, and you’ve got a scary-funny ride. Housebound is a unique film: unlike many horror comedies, it asks the question of how fairly normal people would actually react to a haunted house, with Kylie screaming and flailing at first and then trying to get out of the house rather than just put up with it. Faced finally with having to deal with the ghost, Kylie buckles down and does her best, in the most incompetent and human way possible. 1) The Addams Family Halloween isn’t complete without everyone’s favorite Gothic family. The first Addams Family film is still a delight, no matter what your age. Beginning with the Addams family trying to pour boiling oil on carolers, the film only gets weirder from there: Gomez’s long-lost brother Uncle Fester returns to the family home, but Morticia suspects that something isn’t quite right with this new addition. He just isn’t…Addams enough. With stars including Anjelica Huston, Raul Julia, Christopher Lloyd, and a very young Christina Ricci, The Addams Family is a well-acted, gleefully twisted take on Charles Addams’s original cartoons and the zanier 1960s TV show of the same name. While there’s nothing particularly scary here, there’s quite a lot of grotesquerie, a charming story about the nature of family, and likably weird characters that take a strange Gothic world and make it into a world we all want to inhabit. I guess The Addamses just have more fun than normal people.