ABCs of Death 2 hit VOD last week just in time for the Halloween season (or Nerdoween if you’re nasty) and the horror anthology series will make its way into theaters on Friday, October 31 for a theatrical run as well. The follow up to the original ABCs features a more diverse collection of filmmakers spanning across the globe as well as across genre. Nerdist spoke with director Julian Barratt (“B Is For Badger”), best known for his role as Howard Moon in the BBC cult comedy series The Mighty Boosh, which he co-wrote with his comedy partner Noel Fielding, about working in horror, his history with the genre and the long line of violent furry creatures in British comedy.

For Barratt, comedy and horror go hand in hand: “I’ve been a horror fan pretty much in the sense that my sense of horror and my sense of humor were both equally kindled by films as a kid. I liked horror and comedy, basically, from a young age but I just ended up getting into comedy because there was, I could do stand-up comedy and that was my way into this business and then there was no stand-up horror and I didn’t know how to get into that world.” Barratt continued, saying, “I did try and do some spooky stand up once and some of my stand-up had, I tried to do some horror stand-up but it didn’t really work very well…” That being said, Barratt concluded, “I think I was always interested in trying to put horror and comedy together so, the short is, it’s more of a sketch really, with a gory ending.”

By personally having an affinity for both genres but being better known for comedy, does he think that the two have much in common? Said Barratt, “Films do have suspense and tensions and scares and jumps and I like to write things that have both in them, comedy and horror, but sometimes they are hard to balance… I guess you could do both. Make the horror comedic; it’s like take the horror seriously and have the characters provide the comedy. I mean, I don’t know whether I’ve succeeded in that particularly with the short but I think for me it was just the beginning of trying to do something which had a bit of horror in it which I always loved.”

Barratt explained that he might want to have a little gore find its way into his comedy featured in the UK but that his writing partner, Noel Fielding, may have some objections. Barratt told Nerdist, “In The Boosh, in The Mighty Boosh, we would sometimes push it into slightly scary worlds but that was never very… Noel Fielding, the other side of it, he kind of doesn’t like gory stuff very much, and I do, so I always wanted to have people getting chopped in half in stuff and he would say, ‘We don’t want that,’ [laughs] and then now I want to do more with being chopped in half!”

All we’re saying is that an Old Gregg horror film needs to happen.

ABCs of Death 2 brings 26 new ways to die from 26 new directors on VOD now and in theaters October 31!

Images: Magnet Releasing