Abstract
In a period characterized by pervasive and intense symbolic conflicts between the two extremes of the political spectrum, a strain of humor particularly anchored in the imaginary of horror and filled with graphic violence spread in Brazilian cinema. This chapter looks at three recent films that intertwine comedy and horror to speculate about their possible allegorical link to the current culture wars. Through stories of ghost hunters, cannibal elites, or collective extermination games, these films seem to transpose the confrontations of the macropolitical arena into each fictional microcosm, translating the culture wars into violent allegorical battles presented as something at the same time horrible and funny.
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Notes
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This combination of comedy and horror is also identified by some theorists in the so-called terrir, a subgenre created in Brazil by the director Ivan Cardoso in the late 60s and 70s. According to Lyra, in terrir films there is an intertwining and overlapping of fragments of horror, humor, and sex (2006, p. 142). This overlap, however, is done through parody, in dialogue with the tradition of revisiting the clichés of classic cinema present in the “Marginal Cinema,” an important Brazilian cinematographic wave of that period.
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A famous example of a non-villain whose death is made up as a recurring joke is Kenny McCormick of South Park. In the first five seasons of the series, Kenny dies in virtually every episode, often in an extremely violent and graphic way; and then reappears alive and well without much explanation in the next episode.
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Coincidence or not, two years before the production of Ghost Killers vs. Bloody Mary, another version of Ghostbusters (2016) had been released in theaters. The North-American remake had replaced the four men who occupied the position of ghost hunters with four women. Soon after the start of its promotion, it became the trailer with the most dislikes in the history of Youtube (Proctor, 2017), moving an immense resistance from fans. This set of reactions is connected to what some recent studies define as a “geek masculinity” (Salter & Blodgett, 2017; Blodgett & Salter, 2018), a niche that has been articulating and promoting a series of actions against what it defines as victimhood narratives, in which women (cis or transgender) are considered threats to their “way of life” (Levendusky, 2013), contributing to the deployment of an “us vs them” rhetoric (Massanari, 2017).
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Hoefel, D. (2021). Comedy, Horror, and Graphic Violence: Brazilian Allegories of the Culture Wars. In: Mpofu, S. (eds) The Politics of Laughter in the Social Media Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81969-9_10
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