BUDDY GHOSTS, DANCING SKELETONS: AN ANALYSIS OF HORROR_HUMOR IN LITERATURE

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to provide a critical analysis based on the works of Minois (2003), Cabral (2007), and Bines (2017) to understand how horror-humor literature can serve as a valuable educational tool for children and teenagers, arousing curiosity and self-reflection due to the subversion of social homogenization categories that these texts evoke. Laughter can be understood as a threat to fear, a symbol of freedom, and, in this sense, laughter about death or our deepest fears within our psyche delineate the purging or cathartic nature of this laughter. For this reason, we argue that keeping children and teenagers away from reflecting on fear, mortality, and grief can have the opposite effect of what is desired. We believe that, by using appropriate language, these themes can and should be responsibly addressed with children, and inverted fables or horror-humor literature can be an interesting tool for discussing real-life ghosts with them, such as prejudice, the fear of others, and the formation of one's own personality.