Once again, it’s that time to jump back into the world of horror comics with your bi-weekly campfire-ghost-story column, Reading With The Lights Out. So far we’ve covered zombies, Cthulu-monsters and fabulous femme fatales, haunted houses, artists who distort our childhood memories, and campy B-side stories. It’s only fair we give vampires a chance to steal the spotlight (and since I’m rewatching Buffy, our fanged-friends have been on my mind lately).
I think it’s only fair to start this off by saying that I am not a huge fan of vampires. BUT this isn’t going to be a post about how Twilight has ruined vampires, and only real vampire fans read Dracula and Anne Rice, because I don’t care who reads what books about vampires. I’m just prefacing with this to explain my hesitation in reading Severed: I’m not a vampire gal, so I had no interest.
But I did love Snyder’s Court of Owls and Black Mirror Batman runs, so I was talked into giving Severed a chance. (Don’t worry, I don’t just blindly love everything Snyder does. I hated Swamp Thing. Hated it with a passion that knows no bounds.) And ya know, I gotta admit that I was pretty impressed with Severed (me being too cool for vampires, of course, so this is a big deal). It delivers a thoroughly creepy story that uses vampires quite effectively: the vampires don’t overpower the narrative, and they aren’t used as a crutch to deliver chills.
So, here’s a quick plot sum-up: Severed is about a young, adopted boy, Jack, who leaves his safe and warm home to go in search of his travelling-musician father, and en route Jack meets his lovable, streetwise and endearing sidekick bestfriend, and becomes entangled with the wrong sort of fellow. Pretty basic and fairly familiar tropes, right? Right.
What makes Severed so great, though, is the villain, Alan (we’ll just call him by that name, since that’s the one he uses the most throughout the narrative): he’s a vampire, sure, but that’s not really the scariest part of him. If I’m being honest, the whole vampire-thing actually feels really tangential to the horror. It’s the fact that Alan is a predator and a serial killer that makes this story so ridiculously creepy. Because of this vibe, Severed reads more of a don’t-talk-to-human-strangers warning than it does of a vampire story.
The splash page featured on the left exemplifies the terror of Severed, or at least what I found to be frightening about it. In this scene Alan, who is introducing himself to Sam and Jack for the first time, is towering over Sam, illustrating Alan’s strength and power over the younger kids. There is a distinct power differential, which is exactly what Alan uses to lure and collect his victims. This scene, with Sam defenseless, contains all of this. Even if Alan wasn’t a monster, readers would be right to be spooked because the image composition puts Sam completely at this (crazy) stranger’s mercy — a position nobody wants to ever be in.
But beyond this, the other scene that really drives the horror all home is about 3/4 of the way through: for the entire story, we’ve all known what Alan really is, and the tension is built from the fact that Jack keeps (sometimes literally) throwing himself into Alan’s arms — which makes sense, since the kid’s whole motive is to find his father, and he’s understandably lost and suffering from abandonment issues that rival my own. Finally, though, the creepy-bad-touch aspects of Alan are beginning to ooze through to Jack, and he calls Alan a monster — that’s when Alan pops out his dentures and reveals his much more effective set of fangs.
This scene encapsulates all the real terror that Jack is experiencing: Alan is a deranged stranger who goes around collecting and murdering abandoned kids, and this is enough to terrify and upset any sane human being. Alan only resorted to showing his gruesome snarl when Jack was beginning to catch on to the fact that strangers who show too much interest in you too fast are probably up to no good. The point is that we’d be afraid for Jack, even if Alan wasn’t a vampire, because really, using his fangs is just Alan’s preferred weapon — but it could just as easily be anything human and not supernatural. It’s the details that are the most chilling in Severed (and with horror, it’s always the details that matter most).
Alan is specifically collecting young children and tattooing his body with items associated with these boys as trophies. He is representative of a danger inherent in our society, and being a vampire is just a trope to amp up the scream-factor. He’s a predator who takes advantage of young kids and this is a motive and a character that will always inspire terror because they exist in real life. And this is where the horror of Severed comes from: realizing that Alan, without the fangs, exists in our society, our reality. Don’t talk to strangers, folks (especially if they end up being a vampire).
So if you want to read a vampire story, that doesn’t go overboard on dramatic blood sucking (because when Alan does decide to drain a victim, doesn’t just bite his victims, he eats them), or if you just want a good, creepy, and disturbing read, give Severed a shot. And think of it as a warning that yes, while vampires don’t exist, homicidal predators do. And I don’t want to take my chances with either.
