“Widow’s Bay” Sets a High Bar for Horror Comedy

A decade ago, back when Twitter was still Twitter, and writerly types gathered there to amuse one another, a Los Angeles-based screenwriter named Katie Dippold posted one of the all-time great tweets. It was “tbt,” or throwback Thursday, a weekly excuse to post a picture from one’s past. Dippold chose an image of herself sitting with a group of friends at a Halloween party, dressed as the titular character from the horror film “The Babadook.” The costume—doofy top hat, smeared white paint—suggested full commitment to the bit. The only problem was that no one else in the photo was dressed up. Dippold captioned the post “Tbt to Halloween when I dressed as the babadook but my friend’s house had more of a grown ups drinking wine vibe.” The heady mix of emotions the image stirred up—amusement, horror, secondhand humiliation—made it go hugely viral. In an interview with New York, Dippold said, “I feel like that tweet just shows my soul.”

Dippold is a prolific comedy writer, who got her start on “MADtv,” wrote for “Parks and Recreation,” and has worked on films such as “The Heat” and the “Ghostbusters” reboot. But her dream was to make a series that combined her lifelong passion for horror movies with her absurdist comedic instincts (essentially, the spirit of her “Babadook” tweet, adapted for television). She grew up in New Jersey in the eighties, and she had formative memories of visiting a haunted house on the boardwalk: “It was so scary,” she has said. “And I was also laughing so much, and I felt giddy, and that’s a kind of feeling I’ve been chasing my whole life.” She first tried to capture this feeling back in 2009, in a spec script she wrote to land a job on “Parks and Recreation,” which asked: What if the residents of a small town like Pawnee had to face nightmares beyond administrative red tape?

That episode was never made, but after what Dippold described as “years and years of trial and error,” she recently realized her vision in the form of “Widow’s Bay,” a new comedic horror series that just concluded its first season on Apple TV. There have been many scary television shows that are also funny (“Dexter,” “Santa Clarita Diet,” even “Hannibal”) and many television comedies that traffic in horror tropes (“What We Do in the Shadows,” “Los Espookys,” “Search Party”), but few, if any, provide a seamless blend of humor and frights. The comedies often fail to elicit real goosebumps, and the thrillers often deploy comedy so erratically that they veer into camp. “Widow’s Bay,” excelling in both modes, has the rare distinction of striking a tone that feels genuinely new. It is easily one of the best shows of the year.