A/N: Spoiler Alert
Let me start out by saying that I don’t get horror.
Why would you pay someone to scare you? Why spend your (more or less) hard-earned pay-check to be utterly disgusted by what’s in front of you?
If you’re like me, you might even close your eyes, and now you’re effectively paying money for looking at the inside of your own eyelid. Crazy, right? I don’t care for blood. I don’t care for gore. I don’t care for cannibalism, or being grossed out, or men and women being made into a human centipede. Ugh.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I know that a lot of people adore horror. Otherwise, the statement on Stephen King’s bank account would have looked a lot different. Horror just isn’t for me. At least not when it’s found on the screen.
And yet I love Santa Clarita Diet. Why? I mean it’s got blood, it’s got gore, it’s got cannibalism. Hell, it’s even got a severed, talking head.
So why do I love it?
Why did I watch the second season in one single go?
And why do I desperately crave for the third?
Because it’s funny.
It’s really as simple as that. Because it took the twisted and the horrible and the disgusting, and it made it utterly hilarious. Because it took the uncanny and took it even further by joining it with the ordinary.
Let’s join cannibalism with the sensible mother and wife. Let’s make the dad her accomplice in murder. Let’s focus as much on the dynamic of the relationship between the teenage daughter and the parents, as we focus on their freezer that’s filled with dead people.
And it’s funny because it’s bizarre. It’s weird and wacky and wonderful. It’s unexpected, and the unexpected it just objectively funny. Don’t believe me? Ask Sheldon Cooper. Sure, Santa Clarita Diet is occasionally gross. There is simply no other word to properly describe the vomit-scene in that first episode. And it’s utterly disgusting when Sheila and Joel sit in the car, and Sheila starts chewing on a corpse’s foot. It’s nauseating.
It’s also really funny. It’s that dark, twisted sort of humour that’s the guilty pleasure of comedy. It’s making fun of murder, and of psychological breakdowns and of death itself. It takes everything serious and frightening and it makes it… comic. Something to laugh at.
And people want to laugh at what scares them. It comforts us. It takes away its power. And, finally, I mean – let’s be honest.
We all love to laugh.
mariasjostrand 