Every October, H³  watches one horror movie each week; Tucker and Dale vs Evil is this year’s first selection. Since this is a movie I’ve seen and love, this review will be in part about his reaction, from a non-horror fan’s perspective. 

• Directed by: Eli Craig
• Written by: Eli Craig. Morgan Jurgenson
• Starring: Tyler Labine. Alan Tudyk. Katrina Bowden

As much as I say I don’t like horror comedies, I keep finding ones to recommend. My favorites are ones that subvert tropes and expectations.  Tucker and Dale vs Evil had a lot of fun with the evil hillbilly trope. It also hits some other horror movie standards.

In a nutshell, Tucker and Dale is about stupid people making assumptions.  This works because the stupid characters are so believably stupid. Most of the misunderstanding comes from a group of college kids. Tucker and Dale are not mental giants either, but most of their shortcomings come from circumstance. 

Spoilers ahead for a 15-year-old movie.

Tucker and Dale are mistaken for evil cannibal hillbillies by a group of camping college students. Dale, the kinder of the rednecks, immediately crushes on Allie, the sanest and smartest of the group. Tucker, played brilliantly by Alan Tudyk, keeps encouraging him to talk to Allie. Tucker’s shyness only makes the kids see him as more of a threat. After their rescue of Allie gets misconstrued as a kidnapping, the kids become convinced that Tucker and Dale are evil. They are hyped up by Chad, who has a whole lot of bias and some deep-seated issues.

Even slapstick has a Theme

The movie hits the main theme hard pretty early on: it’s all about communication or lack thereof. This is also one of the few movies where not calling the cops makes perfect sense, at least from Tucker and Dale’s perspective. There is another theme too, one we haven’t touched on in a while: good, old generational trauma.   Tucker and Dale vs Evil takes these common comedy and horror themes and stretches them to extremes. 

There is evil in this movie, but it’s a human, understandable evil. It’s created from long held prejudice and misunderstandings. While the resulting chaos in Tucker and Dale is very blood and very silly, the movie works because it plays off of subverting existing stereotypes. 

Side note – H³ just laughed harder at this movie than I’ve heard him laugh at most comedies. 

Is Tucker and Dale vs Evil a Horror movie? 

For a comedy, Tucker and Dale has some pretty great kills. As the comedy ramps up, so does the intensity.  It never fully crosses over into a true “scary” movie but it’s familiar enough with the genre to be horror-adjacent.   

As much as I hate arguing over what movies count as what genre, I do have fun talking about what people recognize as genre standards. For Tucker and Dale vs Evil there are elements of horror.  Specifically in the escalation of the misunderstanding and the deaths that come out of it.  There is some mild gore that also fits the standards. The amount of suspense you feel is tempered by the comedy. Honestly, the biggest source of tension is finding out how the idiot kids are going to fail.   Oh, and there is a fight involving chainsaws; by this Ghoul’s standards, that makes it a horror movie. 

H³ Non-Horror Fan Review

Hi folks, H³ here. The Ghoul has “asked” me to write up my thoughts on the four “safe” horror movies that we’ll watch together over the course of October. First up: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. But before I get into that, a little background on me, and why I have the moniker I do.

As the Ghoul’s mentioned many times, I’m known as the Horror-Hating Husband. Why, you might ask? Well, I don’t enjoy being scared. Like at all. As the Ghoul will attest to given my reaction any time I don’t hear her approaching from another room. (What can I say Ghouls creep). I also can’t handle extreme amounts of gore. Or what I consider to be grotesque monsters/demons/etc. I just find them deeply disturbing, and I don’t feel well after being exposed to it for any real length of time.

Here’s one particular trigger for me that I can recall. When I was younger, I went with a group of friends went to see Se7en in the theater. “What’s in the box?” indeed; I was messed up for two weeks afterwards, if that gives you any frame of reference. So, when an entire genre is based primarily on things that I don’t enjoy (putting it mildly), it tends to drop pretty far out of my favored nation status category. That said; the Ghoul has been trying to introduce (or re-introduce, really) the genre to me, because she loves it, and we love to share our interests with each other. So here we are!

The Review

Now, to the movie at hand. I really enjoyed Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. It’s definitely more of a horror-comedy than a straight horror, which definitely helps make it more palatable to me. I might even go so far as to say it’s a comedy with horror elements thrown in. As the Ghoul has already mentioned, it’s a series of misunderstandings that go horribly wrong, and things start getting deadly pretty quickly. I’ll leave all the theme analysis and that kind of stuff for the Ghoul; I’m just going to focus on what I enjoyed, which is decidedly less involved/deep.

First, the cast is fantastic in this. I’m a huge Alan Tudyk fan to begin with, and his Tucker was great as the somewhat smarter of the two main leads, and his continual state of “wtf” was hilarious. He had great chemistry with Tyler Labine’s Dale, the bigger, dumber, more kind-hearted one. The rest of the cast was great too; the college kids were totally believable as a group of frat bros and their assorted girlfriends. Jesse Moss’s Chad, the “leader”, has a great descent into madness that the rest of the gang kind of just goes along with (except for Allison, the psychology major, and clearly the smartest one of the bunch).

How Tucker and Dale Stays Fun

The horror elements are more accidental in nature for the most part, and there’s nothing supernatural here at all; several of the kills are the result of people not paying attention to their surroundings, or just bad timing. As things continue to escalate and Chad really starts losing his grip on reality, things start to get more into what I’d consider the “traditional” horror vein, with kidnapping, some light torture, and arson, among other things. But even with the escalations, the humor bits soften the blows and make it “safe” for folks like me.

Often, movies whose plot are based on a series of misunderstandings to drive the story forward wind up feeling “cringey” to me; things feel way too contrived most of the time. This one doesn’t, and my guess is it’s largely because of the strength of the leads. Based on history, my guess is that Tudyk improvised a decent portion of Tucker’s performance, and the previously mentioned chemistry between him and Dale really made the movie for me. The writing is great too; the misunderstandings are a little predictable at times, but that’s fine. The dialogue and other interactions between the characters make up for it.

So, all in all, I loved this movie. Its horror elements, while present, weren’t overly gore-focused or over-the-top. There wasn’t anything terribly grotesque either; some makeup and practical effects, but again, nothing that tripped my alarms. And as I mentioned earlier, I considered it more of a comedy-horror, which it turns out, works pretty well for me. 

Back to The Ghoul -Final Thoughts

Horror should be for everyone. Tucker and Dale vs Evil offers enough blood and kills for fans who are more familiar with the references while still being newcomer friendly. It was a great start to our October horror movie tradition and might even get a rewatch.

Tucker and Dale Vs Evil is available on streaming