Comedy and Horror have a lot in common. Both are about building tension until the audience can't take it any more and react in one of two ways: they either laugh or scream.
With this in mind, one might think that it's easy to combine the two. Historically, it's happened. Scream, Army of Darkness, Return of the Living Dead, Fargo; these are all movies with strong thriller or horror elements but that also managed to be funny. But these are exceptions to the rule. For every, genuinely funny and creepy horror movie, there are countless movies out there that have failed at both.
For example, in recent years there were two prime horror comedies: Dylan Dog: Dead of Night and The Cabin in the Woods. One of them was an abysmal failure and the other was a great commentary on the horror genre.
Dylan Dog was based on the fantastic Italian horror comic about a detective who investigated supernatural crimes. It was a surreal comic, where the humor was based on truly bizarre situations. It was brilliant and I recommend it heartily to people who enjoy weird. The movie, on the other hand, resorted to cheap gags, when it could be bothered to do anything beyond boring. It would not, or could not, take any risks, which is key for a movie to be either scary or funny. If there is no tension, then there's nothing. You're not scared and you're not laughing.
With either genre, you can't shy away from tension; you can't steer clear of things that make people uncomfortable. It is that discomfort that makes either genre successful. Which is why The Cabin in the Woods is a better movie. Rather than watering down the horror, they embrace it. Every bit of true, awful nightmare makes the humor that much funnier. You laugh to relieve the tension.
The Cabin in the Woods is an exercise in the balance between tension and release, why Dylan Dog: Dead of Night is a perfect example of the writer and the director playing it too safe and killing any chance of the audience laughing or screaming.
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