Note: This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, just a rundown of the eras in horror comedy. Feel free to suggest titles, or whole epochs, that we may have missed out.

The 1920s stage plays

In the 1920s, playwrights decided to spice up their stage plays by adding more horror elements, creating silly haunted-house and monster stories like The Bat, The Cat & The Canary and The Gorilla. Some of these, like Canary, got adapted to silent movies. The 1925 Lon Chaney film The Monster also features a comic-relief character, but isn't really a full-fledged comedy.

Abbott And Costello And Laurel And Hardy And So On

In many ways, the 1930s and 1940s were the heyday of the "clean" horror comedy, which featured monsters without any real gore or violence. Laurel And Hardy did A Live Ghost in 1934, the haunted-house movie The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case in 1930 and A-Haunting We Will Go in 1942. The Three Stooges also dabbled in horror-comedy with short films like 1943's Spooks!. And then going into the 1940s, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and Bob Hope, among others, brought the genre to new prominence. There's also the hilariously titled Zombies On Broadway. Let's put on a show!

1960s Anarchy

The 1960s saw a slew of trippy novels, movies and TV shows in which horror elements often jostled with comedic ones — several of Peter Sellers' 1960s comedies often veer into horror at odd moments. At the same time, monster sitcoms like The Munsters and The Addams Family ruled television with their zany portrayals of monsters who were just like us — almost. This was also the era that gave the start of the long-running Scooby Doo cartoons, and a slew of cute/funny images of monsters, from the Frankenberry cereal to the Count on Sesame Street.

Self-Aware Campiness

Susan Sontag published her famous essay on "camp" in 1964, but the 1970s really backed up the camp truck to our door, and dumped a load of glitter on our front steps. Horror comedy was no exception, with Vincent Price starring in two mega-campy Dr. Phibes movies, and other over-the-top horror films like Please Don't Eat My Mother and Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes taking over cinemas. Most of all, Rocky Horror Picture Show became a defining movie for a whole ripped-fishnets-sporting generation.

The self-aware horror spoof genre took off way more in the early 1980s, with movies like Creepshow mocking the genre's cliches. And in general, the horror-comedy movie genre really came into its own in the 1980s, diversifying into a bunch of thriving sub-genres.

Ghostbusters, Gremlins and more

1984 saw the release of both Ghostbusters and Gremlins, sparking a new onslaught of cute/scary monsters and ghosts, including four (!) Critters movies. I'd also put 1986's Little Shop Of Horrors and Haunted Honeymoon into this category: wide-eyed protagonists coming face-to-tentacle with weird, slimy or fluffy-but-nasty creatures. According to Box Office Mojo, both Ghostbusters films and the first Gremlins occupy three out of the top four best-selling horror comedy slots of all time.

Troma comedies in the 1980s and beyond

Troma deserves its own category, for its sheer volume of output if for no other reason. Although it's best known for the Toxic Avenger films and Surf Nazis Must Die, there are just so many weird, over-the-top and just plain wrong Troma films out there, you could fill a bookshelf with the DVDs. And really, Troma is just the tip of the iceberg of a slew of direct-to-VHS and direct-to-DVD movies that we've seen in the past 20 years ago, with a ton of cult auteurs pushing the boundary between scary and funny.

1980s Werewolf/Vampire Humor

Teen Wolf (1985), An American Werewolf In London (1981), Fright Night (1985), Mr. Vampire (1985), Once Bitten (1985), Vamp (1986) and Love At First Bite (1979) were just some of the cocaine-fueled laughs at Universal monsters. Here's a photo of Grace Jones at a vampire strip club, from Vamp.

Body Horror/Comedy

The Reanimator films and Brian Yuzna's Society, among others, take the David Cronenberg trope of the human body being transformed into something gooey, icky or disturbingly awful, and they find the silliness and subversive humor that lurks just behind that, with gore, decapitated limbs still moving and lots of oozing goop all providing opportunities for slapstick and discomfort. The 1980s were also the heydey of Frank Hennenlotter's over-the-top violence and bodily destruction, in films like Basket Case. I'd also stick Peter Jackson's Dead/Alive into this category. In many ways, this genre has been the gift that keeps on giving, as evidenced by the awesomeness of 2006's Slither.

The Rise Of Sam Raimi

Classic Sam Raimi films deserve their own category, especially the Evil Dead films and Army Of Darkness. Bruce Campbell in his prime, rocking the chainsaw hand, against the legions of dead. Good times.

Christopher Moore

No discussion of horror-comedy would be complete without mentioning the 1990s and 2000s novels of Christopher Moore, especially his vampire classics Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story, You Suck: A Love Story, and Bite Me: A Love Story, plus his zombie Christmas tale The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale Of Christmas Horror.

Creature Features

Tremors (1990), Arachnophobia (1990), Lake Placid (1999) and Eight-Legged Freaks (2002) were just some of the slew of tongue-in-cheek monster-rampage films that came out in the 1990s and early 2000s. My fave is probably Lake Placid, just for the amazingly deadpan performances by Bill Paxton and Betty White, among others.

Buffy Etc.

Joss Whedon's Buffy empire, including a movie and two television series, pretty much deserves its own category, and it came along with a slew of other TV shows and books featuring (frequently female) heroines facing tongue-in-cheek magical/horrific threats, including Charmed and Xena: Warrior Princess.

The Chucky and Leprechaun Films

I have no idea where those fit in, so I'm putting them here. These are like the silly counterparts to the already quite silly Jason Voorhees and Freddie Krueger films. Chucky is a weird doll that comes to life and attacks people (I guess — I've only read a comic-book adaptation) and there have been a million films about a silly leprechaun going around disemboweling people and controlling their minds. And rapping. And dancing.

Horror Spoofs

The Scream films in the late 1990s jumpstarted the slasher-movie genre with their knowing humor and sly horror-movie references. And then with the release of Scary Movie in 2000, the floodgates opened. There have been a ton of horror spoofs, many of them with the word "Movie" at the end of their titles. Plus the upcoming Transylmania, which exactly one person is excited about. (And we know where you live.)

Zombie Rom-Coms

Shaun Of The Dead, Planet Terror, Jennifer's Body and Zombieland all, to some extent, use the reanimated dead as a backdrop for character-focused comedies. (Okay, so the rom-com thing in the subhed is stretching it slightly — they don't all feature love stories, exactly. But some of them do.) Zombie comedies that are less character-focused include the Nazi epic Dead Snow, the zombie slave masterpiece Fido, the zombie sheep masterpiece Black Sheep and the incredibly nasty Zombie Strippers. Plus Bruce La Bruce's Otto, Or Up With The Dead People. Oh, and there's also last year's Poultrygeist: Night Of The Chicken Dead. No, really. There's also Jon Heder's webseries Woke Up Dead.

Meanwhile, in the world of books, many people see Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide as humorous, rather than as the indispensible handbook it is. There have also been a decent number of funny zombie books, including Breathers: A Zombie Lament by S.G. Browne, the mash-up Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, and several others.

Not entirely sure how it fits in, but horror spoof John Dies At The End, by Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin (under a pseudonym) is selling like hotcakes on Amazon.

Sources include Wikipedia, BoxOfficeMojo, IMDB, Scared Silly and the book Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror & Comedy by William Paul.

Additional reporting by Mary Ratliff.

Quick someone get Dr. Monster a comic book deal stat, we want to see what happens next.

UPDATE: The name of the artist is Travis Pitts, we want to make sure this brilliant design gets lots of love so spread it around! To see the rest of his work check out the Travis Pitts' site Zom Bot.

Thanks for the tip Sean!

With a horror heritage that includes a Bram Stoker novel (The Jewel of Seven Stars, released just six years after Dracula) and a string of Bela Lugosi movies, the good ol' Mummy should be up there with all the other horror classics getting Twilighted and revamped for the CW generation. So why are we in a Mummy recession? Here're some potential problems for the bandaged ones:

The Comedy Aspect

Whether it's the admittedly-silly name, the visual of a slow-moving figure wrapped entirely in bandages or too many appearances in Scooby Doo (See above), it's kind of hard to take Mummies seriously as any kind of threat recently. Nowadays, you're as likely to see a Mummy as comedic McGuffin in Eureka (or, yes, subject of a Scooby Doo direct-to-DVD movie) as anything that's really going to try and spook you. Seeing Mummies as sources for comedy isn't anything new, of course -


- but somewhere along the line, that's all they became. For Mummies to live again, someone would have to come along and treat them with the fear and respect they deserve.

The Mummy Trilogy
...And that person wouldn't be Stephen Sommers. Don't misunderstand; as sub-Indiana Jones wannabes with the focus firmly on kid-friendly adventure and giving John Hannah a chance to overact at every opportunity, the three Mummy movies are actually pretty good (Well, the first one, at least). But as movies that make Mummies something to be spoken of in the same breath as vampires or werewolves...? Not exactly the greatest.

Part of the problem with these movies is, in my opinion, we knew too much about the Mummy; by nature of its story, the Mummy ceased to be an unknowable, unstoppable threat but was, instead, a flawed human who just happened to have been resurrected millennia later with supernatural powers. Considering this trilogy has shaped the mainstream perception of the Mummy as much as anything else since its release, it's frustrating that this route was taken instead of the producers' original idea to let Clive Barker create a low-budget modern day movie about a cultist looking to reanimate an army of Mummies...

Zombies
There's no way around it: Zombies have completely stolen Mummies' thunder... and their whole schtick. Just look at the evidence: Undead? Check. Slow lumbering around? Check. Killing people? Check. Zombies are naked Mummies, except they're wearing clothes. It's not hard to see why zombies have come into ascendance while the popularity of the Mummy has declined: They offer all of the threat without any of the baggage; they can be contemporary, of any nationality, and don't have a particularly defined look. But is the overly-populated Zombie Bandwagon really enough to derail the Mummy Train permanently? If nothing else, I'm surprised that someone hasn't tried to get a bigscale Mummy movie made by pretending that it's a historic take on the zombie idea (Hollywood producers: You can send my fee care of io9.com, thank you very much).

Don't think I don't get it; Mummies seem silly and old-fashioned (literally, considering that whole Ancient Egypt thing) in a world where Vampire Diaries and Twilight show their horror peers to be filled with pouting teenagers who listen to Muse all the time. But all it would take is one well-made project from someone who really cares about the concept to put the Mummy back where it belongs, as a Horror Icon worth more than toilet-papered Hallowe'en costumes. Anyone got Guillermo del Toro's phone number... and a way to clear his schedule for the next couple of years?

Deadgirl
What to do when you find a corpse chained to a table, and then discover that said corpse isn't actually dead? If nothing else, this dark comedy horror will make you realize that any answers you'd come up with to that question would be better than what happens here.

Doctor Who: The Next Doctor
Davids Tennant and Morrissey team up to take on Dervla Kirwan's villainous Miss Hartigan as the BBC mysteriously release last year's Christmas special after the already-out Planet Of The Dead special. Well, it is all time-travel, I guess...?

Primeval Vol. 2
The unintended end of the series can be found in this 3 disc box set that, despite the confusing title, actually contains the third season of the now-canceled show.

Sanctuary: The Complete First Season
See? This is how you name your DVD releases, clear and simple. Although, if they'd wanted to be completely descriptive, they would've called it The Complete First Season With Commentaries On All The Episodes, The Original Webisodes And Some Other Special Features. But that may have taken up too much room on the packaging.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars - Clone Commandos
A second selection of episodes from the first season of the Cartoon Network show that reminds people that, while war may be hell, Star Wars is just a pretty bad heck. Or perhaps a goshdarnit, at most.

X-Men Vol. 3: The Marvel Collection
X-Men Vol. 4: The Marvel Collection
Two more collections of episodes from the 1990s cartoon to remind people that, before there were X-Men movies that didn't match up to the Batman ones, there were X-Men cartoons that didn't match up to the Batman ones. But then again, I liked Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, so what do I know?

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Talking of X-Men movies, here's this summer's installment, allowing you to study the acting talents of Will-I-Am at your leisure. Also, with the ability to skip chapters, you can pretend that Gambit doesn't exist, which will immediately make the movie better.

Sept 22
Battle for Terra
It was the CGI movie you kept seeing trailers for, but don't actually remember seeing in theaters - and now it's out on DVD for you to ignore at home, too.

Clive Barker's Book Of Blood
Yes, yes; it was Books of Blood when the books were originally written, but times are hard for everyone, and movie didn't have the largest of budgets, so some cutbacks were inevitable (It's actually premiering on Syfy this week, for those who want a preview).

The Haunted World of El Superbeasto
If the idea of an animated movie based on a comic book about a superheroic masked wrestler created by Rob Zombie doesn't interest you, maybe the cast list - which includes Paul Giamatti, Rosario Dawson and Brian Posehn - will. Otherwise, we can't help you.

Scooby Doo: The Mystery Begins
Because, sometimes, you need a live action reboot of the Scooby Doo franchise by the man who directed the Flintstones live action movies. Of course, when we say "need," we may be using that word incorrectly. Nonetheless, this direct-to-DVD epic shows the first meeting of Fred, Daphne, Velma, Shaggy and Scoob, and without the disturbing presence of either Sarah Michelle Gellar or Freddie Prinze Jr. So... potential win after all?

Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection Box Set
Star Trek: The Next Generation Motion Picture Collection Box Set
Paramount finds a new way to recycle the Star Trek movies with these new era-specific box sets. We look forward to the inevitable Star Trek: The Good Ones, You Know What We Mean box set within a year (Also: Am I the only one who was surprised to find out that there were four TNG movies, even though I've actually seen them all? I think I subconsciously try to pretend that Insurrection and Nemesis don't actually exist).

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles: The Complete Second Season
Your chance to relive the only Terminator that mattered this year, despite that whole cancellation thing, with six discs full of episodes, commentaries and special features. Buy it in the hope that someone at Fox will change their mind when they see the sales figures.

Sept 29
Batman Collection: 4 Film Favorites Box Set
Those "film favorites" would be the Michael Keaton/Val Kilmer/George Clooney movies, by the way. It seems fair, because to add in either of the Chris Nolan-era movies - or even the 1966 Adam West one - would make any of these four seem somewhat lacking in comparison (Okay, maybe not Batman Returns).

Blade Collection: 4 Film Favorites Box Set
I know what you're thinking: "There were only three Blade movies, how can they have a 4 DVD box set?" The answer lies in including the pilot for the short-lived TV show in there, which seems like a slight cheat to me, but that's why I'm not a Warners Home Entertainment executive.

Hardware
Finally making it to DVD, Richard Stanley's 2000AD-inspired robot horror movie from 1990 finds a new, uncut and uncensored form to ensure that old-school fans will want to pick it up as well. If nothing else, how often do you see Iggy Pop and Lemmy in the same movie?

Monsters Vs. Aliens
Dreamworks Animation's love letter to old school B-movies proved to be much better than expected when it was released in theaters earlier this year, and the DVD - with special features on the making of the movie, deleted scenes and, bizarrely, a Dreamworks Animation Video Jukebox - aims on taking even more advantage of the impressionable hearts, minds and wallets of kids of all ages.

The Real Ghostbusters Complete Collection Box Set
25 discs of animated paranormal activity, as the entire five year run of the 1980s (and early '90s) cartoon (including Slimer spin-off) gets collected in this insanely comprehensive box set that also has twelve hours of special features. You may never have to leave the house again. Or, at least, not for a few weeks.

Superman/Batman: Public Enemies
The latest DC animated movie adapts Jeph Loeb and Ed McGuinness' fun, over the top tale of President Lex Luthor trying to turn the world against our favorite superheroes, only to (a) go insane in the process and (b) lead to the creation of a giant Superman/Batman composite robot. If they've not changed too much, this could be the guilty pleasure of the fall.

Ultraman: The Complete Series
...Or, perhaps, it could be this: A 4 disc box set collecting all 39 episodes of the mid-60s Japanese TV show that brought the madness and production values of Godzilla movies to television on a weekly basis. Robot superheroes versus monsters courtesy of Eiji Tsuburaya? Works for me.

Like the movie preview, we've split this preview into months (and, inside those months, into weekly releases), but with releases still unconfirmed and unannounced, we've pushed November and December together. Don't worry; it'll make sense when you click on the links below.

September
October
November/December

I just love the fact that Batman carries around a giant bag of Bat-snacks. Where does he keep them? Somewhere on his utility belt? Does he keep them to reward Robin after a long day of crime-fighting? Is that the same pouch where he stores his pants after he whips them off in the earlier clip?