WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for "The Cellar" in Are You Afraid of Darkseid?, on sale now.
A tale of horror revealed that Superman and Lois Lane once wandered into a situation that has some eerie similarities to the Resident Evil series. And they almost didn't survive the encounter. While investigating the disappearance of two missing children Clark and Lois investigated a small farmhouse in the countryside. What they found inside the house was no simple kidnapper however, but a horror show waiting to sink its claws into whoever was unfortunate enough to catch its attention in a short story by Jeremy Houn, Tony Akins, Moritat and ALW's Troy Peteri.
But the perpetrators themselves mirror some of the most recent games from Resident Evil and show that even Superman isn't strong enough to defeat that kind of threat alone.
Clark recently got a call from his old high school friends. Their daughters had gone missing and knowing that Clark and Lois were an investigative power couple, reached out in the hopes that they might be able to find their children. Husband and wife set out into the country, helping to spread the word about the missing kids while also doing their own private investigations into the houses they visited. Their latest lead brought them to a remote farmhouse that have been easy to miss had they not known what they were looking for.
After meeting the homeowner, a very spindly looking farmer who seemed very much in need of sunlight, they were invited indoors. While Lois occupied the farmer, Clark did a sweep with his x-ray vision, spotting the girls tied up and unconscious in the cellar. Feigning going to the bathroom, Clark entered the lower level to free the girls, but ended up encountering the farmer's wife, Ruthie, the true source of this evil. Ruthie had transformed into a creature like the classic Metropolis villain, Parasite.
She began draining Superman and shockingly, he wasn't able to resist her powers. He would have succumbed had it not been for Lois. While Superman battled the wife down below, she held off the farmer, being thrown around the house before stumbling upon the source of Ruthie's power. Smashing it into the farmer's head saved her life and as an added bonus, her husband's. Without the stone that granted her powers, Ruthie faded away into nothing, allowing Clark and Lois to return the children to their parents.
It was a harrowing adventure and one Superman almost didn't survive. He admitted that whatever power Ruthie had was supernatural in nature. If Lois hadn't intervened, Superman would almost certainly be dead now. But the situation, while seemingly resolved, also parallels the events of recent entries in the Resident Evil franchise. Specifically the seventh entry.
Originally, the Resident Evil series was a horror game about bioengineering creating actual zombies for the protagonists to fight off. It is credited with bringing zombies back into popular culture, but as time passed, the enemies the game threw at its players evolved. Now the mutagen that brought the dead back also affected the living, capable of transforming ordinary people into terrifying monsters.
The seventh game did this, having its latest protagonist, Ethan Winters, evade the mutated Baker family, the owners of a remote plantation while he was searching for his missing wife. The premise that Superman and Lois dealt with was very much the same, finding a very disturbed family mutated by an unknown power while in search of missing people. It shows that even though Superman is considered one of the DCU's brightest characters, even he can delve into the most horrifying parts of his world. And just like Ethan Winters, Superman is not impervious to how dangerous the truly disturbing can be.