It is one of cinemas most recognizable subgenres, yet to our knowledge it does not (yet) have a name.
We define the “Mansion Murder Comedy” to be one of the class of films which employs the tropes of the gothic mystery thriller for comedic effect. For the purposes of this article, we are limiting our discussion to films of a specific structure: a disparate group of characters, each with their own ends and backstory, gather at an ancient mansion where a series of murders takes place, implicating them all and compelling the guests to try to solve the murders without outside help.
It is a hilariously familiar and perhaps even hackneyed premise, but it is this very familiarity that gives it power.
Unlike most of our other Top 10s, we will tell the story of this subgenre in chronological order instead of the order of the Flickchart Globals. A crucial aspect to explore here is how this subgenre has built upon itself, and continues to refer to itself, as the years go by. Very quickly in its history (by the second entry in our list, actually), the Mansion Murder Comedy became self-aware, referring to itself from within the frame, or at the very least assuming that the audience is genre-aware. This by itself is not unique to the Mansion Murder Comedy, but nowhere else does this awareness form so much of the spine of what makes these films enjoyable.
All of these films are to some extent both homage and parody, and yet (with one exception) they are all intended to be “taken straight”; that is, we are expected to be horrified by the murders, while still enjoying the jokes. These are not Naked Gun-style send-ups.
It is this sweet-salty juxtaposition of nervous laughter around the corpse that gives these films energy. They reveal something about human nature that eludes other comedies, even so-called “dark comedies,” which these are not.
The night may be dark, there may be death behind every hidden door, but the bouncing chromatic strings in the soundtrack announce that we are in that fun, cozy, liminal space of the “ooky-spooky.”
Eight strangers (or are they?) are invited to a fancy apartment where they are taunted by an unseen madman who picks them off one by one in increasingly dramatic ways.
It is a format that Agatha Christie would steal for And Then There Were None, and hundreds more would do the same. It provides delicious excuse to bring colorful, wisecracking personalities together. But in order for it to actually generate a plot, you need to put some mechanisms into place. Here we can start to identify the rules and tropes which drive this subgenre.
First, no one can leave. Every entry in our list is a bottle episode. The constraint on space and the (seemingly) impossibility of new characters amps up the tension, and thus the drama.
Second, you must have hidden doors and passages.
Third, it must turn out that among your collection of “strangers” there are actually secret connections and interweavings.
Fourth, you need jokes. This film probably doesn’t count as an outright “comedy,” but there is enough levity, in the banter and in the character of the assistant butler (who is not as funny as he thinks he is), to prevent it from turning into an outright horror movie. The filmmaker’s intent is not to suffocate us with oppressive terror, but rather to have a ripping good time, with death just happening to stand in the middle.
Fifth, you need a corpse to fall out of a closet like standing lumber. This will either be shockingly horrible or hilarious, depending on the audience’s frame of mind.
With those tropes in place, the stage is set to explore in how many ways we can tell stories about violent death with a smile on our face.
“All this, midnight, the alligators, I mean the heirs, and the family lawyer all gathering to hear the reading of the will. It reminds me of all the melodramas and murder mysteries I’ve played in.”
This astounding piercing of the fourth wall by Bob Hope is one of the loudest and earliest winks in cinema, and it lets us all in on the joke.
All these types of comedy-mysteries are collusions between the filmmakers and the audience. We know we’re not going to be forced to witness any kind of “true” horror, and the movie promises none. Furthermore, the movie is expected to adhere to a fairly strict set of rules, any deviation from which would somehow puncture the magic.
The Cat and the Canary, directed by Elliot Nugent, is a Southern Gothic tale based on an insanely popular play from 1922. A family gathers to hear the reading of the will of a rich eccentric who rigs his bequests in such a way as to guard against a strain of madness in his family: the young pretty ingenue gets everything provided she stays sane for 30 days.
Therefore, everyone else (except for our wisecracking male romantic lead) has tremendous incentive to drive her crazy through the use of every horror cliché that can be assembled at short notice, including but not limited to an escaped maniac prowling the grounds. Very few deaths actually occur, but the threats, behind every secret door and hidden panel, are real enough that without Wally (Bob Hope) cracking wise every thirty seconds, we would be crushed by the swampy fumes of melodrama.
As it stands, we are offered an exhaustive yet family-safe tour of the mystery-melodrama toolbox, which for all its predictability (especially in 2025) is incredibly satisfying.
One Body Too Many, directed by Frank McDonald, has a hilarious title, and the movie is far better and funnier than its five-digit place on the Globals would signify. Jack Haley delivers his best non-metallic performance as a car salesman who is mistaken for a detective at an eccentric millionaire’s wake. He must then guard the corpse lest it be tampered with in such a way as to despoil the will.
As we’ll later see with Clue, OBTM is a very “corpse-positive” film. A good deal of time is spent with the characters gathered around the casket, or moving the mortal remains, or swapping them out for a living body to set us up for a jump-scare later. There is no “tasteful omission” of the realities of a wake. They (the characters, and audience) are here to see the body; let’s not pretend otherwise.
By playing so freely with the corpse, by cracking jokes around it and prop-ifying it, we double-down on what is at first glance simply coarse irreverence, but which is actually a beautifully transgressive, post-modern dig at the solemnity that usually surrounds end-of-life rituals in the West.
All the films in this list maintain this morbid playfulness, without becoming outright “dark comedies” (at least, not in the way we use that term today). Films like One Body Too Many succeed because they manage to maintain their silliness in spite of, or because of, their dreary storylines.
Fog Island, from director Terry O. Morse, is, frankly, an inferior entry in our list (and it is the lowest ranked overall). It is flatly shot and contains only the barest minimum of humor to justify its inclusion in this list. But it brings enough important tropes to the party to warrant discussion.
George Zucco plays a wealthy ex-convict who was framed for a crime. Also, his wife was murdered. He concocts a ruse to bring all the suspects to his foggy island for a séance and successive execution, by means both weird and diabolical.
This film contains the earliest example we could find of the host of one of these gothic mansion murder parties actually preparing little presents for each of their guests, an idea which will be fully developed by its successors House on Haunted Hill and Clue. This powerful gesture communicates the host’s premeditation and control. He is showing that, despite the guests’ individual, greed-induced intentions, he is the one with the plan.
The guests, all from some version of “high society” and each familiar with the rules of dinner parties, no longer have etiquette and social mores to lean on and protect them. In a way, the real violation that these Mansion Murder Mysteries commit (whether they are comedic or not) is to carve out a mini-society with a completely new and profane set of rules. The participants are faced with dual goals: figure out the rules so they can survive, but also get back to the “real world” as soon as possible.
Our second-highest-ranked film on this list comes as close to a perfect prototype as possible while still retaining a clever and compelling story.
Vincent Price plays an eccentric millionaire who rents an allegedly haunted house and invites five desperate acquaintances to try to survive the night, with the promise of $10,000 to the survivors or their next of kin. This is teed up as a quirky birthday present for his ice-queen wife, but of course there are twists and turns, hidden motives and improbable fake-outs, all couched within William Castle’s trademark goofy-horror style.
The disconnected nature of the guests is particularly apparent here. Gone are the threadbare family or business ties which usually explain what everyone’s doing there. This time, it is a completely contrived and intentional assemblage of disparate personalities, driven (ostensibly) by their greed and curiosity, and (ultimately) by the host’s careful machinations.
Echoing Fog Island and foreshadowing Clue, we have a host who has prepared a little “party favor” for each guest: a Colt Model 1903 Pocket Hammer semi-automatic pistol, nestled into a tiny morbid coffin.
The comedy (both the intentional and the unintentional) is what makes the legitimately unsettling threat that exists in each scene fun and bearable. Without that spoonful of sugar, the rough medicine of shrieking ghosts and severed heads (along with whatever else William Castle has going on in the aisles of your local theater) would be at best grating, and at worst traumatic.
It is the scene-chewing hammery and dry-martini wisecracks that transforms a fairly vanilla gothic-murder-mystery concept into a fun experience that qualifies as “spooky” without really being scary.
Released in the U.S. with the slightly less regional title No Place Like Homicide, director Pat Jackson’s What A Carve Up! represents the most overtly British entry in our list, and also our first outright parody.
A man and his friend go to a spooky Yorkshire mansion to hear the reading of a will, and wouldn’t you know it, they find an assortment of oddball relations and a poorly-motivated serial killer who picks them off one by one.
What distinguishes the film is the casting of Sid James and Kenneth Conner as a kind of two-headed vaudevillian version of our typical protagonist (such as Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary). By placing a comedy team at the center of the plot, we avoid many of the tired old rhythms of “serious character delivers serious line, comedy character delivers a wisecrack.” The two clowns, perfectly balanced against each other and having stupendous chemistry, generate a fresh kind of energy that propels the by-now-inevitable beats of the plot.
Again, we have explicit reference to the genre of the story they are in: one of our heroes is a proofreader for corny pulp horror stories, and (just like Jamie Kennedy in Scream) knows what to expect, and what to fear, behind every secret door.
And with this entry, now in the “postmodern” era of the 60s, we have our first more or less intentional example of parody: this is a (loose) remake of Karloff’s The Ghoul, made with the explicit intent of sending up its solemn self-importance.
All the films in this list have some aspect of winking at the audience, and at the ridiculousness of this kind of melodrama, but from this point forward all of our films will wear their “let’s all laugh at the the way they used to tell stories” attitude on their sleeves.
Leaping forward fifteen years lands us in the cynical 70s, a decade when many cultural artifacts were being re-examined in the context of the post-60s hangover. What better way earn your tweed-jacket elbow patches than by skewering some of fiction’s most beloved characters?
The story of Robert Moore’s Murder by Death is slightly askew from the other films on this list. A millionaire (played by Truman Capote – yes, the Truman Capote) invites the five greatest detectives to his creepy mansion to solve a murder that will occur at midnight, the murder turning out to be his own.
The hook is that these five detectives are all actually extremely recognizable (though differently named) riffs on famous film and literary sleuths: Sam Spade, Charlie Chan, Nick and Nora Charles, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple. They are not really “characters” so much as one-dimensional Scary Movie-style pop culture parodies, played by one of the greatest ensemble casts ever assembled.
Written by Neil Simon, this premise would seem to be comedic fertile ground, but its laboriousness and incredibly loud metafictional winking prevent the audience from getting properly swept up in the alleged “humor” of the situations.
Eventually, the villain’s third-act speech reveals the filmmakers’ ultimate aim, which is not really to make a “film” per se, but rather to construct an elaborate piece of performance art which critiques the conventions, tropes, and clichés of the golden-age literary-mystery genre:
“You’ve all been so clever for so long, you’ve forgotten to be humble. You’ve tricked and fooled your readers for years. You’ve tortured us with surprise endings that made no sense. You’ve introduced characters at the end that weren’t in the book before. You’ve withheld clues and information that made it impossible for us to guess who did it. But now the tables are turned.”
Setting aside the fairness or unfairness of this critique (of an entire genre), it is a strange and world-breaking choice to have an in-story character refer to “your readers” when speaking to a table full of literary archetypes (as if they were to blame!).
Through modern eyes, the film fails because of the very thing it complains about: a third-act twist so intense as to make you throw up your hands and turn off the TV. I am sure the film thinks it is being very clever for setting up this mirroring of its own point, but it simply does not land the way it thinks it does.
But what the film does do well, well enough to give it a spot on this list, is that it points out and has fun with the absurdity of us all continuing to tell these stories to each other, generation after generation, when we know completely what to expect. These comedies exist because, for whatever reason, we have simultaneously decided to mock the template while lustfully continuing to employ it.
Next, from Golan-Globus and director Pete Walker, we have House of the Long Shadows, a somewhat forgettable 80s tribute to Hammer Horror, which you nevertheless definitely should see because it stars Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and John Carradine together in a film for the first and only time. (Oh, and Desi Arnaz, Jr. is there too.)
Arnaz plays a writer who bets his publisher he can write a gothic novel in twenty-four hours, and then goes to a spooky Welsh mansion for inspiration. Once there he discovers a real-life plot involving (wouldn’t you know it) a gothic family secret and an escaped madman.
The presence of these four godfathers of gothic horror turns the somewhat inane story into a heartfelt tribute to a lost golden age. Well into their sixties and seventies, they are all somehow still at the height of their powers, glowing in the light of candelabras and moonlight, eyebrows and cheekbones completely amuck.
By contrast, the thirty-year-old Desi Arnaz, Jr. seems like someone’s hyperactive kid brother trying desperately to get attention from the adults. He’s clearly the comic relief, and he does well enough to keep the film firmly in the “comedy” section. But compared to the films that come later in this list, it is clear that the 80s were still trying to craft the syntax of comedic-non-parody tribute-pastiche which would become the dominant love language of the pre/peri/post-millennial film canon.
It is nonetheless clear that this film’s storytelling mode fits the pattern we have been discussing, hanging a lampshade on all the predictable tricks of the Mansion Murder Mystery and finding a unique, loving shade of humor in them, and in ourselves for continuing to love them so much.
We come now to the highest-ranked film on our list, the film that to modern generations exemplifies the Mansion Murder Comedy. A box office flop on its release (due in part due to a William-Castle-like gimmick which had different theaters showing one of three different endings) Clue found pop-culture redemption in its television and home video life. These are, after all, films best watched in the coziest possible setting.
The story features the future victim, named (of course) Mr. Boddy, inviting six seemingly unconnected strangers to a creepy New England mansion (“Hill House”) with the hint that each of their blackmailings will be resolved. Once the cast has been conveniently bottled up, the butler Wadsworth reveals himself to be both victim and orchestrator, and a kudzu plot is unfurled wherein each guest is gifted a lethal weapon (the ones from the board game that inspired the film) and invited to commit murder. The evening progresses in real-time as the corpses stack up, secret passages are revealed, and bodies fall out of doorways like so many dominoes.
To understand the crack-like appeal of Clue, you must take note of two crucial aspects. The first is that the screenwriter and director Jonathan Lynn is British, and brings with him the Euro-vaudevillian comedic energy that we saw in What a Carve Up!. In other words, the film does not suffer from American comedy maladies such as a boring third act devoid of jokes.
Second is the strong and palpable interplay between the snappy dialogue (modeled on His Girl Friday) and John Morris’s inherently comedic score. There is a lot of music in Clue, and it is essential to its pacing and comedic timing.
Morris is a scientist of the comedy film score, with Johnny Dangerously, The Woman in Red, and all of Mel Brooks’ films already on his C.V. by the time Clue came calling. (And we will hear his work again in the final entry, assuming you’re watching these as you read.) Of the many aspects of the Mansion Murder Comedy that Clue has mastered, one to pay special attention to is its use of music to both drive the energy and to keep reminding us that, although human beings are in fact being murdered, this is supposed to be funny.
This author has written extensively about Clue and there is no shortage of critical praise and analysis arguing for Clue‘s status as a modern classic. What we are proposing by presenting it in this list is a fresh lens through which to evaluate its brilliance, and that is as perhaps the flagship entry of this very specific subgenre.
Less than a year after Clue was released, Gene Wilder released his final directorial effort, Haunted Honeymoon, which he also wrote. This would be his second and final on-screen collaboration with his wife Gilda Radner, who would be diagnosed with ovarian cancer three months after its release.
We are going out on a limb ending our list with a lower-ranked and somewhat obscure entry, following our inclusion of the astoundingly popular Clue. But we think there is something to the fact that in 1985 there were two entries in our list being filmed simultaneously. Something was happening in our culture’s relationship to death and the past.
Set in the pre-war 1930s, Wilder and Radner play radio “mystery theater” actors who are invited to one of their ancestral estates in upstate New York, ostensibly for a dinner party with eccentric family. Unknown to them but revealed to us in the first act, the party is a ruse orchestrated by the male actor’s boss and psychiatrist to cure him of on-air panic attacks by “scaring him to death.” You know, like hiccups.
Haunted Honeymoon fits perfectly into the Wilder canon, featuring old-fashioned slapstick, playful treatment of adultery, and exactly one musical number, just like Young Frankenstein and Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother.
Wilder set out to recreate the tone of the “comedy chiller” films and radio plays from his childhood. He wound up working parallel to the very premise we started with here: with the application of certain tropes, lovingly lampshaded (but, crucially, NOT parodied), the filmmaker can create a cozy, spooky atmosphere with rich and fertile soil for comedy.
There must have been something in the air during those Reagan-Thatcher years which caused a collective look-back at the fun we used to have back in the 30s-50s. Back when “horror” didn’t involve gelatinous make-up effects or chainsaws, but rather a big creaky house full of secrets and a vaguely hairy threat around every dark corner.
Let us know in the comments if you disagree, but it is our contention that the tradition of the Mansion Murder Comedy has almost entirely died out. Somewhat-cozy murder-mysteries like Knives Out still occasionally break through. But for some opaque cultural reason, there seems to be little appetite for PG-rated laughs at the foibles of corpses, and that is a shame.
Never has the specter of death and doom been more present in our lives through the thousands of self-created windows that we peek out of at the so-called “world.” Never have we been more in need of a sense of humor about it.
But with the alleged end of the Cold War, the West seems to have decided to get “serious” about things. We have relegated comedy to be a thing that happens during glorified violence, or when sad, angry people try to have relationships, or only in animated worlds. It no longer has a cozy place next to an actual corpse.
Maybe that’s a good thing (we’ll check back in another four decades), but it nevertheless bears close scrutiny. Even when we’re laughing at death, at least we are facing it directly.
