Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Fans of the comedy horror classic “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” will instantly pick up that Gosling is channelling Lou Costello as he soundlessly tries to attract his partner’s attention while simultaneously conveying the horror of his bloody discovery.

But the real table-setter, in terms of the horror comedy’s style and appeal, was the 1948 smash Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

The scary kind—from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) to An American Werewolf in London (1981) to Drag Me to Hell (2009)—keep the laughs and the chills strictly segregated, building tension and then releasing it in a laugh (and, sometimes, cutting short that laugh with an even bigger scare).

Creature features as far back as Bride of Frankenstein and as modern as Poltergeist had employed humor to break up the drama, while others like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and The Fearless Vampire Killers or: Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck had placed the humor as front-and-center as the monsters.

Amusingly, those films were often part of a shared universe, with the monsters crossing over in such efforts as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man , House of Dracula and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein .