What a scream!

Bollywood's fav new genre is frightfully funny. It exposes our fears, it lets off steam, it gives old plots a new life. Two actors tell us why horror and humour are not so different after all

- Karishma Kuenzang

Laugh the vampires back into the castle, tickle the monsters back underneath the bed. The best horror movies of our time are turning out to be comedies. Stree 2, the year's biggest hit, is a story of a gang of friends fighting a headless monster who is intent on kidnapping women. Munjya, which also released this year, draws from Indian myth and has as many laughs as it has scares. Romancham, about a bewitched ouija board, was the fifth-highest-grossing Malayalam film of 2023. India now has a horror-comedy franchise (Bhool Bhulaiyaa 1, 2 and the upcoming 3) and hits in Marathi, Telugu and Bengali. And somewhere, the ghost of Goa Goa Gone, the Bollywood zombie comedy that started it all in 2013, is rolling in its grave, laughing.

Hollywood's done it for ages. Both An American Werewolf in London and Beetlejuice are '80s gems. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a hit '90s movie before it became a hit '90s TV show. It's played with the genre with such gems as Shaun of the Dead (2004), Jennifer's Body (2009) and The Cabin in the Woods (2011) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It's not as easy as it looks. Two actors, who've delivered on both the fright and the funnies, tell us how they got it right.

Pankaj Tripathi

Horror and humour seem like an odd pairing, but they have more in common than we realise. "They're both collective, infectious, community-driven emotions," says the actor from Stree and Stree 2. "If five people laugh in a theatre, most people follow. It's also how laughter clubs work."