While DC Comics is known for its superhero stories, the company has also produced some of the best horror comics on the market. This should not be surprising, considering the company's flagship character, Batman, is a brooding gothic terror who uses fear as a weapon as he stalks the night. As superheroes are meant to instill hope, this should foreshadow the quality of DC's horror stories.
Both in the main DC Universe and among DC's adult Vertigo and Black Label imprints, there have been some smart, sophisticated bone-chilling tales that raise the hackles and invoke fear like the specter of an elder god. Here are DC's 10 scariest horror comics, ranked.
Updated on October 14th, 2020 by Theo Kogod. DC Comics may have invented the superhero genre with the creation of such characters as Batman and Superman, but it was in the horror genre of comics where they achieved perfection. Classics like the original House of Mystery series and Alan Moore’s run on Saga of the Swamp Thing captivate audiences to this day, while more recently, DC has launched two new imprints for mature horror comics. These books are perfect to read just before Halloween, or whenever the mood strikes.
15 Lucifer (2000)
Fans of the TV show on Fox have not experienced the true horror that is the original Lucifer ongoing series by Mike Carey. This intense philosophical tale follows the former Lord of Hell after he quit his previous job and took up residence in LA.
The series manages to find new types of terror—and brilliance—in every issue. In one story, the devil obtains a space outside of reality, which he uses to make his own Garden of Eden, creating his very own Luciferean versions of Adam and Eve who must look to him as their God. Another story pits him against the Japanese Gods of Death as he schemes against them, and they against him. Carey’s writing will make readers have sympathy for the devil, and fear as much for his wellbeing as those around him.
14 Preacher
This weird western is a bizarre examination of American identity and Christianity that follows the exploits of Jesse Custer, an areligious preacher who can use the Voice of God to compel people to do what he says.
The book is a product of its time, but it manages to explore the horrors of religious intolerance, addiction, predatory business practices, and hedonistic sadism through a mixture of bizarre humor and supernaturally terrifying encounters, taking the characters on a road trip through darkest expanses of the American psyche.
13 Animal Man (2011)
There have been several amazing runs of Animal Man over the years, the most famous of which was written by Grant Morrison. However, while Morrison used the character to explore the nature of comics, literary mediums, and political philosophy, it was the 2011 series by Jeff Lemire that made Animal Man into the ultimate horror character.
Here, the character’s animal powers are linked to the Red—a supernatural force connected to all living animals. When animals start going mad and attacking him and his family, he learns that his daughter is the key to saving the world, if he can save her from the things that would stop her. Deformed monstrosities attack his little girl, reducing the one-time superhero to a scared father who feels helpless to save his family.
12 DCeased
DC’s answer to Marvel Zombies is a harrowing and brilliant tale of terror taken to the extreme. The zombie virus is created when Darkseid tries to finally obtain the Anti-Life Equation, hacking into Cyborg’s Mother Box and even capturing the Black Racer (the incarnation of Death who slays the New Gods). Things go terribly wrong, and as Cyborg opens a Boom Tube to Earth, the virus comes with him… and spreads into every screen on Earth.
Anyone looking at their phone, the TV, or a computer screen is infected through their technology, and these people, now biologically altered, can spread the infection through their bite. To show just how perilous things are, Batman does not even make it through the first issue.
11 Seven Soldiers
Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers follows a team of seven heroes fighting a race of powerful enemies, the Sheeda (and is distinct from the earlier superhero team with the same name). What makes the Seven Soldiers a unique team is that none of the members ever meet one another. To defeat the Sheeda, they must operate separately toward a single goal.
Each character has their own miniseries, which ties into all the others. The most overtly horror-themed of these stories stars Frankenstein, but a few come very close. Mister Miracle explores existential dread and the agony of a nightmarishly cruel murder, while both Shining Knight and Klarion’s stories involve extreme isolation, demonic forces, and ancient otherworldly magics.
10 The Dollhouse Family
DC Comics recently launched its new horror line, Hill House Comics, under the direction of legendary horror writer Joe Hill. Hill has tapped several other fantastic creators to work on projects under this imprint. Among these creators is Carmen Maria Machado, who might be the most interesting new name on the horror scene today.
While all of the titles from Hill House Comics have been great, it's M.R. Carey and Peter Gross' The Dollhouse Family which has been the most chilling so far with provocative characters and a world of secrets waiting to be discovered. Its story about a tiny family living inside a haunted dollhouse that comes into the possession of a young girl manages to build an increasing sense of dread that is sure to keep you up at night.
9 American Vampire
Scott Snyder's big entry into comics was American Vampire, a historical horror about the American Dream as reimagined through the predatory behavior of vampires. He also partnered with Stephen King for the first story of this series.
This has something in it for everyone. Vampires flashing their fangs in the sun-scorched deserts of the Old West. Vampires flirting with gutsy flappers in the Roaring '20s. G.I.s fighting vampires in World War II. Greasers hunting vampires for sport. And lest it goes unsaid, there are also vampires in SPACE! Seriously, this comic is fun, smart, creative, and nerve-rackingly tense.
8 Doom Patrol (Grant Morrison)
There have been several runs of the Doom Patrol over the years and the team was even supposedly the inspiration for the X-Men. In 1989, Grant Morrison took over writing the title and changed the face of comics forever. Morrison is a self-described chaos magician who turned the title into a Dadaist narrative art experiment that explored the nature of chaos.
While Doom Patrol always dealt with weird stuff, under Morrison, the series became increasingly unnerving. Its surrealist humor juxtaposed with heady philosophy, rich character interactions, and morbid cringe-inducing violence, breaking down artistic barriers even as the creator broke the bodies of his characters.
7 Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth
Another work by Grant Morrison, Arkham Asylum is a story about Batman having to venture into the Gotham asylum to help suppress a riot among the prisoners. As Batman enters the insane asylum, his own sanity is called into question as he's accused of being little more than a masked psychopath who inflicts violence on others as an expression of his own psychopathy.
This comic is a brilliant psychological thriller, but also has a truly unnerving secondary story that follows Dr. Jeremiah Arkham as he founds the psychiatric hospital. Dave McKean's surrealist art reinforces the loss of sanity as Batman struggles to stay grounded in reality.
6 House of Mystery (Vertigo)
There have been two House of Mystery series. The original was a horror anthology that began in 1951. Unfortunately, the heavy censorship of comics in the '50s negatively impacted horror titles, including this one. The second House of Mystery spun out of the pages of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman and was written by Lilah Sturges (though printed using her deadname).
The house itself is an interdimensional way station where people meet to exchange drinks and stories. Some people end up stuck there, working to serve the regular patrons and listen to the stories. Each story has unnerving mysteries to it, as does the house itself. This may very well be the best haunted house story in comics.
5 Batman: The Black Mirror
When Scott Snyder started writing Batman, he began working on Detective Comics stories during the time Dick Grayson was acting as Batman after Bruce Wayne's apparent death in Final Crisis. The result was collected in Batman: The Black Mirror.
Snyder injected his writing with the terror he personally felt at writing such a huge character as Batman, with Dick Grayson practically scared witless at replacing his former teacher. He introduced new villains whose evil could palpably be felt off the page while bringing back a specific villain, James Gordon Jr., a sociopath prodigy whose last violent act gave the story a sense of never-ending horror.
4 Batman: Death of the Family
After completing Batman: The Black Mirror, Snyder took over the main Batman title during the course of The New 52. The best story of his run, "Death of the Family," was also the most terrifying.
Joker went missing for a year following an incident where his face was carved off. This marks his triumphant return to Gotham in which he terrorizes everyone Batman has ever cared for, wearing the dried severed skin of his flayed face as a mask. The plot twists like a knife in the kidney, building to a tense terrifying climax that threatens everything Batman cares about.
3 Saga of the Swamp Thing (Alan Moore)
When Alan Moore took over writing Saga of the Swamp Thing, the world of comics did not know quite how to respond. In his second issue, he dissected the main character on an operating table, even as he dissected the philosophy and themes central to the character.
Moore's run tackled supernatural horror with a sophisticated nuance, invoking the specter of Louisiana slave plantations in his ghost stories and the subjugation of women as he likened werewolves to the lunar cycle of menstruation. He also addressed real-world horrors like nuclear waste mismanagement, domestic abuse, and even fear of sexuality, making it a comic as smart as it was terrifying.
2 The Sandman
Neil Gaiman's The Sandman is not just one of the greatest comics ever written, but one of the greatest works of English literature. The story follows Dream of the Endless, an immortal god who, after being sealed away behind a magic barrier and then breaking free, must learn to adapt to the modern world that has moved on without him.
This story does everything! Shakespeare struggles to express love for his son before he performs A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Faerie court. There is an undying talking head amid the mass guillotine beheadings of the Reign of Terror. A remote 24-hour diner becomes the scene of the mental dominance and bodily destruction of its patrons. Lucifer changes careers, the Emperor of San Francisco is tempted by supernatural beings, and a Mesopotamian love goddess has a stripping career. For all that it does, the series is genuinely terror-inducing and its most intense moments will stick with readers decades after they finish reading it.
1 John Constantine, Hellblazer (Vertigo)
The Hellblazer comics follow John Constantine, a Liverpool-born working-class grifter, conman, and mage. While Constantine was created by Alan Moore in his run on Swamp Thing, the character took off in his own series in which he tackled every horror imaginable.
Throughout the 300 issues of Hellblazer, he went up against a hunger demon who personified African famine, a fundamentalist Christian cult, an archangel who hung out with white supremacists, a cabal of Freemasons using black magic and police brutality to end the world, the British Royal Family, American school shootings, and a voodoo priest with ties to organized crime - to name just a few.
Constantine suffered the depredations of homelessness, sexual violence, and Thatcherism. He outsmarted the devil, then outsmarted two more on the same day. For all his cunning, John Constantine could not escape the horrors of the world, both mundane and supernatural, and with each passing year of his comic, he aged in real-time until finally succumbing to death.