Welcome to the first ever Reading With The Lights Out, your bi-weekly column dedicated to all that thrills, creeps, moans, groans and keeps you fear-shocked and wide-awake at night from the world of horror comics! To kick things off is a look at Dark Horse Comic’s rebooting of Creepy, a medium that combines two incrdible elements of horror: a pervading tense atmosphere and fiendish visuals.
Creepy #9, “Red Knife” art by Emily Carroll
Originally started in 1964, the late aughts run of the series has stayed true to its original narrative roots and tells B-flavoured, campy, spooky tales about ghosts, ghouls, and other glorious Monsters of the Week. With a collection of impressive authors and artists, like Steve Ditko and David Lapham, you are in good, bloodied hands.
What makes Creepy Comics so great? A unique combination of terror and art; the terror is absolutely absurd and the art is always frightening in its simplicity. In B-horror films and campy scary stories, the usual conventions of reality are stripped away. The horror comes from realizing that is unexplainable or rational. For example, Creepy features tales about succubi-prostitutes (“Nineteen” Issue #8), demon tattoos killing people (“Pelted” Issue #3), zombies making clothes out of human flesh (“Maquiladora” Issue #3), and swamp zombies turning people into zombies and then marrying them (“Zombie Wedding at Slaughter Swamp” Issue #4). These issues only scratch the surface of what Creepy Comics has to offer.
Creepy #3, “Pelted” art by Angelo Torres
These B-horror narratives offer something deeper and scarier than “realistic horror stories” such as Saw and Hostel, which threaten on the basic survival level. Realistic horror stories get their power from the audience believing that this could be real life, real people — and some of the scariest stories revolve around how unpredictable and unknowable people really are. With the realism element there is much merit in that Saw and Hostel can force us to become a hardened, ill-trusting and paranoid species. Admittedly, they better serve us in our day-to-day life and our international travels. Realistic horror serves as warnings and is horrifying in its potential correspondence to real life.But in absurdist thought, humans are irrevocably alienated from the world. Life, reality, and truth are all devoid of an inherent meaning, and accordingly, absurdist art plays on a rejection of these essential beliefs and values in traditional cultural thought. This is exactly what the scary stories in Creepy do: they reject traditional modes of conceiving reality. They refuse to fall victim to the trap of realism for thrills and screams. The world is a terrible place, and while this is scary, it’s on a somewhat understandable level. People do bad things; it’s why kids are warned not to talk to strangers. Ever.
What Creepy offers, instead, is the same idea that horror grew out of: monstrous concepts that are unthinkable, unknowable and irrational, that prey upon our deepest fears. These fears cannot be dispelled through an appeal to reality. The traditional notion of reality is bagged and sent off to the morgue. It’s the Swamp things, the monsters from various lagoons, lakes, oceans, and planets, the women who can turn living humans into miniature dolls, the dead who become re-animated and the demon tattoos that are actually demons that are terrifying in their absurdity. The rules are clear with a Michael Myers-esque serial killer: do NOT run up the stairs but to get the out of the house.
Creepy #7, “Deep Ruby” art by Steve Ditko
This is the fun. What’s scarier than what is incomprehensible? The suspension of disbelief is insanely powerful because it destroys any sane grounding. Normal, human rules don’t count. It’s the Mud Monster’s rules now (“Mud” Issue #7) rules — and he don’t play fair.
The fun is perverse, but it’s right in line with certain philosophies: life is absurd. Eugene Ionesco said of absurdist theatre that “people drowning in meaninglessness can only be grotesque, their suffering can only appear tragic by derision.” It is through the farcical B-elements of campy horror that true horror can be accessed because previous symbolic codes of meaning are deflated and powerless. If we don’t embrace the absurd, if we decide to stick to our ideas of rationality, then we’re all just monster-fodder for when the giant space egg descends to earth — metaphorically speaking of course.
