Horror as a genre has grown in leaps and bounds. Starting off in books, horror has primarily become a visual medium for many fans nowadays, with horror movies being the way that the vast majority of fans consume horror media. While horror novels are still big business, horror has become a visual medium and comics have taken advantage of that. Marvel, DC, and independent comics have all taken a stab at the horror genre and have proven that comics can do it better than anyone.
Comics and horror go very well together and horror comics can be scarier than any movie.
10 Horror Comics Can Change The Way Horror Icons Are Looked At
One of the greatest horror comic success stories is Marvel's Tomb Of Dracula. Starting in the '70s, Tomb Of Dracula was basically a horror anthology based around the Marvel version of the vampiric icon, with many stories basically starring the monster. This was very different from horror movies, as movies don't usually focus on the villains as much.
Horror comics can give fans a glimpse of their favorite horror villains in new ways. Comics can focus on the monsters in ways movies can't and won't. Getting into the head of the monsters and seeing what fuels their inhuman desires makes them scarier.
9 Superheroes & Horror Are Always A Great Mix
Marvel has done a lot of superhero-themed horror. Horror movies like to highlight the plight of the helpless against monsters but comics go another way. Having horror monsters fight superheroes shows just how scary they can be. Sure, the zombies of Night Of The Living Dead are scary but superheroes should be able to beat them, right?
Well, reading Marvel Zombies proves that superheroes are just as susceptible to zombies as anyone else, making zombies even scarier. Pairing horror and superheroes shows that the dangers of the horror story can affect even the most powerful beings ever.
8 Comics Can Present Many Different Kinds Of Horror
Independent comics have become a force in the comic industry and one of the places where they are strongest is horror comics. Indie horror books have done all kinds of amazing things with the genre; books like Hellboy mixed centuries of horror legends with Lovecraft and history to make some truly chilling stories. Something like Wytches played with folklore and created a mythology of horror that worked brilliantly.
Indie horror books can do slasher horror like Hack/Slash, vampire horror like Redneck, and just about every horror genre under the sun, giving people scares that movies just don't anymore.
7 The Horror Can Happen Anywhere In Comics
One of the strongest things about horror in comics is that it doesn't always happen in horror comics. One of the great things about comics is that any book can use horror trapping to make a story even better. When fans are looking for horror, the scares are expected. When they just get a scare out of nowhere, that's truly unique and effective.
Comic writers are masters of using all manners of horror in stories that aren't inherently horror. Take Wolverine in Weapon X. The book played into the body horror of what happened to Wolverine and then showed just how scary he could be unleashed, mixing superheroes and horror in new and fascinating ways.
6 By Making Monsters More Human, It Shows How Much More Frightening The Remaining Monsters Are
Alan Moore's Swamp Thing comics are masterpieces of the horror genre. The book goes a long way towards showing just how human Swamp Thing is by taking away his humanity and showing that it was a choice he made. He chose to be Alec Holland and continues to choose to be human. This makes the monsters he fights that much worse.
By showing that monsters can be human, Moore made the other monsters that much scarier because Swamp Thing showed that those monsters are only monsters because they want to be. This choice to be evil makes them so much more effective as monsters.
5 Comics Do A Better Job Of Showing Humans Are The Real Monsters
Neil Gaiman's The Sandman is an undisputed triumph for a lot of reasons but one of them is how it approaches horror. The book focuses on beings who are gods, angels, dreams, nightmares, and things beyond those, yet the most potent sources of horror are humans. It's the humans in the stories that do the most horrific things.
Even with something like the Corinthian, a nightmare that inspired generations of serial killers, his crimes paled in comparison to all that was done by those humans who came after him; he was acting according to his nature but they chose to be killers. Comics often do something that horror in other mediums doesn't by showing that humans are the real monsters.
4 Comics Can Present Horror In More Sophisticated Ways
DC in the 1980s revitalized horror comics by going for what was known as sophisticated suspense. British writers like Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, Peter Milligan, Garth Ennis, and many more came into the American comic industry and brought a new flavor to horror that few other mediums brought. These writers brought a sophistication to horror that movies are missing.
Movie horror can be very cliché and it sort of kills the scares in a lot of ways. Comic horror has proven that horror can be smart and scary in a way that a lot of horror from other mediums just isn't anymore.
3 Spooky Atmospheres Are A Massive Part Of Comics' DNA
Almost since the beginning, horror has been a part of comics. Batman plays on that perfectly; he's a superhero who uses the trappings of fear against villains. In the '50s, EC Comics was one of the top publishers, and while horror took a backseat in the '60, the '70s and '80s brought it roaring back. In the '90s, horror comics fueled DC's Vertigo imprint of amazing books.
The last twenty years have proven just how much horror is part of comics as well, with writers and artists using spooky atmospherics of all kinds in effective ways to make scares happen in a variety of books.
2 The Combination Of Prose & Art Brings Effective Scares
Horror novels and movies are good sources of horror and each does horror in different ways. Movies use horror completely as a visual thing, using gore, jump scares, and imagery to get the scares across. Novels are more psychological, using prose to create horror that the reader imagines. Comics combine these approaches and that makes them perfect for horror.
It not only lets readers use their imagination to fill in the blanks but shows them the horror, using page turn panels and all manners of tricks that only can be done in comics to elicit scares from the audience that novels and movies can't on their own.
1 The Varieties Of Art Make All Kinds Of Scares Possible
Horror movies often do a great job with visuals but photorealism isn't always the best thing for horror. Too many horror movies go too realistic with things and there's no atmosphere to it. Comics are quite different artistically, as each penciler, inker, and colorist brings something unique to a project that others don't and this works very well for horror.
Horror movie visuals can be boring because they're real. Comic visuals can run the gamut from realistic to impressionistic, bringing dimensions to the horror that the more realistic visuals of horror movies just can't replicate without looking kind of ridiculous.