Horror Movies are Funny Too

At the start of this semester, I never would have thought one of my unrestrained laughter blog posts would involve a horror movie. As many of you probably know, horror movies are designed to produce screams, not laughs, so why in the world would this specific instance result in the latter. The answer is that it was not the movie that was the subject of ridicule, but rather the reaction of one of the viewers to a certain scene. The movie in question was Anabelle, the story of a creepy doll that becomes possessed by a demon and drives a young mother to the brink of insanity. The scene that provoked the outlandish reaction involved the mother looking under the bottom of a closed door when suddenly the doll appears out of nowhere on the other side. Basically, it was an example of the classic horror movie scene in which everyone in the audience knows that something is going to pop out, yet still get scared even when it does. Now, the normal response to a scene like this would be to jump in your seat or maybe even let out a little scream, but what this viewer did resembled neither. No, what she did was much closer to a cheer or a "whoop," something you might hear at a TCU football game. Of course, the rest of the audience, myself included, were not prepared for this out of place response and the incongruity of the situation immediately caused us to break out in laughter. The movie had reached a climactic, terrifying moment and she was cheering? It was obvious that she was scared and not actually cheering, but that fact did nothing to stifle our laughter.