The Most Surprising Thriller of 2025 Is The Perfect Blend of Comedy and Horror
Josh Ruben’s horror-comedy finds the ideal median between the two genres.
One of my favorite quotes about cinema comes from the great thespian Nicolas Cage. While promoting his horror-comedy Renfield with an appearance on The Late Show in 2023, Cage described the eye-opening experience of watching another classic of the genre: An American Werewolf in London.
“I’m laughing, and now I’m really scared,” Cage recalled. “It just slaps you around.”
Horror and comedy might not seem like an obvious match, but when they come together in just the right way, the result speaks for itself. From Scream to Shaun of the Dead, some of the best entries in either genre find a way to blur them together. And in recent years, we’ve witnessed a surprising evolution in the comedy-horror trend.
Starting with Jordan Peele, a crop of comedians who found success on the early internet have pivoted from cracking jokes online to directing scary movies. Besides Peele (Key & Peele was a Comedy Central show, but it frequently went viral on YouTube), the list includes Zach Cregger, who founded the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’ Know and directed 2022’s surprise horror hit Barbarian, and CollegeHumor alum Josh Ruben, whose latest horror movie, Heart Eyes, just landed on Netflix.
Heart Eyes is Ruben’s third movie to walk the line between horror and comedy, and his scariest of the bunch. The story follows a serial murderer known as “Heart Eyes” who goes on a murder spree each Valentine’s Day, targeting romantic couples in a different city. The twist is that his latest victims aren’t a couple at all. Instead, they’re a pair of coworkers played by Olivia Holt and Mason Gooding.
Heart Eyes stalks the unwilling duo across Seattle, leaving a trail of blood and gore behind him. The movie is delightfully violent in the style of classic slashers like Halloween and modern entries like In a Violent Nature, while the romantic tension between Holt and Gooding adds a unique flavor. Even if the third act falters under the weight of overly complicated exposition, there’s enough here to make Heart Eyes a worthy pick for your next scary movie night.
Clearly, Josh Ruben is good at making scary movies, but why is he doing it in the first place? In a Reddit AMA, Ruben responded to a question about how his comedy background led him to horror by quoting another comedian turned scary movie director.
“It was Jordan Peele who once said, ‘The only difference between comedy and horror is the music,’” Ruben wrote. “I think that's pretty true.”
Josh Ruben on the set of Heart Eyes.
That Peele quote originally comes from an interview with USA, and in the same article, he offers an alternative explanation for his shift from horror to comedy.
“It became very complex, somehow, making comedy in this world,” Peele said.
Peele isn’t the first comedian to worry about the future of the genre. Perhaps the broader cultural shift away from big-budget theatrical comedies helps explain why all these sketch comics are suddenly making horror movies. After all, Hollywood clearly still sees the value in a mid-budget thriller.
Then again, maybe Nicolas Cage was right. Maybe horror and comedy really do go hand-in-hand. When asked a similar question, Barbarian director Zach Cregger offered up a thoughtful explanation
“It’s all about subverting expectations,” Cregger said. “It’s all about being a step ahead of the audience, zigging when they expect you to zag, and timing. It’s just timing and tone. That’s the anatomy of a joke; that’s the anatomy of a scare. I do feel like I’ve been working that muscle group out for a long time through comedy.”
But whatever the reason for this unexpected convergence of YouTube skits and scary movies, we’re definitely not complaining if the outcome is movies like Get Out, Barbarian, and Heart Eyes that are capable of slapping audiences around with a deliciously evil mix of horror and comedy.
