What Classic Horror Movies Would Be Like If There Were Guns

The scariest villain this Halloween is a "haunted" firearm that kills ... people.
Friday the 13th

Movie writers often have to jump through hoops to keep real world situations out of their scripts. Despite the majority of us spending our waking hours staring at screens, communicating through silent, written messages, it’s hard to put such a sentient story on a big screen and convince people to watch. Cellphones would ruin plots ― especially those in the “Romeo & Juliet” miscommunication vain ― and so you’re forced to watch movies that barely reflect how things truly are.

Fighting for the title of having the most unrealistic plotlines is the horror movie genre, in which script writers dream up elaborate killers who want to murder you with chainsaws, knives and crossbows. But for the entirety of movie history, the possibility of a scarier and more effective killer was there all along ― a person with a gun.

On Halloween weekend, “Comedy Bang! Bang!” is starting its fifth and final season with a sketch that imagines a horror villain who has a “possessed” gun. The Huffington Post is exclusively premiering the fake movie trailer below, and had a conversation with the show’s creator and host, Scott Aukerman.

“Comedy Bang! Bang!” doesn’t typically do political sketches, but this parody of horror movies goes straight after the second amendment, with the victims shocked that “a tool one uses for hunting sport or protecting one’s family” is being pointed at them. While running away, a female character exclaims, “I would be better able to process this if he were chasing us with like an ax or a glove made of knives or something.”

But to not make this too gruesome and hard to watch, the killer in Aukerman’s sketch doesn’t use modern guns, instead opting for a comical-sounding Western six-shooter and an old-timey musket. “I don’t think it’s funny to have a hockey mask killer come in and then have a semi-automatic pistol start blowing people away like that,” said Aukerman on figuring out the direction of the sketch. Much care was put into making an argument for gun control, while also rooting this in comical satire.

“To me, it was really a kind of difficult balance,” said Aukerman. “Trying to make [the guns] a little more cartoony and not make it so grim, so the point we were making could kind of stand out in a more humorous way.”

The sketch ends with a tagline that this movie, “The Haunted Gun,” is “coming to a theater near you ... or an elementary school, or a church, or a college campus, or a dance club.”

“I didn’t want to shy away from making a bigger point,” said Aukerman, who later added that he asked himself, “Should we go this far with it?” but ultimately decided to push the limits. “I saw an opportunity to do something that says something.”

Watch the trailer for “The Haunted Gun” below:

Aukerman also talked to HuffPost about his recent episode of “Between Two Ferns” with Hillary Clinton. Along with Zach Galifianakis, Aukerman created the series in 2008. Read here about what it was like working with Clinton and why the show will never work with Donald Trump.

“Comedy Bang! Bang!” returns Oct. 28 at 11 p.m. ET on IFC.

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