Low-Stakes Horror Movies That Are Just A Good Hang

Tremors, the 1990 Kevin Bacon-starring monster movie seems ready-made for the meme age. Bacon's lead is a handyman living in a small desert town, who finds himself an unwitting leader in the battle against a proliferation of underground-dwelling worms hell-bent on gnawing on every member of the sunbaked suburb. A tongue-in-cheek love letter to '50s B-movie monster mashes, Tremors manages to neatly straddle the line between abject silliness and straight-faced scares, making it the perfect starter pack for the horror-curious. 

John Landis is the director and creative force behind many of the best-remembered ‘80s comedies, including Animal House and The Blues Brothers. That comedic skill is on full display his 1981 horror classic An American Werewolf in London, lightening the would-be psychological stress of enduring some of cinema’s most truly horrifying werewolf transformations with darkly humorous and satirical observations about cultural tourism, “otherness”, and the “ugly American” trope of obnoxious American travelers in foreign countries. It's both a staple of Landis's comedy and of werewolf films as a whole.

Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard's sizzling send-up of the horror genre, The Cabin In The Woods, functions all at once as an effective entry into the form and a hyper-meta deconstruction of horror tropes. All that to say, the movie is as relentlessly clever and cutting as the killer creatures it features, as it offers a tongue-in-cheek explanation for why horror movie monsters appear to trouble young adults - and why the virgin is always the last one standing. Bolstered by a head-to-toe cast of comedic greats and recognizable (not to mention likable) faces, one can consider The Cabin In The Woods required viewing for new inductees and seasoned vets of horror, both. 

A punk rock touchstone? A subversively queer would-be blockbuster masquerading as macho horror? An effective portrait of male friendship? An endearing love letter to California and Corman pictures in equal measure? The Lost Boys is all of the above and more. Jason Patric and Corey Haim are brothers who find themselves on opposite sides of a local gang of ne'er-do-wells who just happen to be creatures of the night, led by Kiefer Sutherland's David, the most fearsome of all. Quirky, visually singular, and full of winning performances, Joel Schumacher's 1987 vampire tale is, above all, simply cool. 

If 1996's The Frighteners doesn't quite live up to its name, it's only because the movie is much more concerned with eliciting chuckles than screams. Michael J. Fox headlines as a former architect-turned-supernatural con-man/exorcist named Frank Banister who gains the ability to communicate with ghosts. When an avalanche of mysterious deaths in his hometown begin to point toward something truly supernatural, Frank must join forces with a victim's widow and a mildly unhinged federal agent to solve the mystery. Thanks to an overwhelmingly likable lead in Fox, The Frighteners leans heavy on the comic side of comedy-horror, and is all the more enjoyable for it.

George A. Romero is an indisputable master of the form when it comes to horror filmmaking, but perhaps (wrongfully) less discussed is his prodigious skill as a social commentator, often with a distinctively dark sense of humor. With 1978's Dawn of the Dead, Romero cements both of those assertions, delivering an at-once scathing and hilarious critique of consumer culture as it follows a group of survivors in the middle of a zombie apocalypse who hole up in nine other than the ultimate haven to mass consumerism itself: a mall. It's lighter fare than Romeo's original genre-defining film Night of the Living Dead, and a solid entry point to zombie films for tentative viewers.