"Horror comedy" is the term I am inclined to use naturally. I think everyone gets what you mean when you say that, and it seems to be the most regularly used term out there.
But when I was on Wikipedia to check some details about both of the movies I watched on Saturday, Teeth and The Voices, I saw them both described as "comedy horror."
Hmm.
I get this usage on a fundamental, grammatical level. The first word functions as an adjective while the second word functions as the genre name. "Comedy horror" is how you should describe a horror movie with comedic elements, as opposed to a comedy with horrific elements, which is what "horror comedy" would be.
Two things give me pause about choosing this naming convention, though.
1) While I think "horror" works as an adjective, I don't think "comedy" does. Granted, they both have a proper adjectival form, "horrific" and "comedic." But "horrific comedy" and "comedic horror" don't really work as subgenre names. The first word in both phrases is functioning as both an adjective and a genre name, but horror still works better in that regard. That can probably be explained by the fact that you say "I saw a horror movie over the weekend," but no one says "I saw a comedy movie over the weekend."
2) If we do want to use the phrase "horror comedy" to mean a comedy with horrific elements, well, I don't know what an example of that would be. You are talking about a movie that is first and foremost a comedy, but has horror draped on top of it. I guess maybe, if you wanted to make a distinction between them, Scary Movie could be a "horror comedy" while Teeth and The Voices would be a "comedy horror."
But we need these to be casual use phrases, ones that don't require explanation. If you are going to draw a distinction between movies that are primarily designed to make you laugh, that have horror elements in them, and movies that are primarily designed to scare you, that also sometimes make you laugh, it may not be immediately clear you are making that distinction just by using both subgenre names in the same conversation. It may just appear to be inconsistency. And then once you are getting into explaining it, the discussion just gets all the more cumbersome.
And I've just thought of one more justification of the term I prefer. If we're really thinking about it in terms of subgenres, it makes a certain sense to list the genre that's higher on the hierarchy first, and then the modification to that genre. You want to get oriented in a larger sense, then learn the way that orientation is being tweaked. So that would be horror -> comedy, therefore, "horror comedy."
The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I am with either term. As old a term as it is, dating back centuries if not millennia, "comedy" does bear the burden of a certain sort of low culture. Most of the movies I watch this month that are categorized as either "horror comedy" or "comedy horror" are more likely to have a grim, gallows humor, much more black comedy than straight comedy. Something can be funny without actually making you laugh. "Comedy" tends to have overtones of the sort of desperate, laughs-at-all-cost approach of a hack standup comedian.
Clearly, though, I'm stuck with one of the two. Above all other considerations, "horror comedy" just rolls off the tongue better. So I think I'll stick with that, whether or not the term really does justice to the all the nuances of the films assigned to that subgenre.
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