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Miller, Cynthia J. and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, editors. The Laughing Dead: The Horror-Comedy Film from Bride of Frankenstein to Zombieland. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. 272 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-4422-6832-6. $85.00.
Holding Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper's gorgeous book in one's hands already is a tasty treat. It is hefty, there is no doubt about that-and its hardcover binding gives it even more significant weight-but it is alluring. The title The Laughing Dead is as quirky as it is catchy and contemporary, and the brilliant palette of blue-violet juxtaposed with red-orange accents on its fleshly backdrop colorfully establishes the book's core argument to follow: that two polar opposites on any wheel or spectrum, when brought together, become complementary and dynamic. For Miller and Van Riper, of course, the wheel is film genre, and the contraries are horror and comedy. An important alchemical hybridity happens, this book argues, when elements of horror and elements of comedy coalesce and, as Miller and Van Riper tease in opening their Introduction, "The undead are unfunny. Or at least, they're supposed to be" (xiii).
The sixteen essays of The Laughing Dead are organized into three Parts: "Part I: Playing with Genre" has five essays that deal with a variety of ways in which the genre of comedy upsets (for better and for worse) the genre of undead horror stories from World War II to our contemporary; "Part II: Horror, in Theory" has six essays that engage with this tradition of comedy-meeting-undead-horror to investigate how either seemingly opposite element challenges and augments the other for a dynamic hybrid; and "Part III: There Goes the Neighborhood" has five essays that explore undead horror films that comically situate the undead in somewhat surprising locales, from the city to suburbia to DIY science labs. A tight Introduction also opens the edited collection.
All five of the essays in "Part I: Playing with Genre" are thoughtful pieces that start the conversation of comedy and horror coming together, but there are two stand-out contributions here: Christina M. Knopf's "Zany Zombies, Grinning Ghosts, Silly Scientists, and Nasty Nazis: Comedy-Horror at the Threshold of World War II" and Eric César Morales's "Beyond Fear in The Book of Life: Discussions on Children, Death, and Latinidad."...