How Directors Like Zach Cregger and Jorma Taccone Create Horror Magic With Comedic Timing

Years before Zach Cregger directed Amy Madigan to an Oscar for his 2025 horror movie Weapons, the one-time Whitest Kid U’ Know was a comedy actor shooting a TV show on the island of Fiji. “I liked the show a lot,” he says. “But I found myself only creatively fulfilled when I would go back to my hotel at night to write a genre movie.” It was then, he tells Consequence, that he really fell in love with writing, particularly “writing what I wanted — and what I wanted was this dark story.”

Cregger was realizing, then, that his “true orientation is toward darker stuff,” which would lead to him becoming one of today’s most acclaimed horror directors. However, since that time, he hasn’t stopped using the tools he acquired from his time in comedy to heighten the impact of his films.

It’s a path forged in the modern era by Jordan Peele, and now also followed by other directors, including Over Your Dead Body helmer Jorma Taccone, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’s Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett. All of them come from a comedy background, and have used that experience not just to lace intense scenes with humor, but to make sure the scares hit as hard as they possibly can.

Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett began their careers as part of the online filmmaking team known as Chad, Matt, and Rob, making shorts during a time when short-form comedy, like breakout video Alien Roommate Prank Goes Bad, was one of the most popular formats online. (Bettinelli-Olpin was one of the original group members; Gillett joined in 2011.)

However, Bettinelli-Olpin remembers how “we were really consciously trying to not do just sketch comedy. It was like, what’s a different version of that? How can these be like little mini short films that have their own identity?” The solution they landed on then was to incorporate horror elements, such as jump scares. “We realized you can merge these two things in a way that make both better. It makes the funny stuff funnier and it makes the scary stuff really surprising.”

The Chad, Matt & Rob team would eventually become the filmmaking collective known as Radio Silence, who have since tackled multiple V/H/S and Scream installments, plus the Ready or Not films. And Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett never stopped incorporating humor into their horror work, rooted in the idea of “real grounded characters who get thrown into an insane situation,” as Bettinelli-Olpin explains. “The more crazy it gets, the more real their reaction gets, the funnier it gets and the scarier it gets simultaneously.”

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come picks up immediately after the events of the first film, in which freshly married Grace (Samara Weaving) found herself in a life-or-death fight with her new in-laws, hunting her as a family Devil-worshipping tradition. The sequel finds Grace reunited with her estranged sister (Kathryn Newton), with multiple families now hunting them for a chance at Devil-powered world domination.

With the Ready or Not films, Gillett says that “[Weaving]’s not playing funny, the other characters aren’t playing funny. What’s funny is the heightened reality of the story that our very grounded and relatable character is entering.” The key is “not being afraid to be earnest about all of the tones.”

Bettinelli-Olpin compares it to Jack Nicholson’s performance in The Shining, “where he’s horrific and terrifying, but there’s humor the whole time. It kind of comes and goes, so it catches you off guard. I wouldn’t call The Shining a comedy by any stretch, but there’s levity to it, which then makes the crazy crazier and scarier.”

Here I Come debuted at the 2026 SXSW Film Festival alongside Over Your Dead Body, Jorma Taccone’s remake of a 2021 movie by Norwegian filmmaker Tommy Wirkola. The Lonely Island alum previously directed MacGruber and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping; he defines what he typically does as “comedy action.” So tackling horror on this level for the first time was “a little uncomfortable” for him… Because “horror scares the shit out of me.”

As one example, he describes watching 2005’s The Descent (a very scary movie about a spelunking adventure that goes horribly wrong) with friend/collaborator Andy Samberg: “Me and Andy watched it at noon on a Sunday on a tiny little TV. And we kept turning it off and pausing it and walking around the room like, ‘Oh God, oh God.'”

But Taccone was excited about the challenge of doing a remake that he “was going to like as much as the original.” Coincidentally enough, Samara Weaving also stars in his film alongside Jason Segel — the movie begins with an unhappily married couple each planning to use a weekend cabin getaway to kill the other, before two escaped mental patients (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine) and their equally deranged guard (Juliette Lewis) interrupt their murderous plans.

To make the movie, Taccone had “to get over that fear of just, like, can I do this? I felt like I would be potentially good at it, but can I thread all these needles of tone?” Thankfully, the learning process meant discovering that “the horror stuff actually feels like comedy to me, in terms of how you execute it.”

One tool in the toolbox that helps with executing both comedy and horror: Test screenings. As Bettinelli-Olpin says, “we wish test screenings were only used to calibrate.” But showing a movie to a fresh audience can help the filmmakers figure out what might not be working.

“The testing process is really important,” Cregger believes. “You put something in front of an audience and you’re going to know for a certainty whether it is or is not funny, because they will not laugh if it is not funny. There’s no arguing with a test audience. You can’t say, ‘Oh, you come on guys, that’s actually really funny.’ Like, no, it’s not. Because they didn’t laugh. And I think the same goes for scary. If they’re scared, you can feel it in the room and they tell you afterwards. It’s almost binary whether it works or it doesn’t.”

Bettinelli-Olpin echoes that idea. “You don’t need to read a card, you don’t need to hear [the audience] talk about it. When something is not working, we turn to each other and go, ‘You feel it? Oh, that is not working.’ And we want to fix it more than anybody else. The fear is always that, if it doesn’t test well, the movie becomes something that you’re not in love with. But the actual experience of sitting in a test screening is invaluable.”

Taccone only had one test screening for Over Your Dead Body, “because we didn’t have any money.” However, one change that came out of that process was cutting a late-movie death scene that was in the original film, “a real kill-your-darlings moment” that Taccone ultimately felt distracted from the movie’s central relationship. “It’s the thing that I so love about feature editing, that those things that you do influence how you feel about a character at the end. And it only comes from editing and editing and seeing it with other people.”

When you know there may be an issue with the movie, is it easier to fix a scare in post-production or to fix a joke? Gillett thinks the answer is a scare, because “so many great scares are sound. Sound is the cheat code in so many ways for horror, from music to sound design.” For both scares and jokes, though, Bettinelli-Olpin believes that “when they’re not working, it’s usually either because it’s either too fast or too slow. It’s about finding that rhythm.”

Cregger agrees. “Something is scary or not scary by usually like one or two frames. And comedy is like that for sure — it is just pure timing. So the edit is crucial.” As one example of this, Weapons features a haunting moment in which Julia Garner’s character sleeps in her car, unaware that someone’s about to sneak inside it. In the edit, Cregger says, “we extended the duration [of the moment], because I think on the day she opened the door a little early, and we felt like we needed another second and a half before.”

Finding that perfect timing, Cregger continues, is “kind of a musicality. There was definitely a comedy ear at work for that.”

Taccone also thinks it’s something you can literally hear, elegantly describing the process of finding the perfect timing as “frame-fucking.” However, he adds, “the scariest thing is if you didn’t get the performance [on set]. I think that’s much more of a problem. If a line isn’t working on set, if it doesn’t sound natural coming out of an actor’s mouth, change the line. Those are the moments where I think you have to be really disciplined and be like, ‘There’s no reason to shoot this if it’s not working.'”

Horror and comedy have become two flavors that taste great together, but there is one big difference between the two genres. As Cregger observes, if a joke in a horror movie isn’t working, “you just cut the joke out and now you just have a scene that has no joke and nobody minds. You can have a horror movie where there’s maybe only five laughs in the whole movie, and everyone’s going to leave and be like, ‘That movie’s pretty funny too.’ Because you’re just not expecting to laugh at all in a horror movie.”

However, he continues, “in a comedy, if it’s not funny, you’ve got to try and make it funny. You don’t get to just cut the jokes out, because people are gonna be like, ‘Why was there like 20 minutes where there was no laughing?’ That would suck.”

Cregger chuckles. “I’d say the stakes feel a little bit higher with comedy.”

Weapons is streaming now on HBO Max, and Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is now in theaters. Over Your Dead Body premieres April 24th, 2026.