"Mmmphing' onna Rizz!!"

This decended into complete insanity. About halfway through they started to impro...and we just let it happen, partly because we were all laughing like idiots.

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Young Frankenstein (1974) ★★ · Rewatched Oct 7, 2025

Young Frankenstein (1974) is Mel Brooks’ best-known foray into horror territory, though he’d return to the well with Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). Both of these are flat-out absurdist comedies, not horror-comedies, and that distinction matters. The horror-comedies I love most (e.g., Braindead/Dead-Alive, Re-Animator, Evil Dead II, Ghostbusters) work because the monsters are treated as real threats. You actually care about these characters, which gives the story some weight, while the comedy comes from the tone, or from how the human characters react to the horrors around them.

Laughter and horror come from the same instinct: the release of tension. This is why often horror feels absurd and comedy is cruel or disturbing; the two genres are cousins.

That's why what Brooks attempts in Young Frankenstein doesn’t land for me. This isn’t a horror-comedy, it’s a 105-minute farce. The monsters aren’t remotely threatening; they’re about as dangerous as The Munsters. While Dracula: Dead and Loving It at least sustains some dramatic interest by following Stoker’s plot beats, Young Frankenstein abandons structure by being a pseudo-sequel to the Universal Frankenstein films.

It might have worked as a sketch or short, but nearly two hours of gags with no real stakes or characters I can invest in just leaves me cold. But that may just be me, I usually struggle with long-form comedies for this reason. If a comedy’s going to run feature-length, I need something to hold onto. like Dr. Strangelove or The Big Lebowski, where there’s still a real story, themes, or characters offering a throughline amidst all the absurdity.

With all that said, Brooks nails the look of a classic Universal horror film. His mimicry of James Whale’s style shows a real reverence for the material. Visually, you could believe this was shot in the ’30s or ’40s as part of Universal’s monster cycle.

While Mel Brooks isn’t usually considered in horror history, he left his fingerprints on the genre in surprising ways. Mel Brooks discovered David Lynch (generally not considered a horror director, but undeniably influential in the genre's development post-Hammer/Universal), who was at that point only known to cult audiences via the midnight movie reputation of Eraserhead. Lynch got the job of directing The Elephant Man (1980) specifically because of how impressed Brooks was by how the young filmmaker handled deformity in Eraserhead.

Brooks also spearheaded the 1986 remake of The Fly, ultimately directed by David Cronenberg, which remains one of the greatest horror films—and one of the greatest films—ever made. Brooks deliberately kept his name off both productions, not wanting his reputation as a comedy filmmaker to give audiences false expectations about Lynch or Cronenberg’s work.