Byrne Robotics: Horror and Superheroes

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Ed Love
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Joined: 05 October 2004
Location: United States
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Posted: 20 October 2011 at 6:22am \| IP Logged \| 1

If played straight, a vampire for instance instantly creates a horror story. You can say the BLADE movies are just action movies with vampires, but they're still horror movies. And the horror stems not from the hero's mortal danger, as the hero is invincible in these cases, but from mortal danger to other characters the audience come to care about. In the BLADE flicks, that would be Whistler, specifically, and whoever else is teamed up with Blade and garners audience empathy.

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The problem with that angle is that the exact same is true to make a good action/adventure story -- you must believe that there is danger or sense of jeopardy to the characters involved. So the difference isn't merely a sense of jeopardy, both need it.

Monsters are a short-cut to make something horror, but not if the point of the film is to be exciting and not frightening or unsettling. The Blade movies may have some horror elements and motifs, but they are paced and flow as action movies. The response the audience is to have towards the film is one of watching an action movie. Ditto for Underworld, The Pirates of the Caribbean, the Mummy movies. The first two Evil Dead movies are horror movies. Army of Darkness, not so much. D& D fantasy novels are replete with monsters of all types including the classics, but they aren't horror stories. Most monsters in superhero stories aren't presented differently than other super-villains because the creators are first writing a superhero action story. They may be using a monster as the antagonist but they aren't trying to create moments that scare or unsettle their audience but to give their protagonist a foe that will make a good fight.

Which is why you can have horror stories WITHOUT supernatural or fantastic adversaries, just by crafting a story about the cruelty that common man is capable of or how helpless we can be as individuals. It's all about what audience response the story is going for.

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Kip Lewis
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Joined: 01 March 2011
Posts: 2880

Posted: 20 October 2011 at 3:29pm \| IP Logged \| 2

Another horror story that works for super-heroes is what we saw in
the few stories where the hero such as Spider-man mutating into an
out of his control creature. It could be played as action or horror or
both.

Another consideration in all of this is things don't have to be either/or.
A story can be both horror and action. (Or comedy and horror like the
original Fright Night.)

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Flavio Sapha
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Joined: 16 April 2004
Location: Brazil
Posts: 12912

Posted: 20 October 2011 at 5:33pm \| IP Logged \| 3

THE GLORY BOAT, mentioned by Chad, is my favorite New Gods
tale. An opera between comic covers!

Edited by Flavio Sapha on 20 October 2011 at 5:33pm

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Chad Carter
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Joined: 16 June 2005
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Posted: 20 October 2011 at 7:25pm \| IP Logged \| 4

I didn't read much of it, but Bruce Jones also went the horror angle with his Hulk run.

I can see the approach was valid, and the character of the Hulk as monster is certainly more in tune with the original Lee/Kirby origin.

The problem is, the Hulk is most successful as Mighty Joe Young, not King Kong (the 1933 version.) On the one hand, Kong as a character (not Kong's story, which is a love/tragic/monster story) is a brutal magnificent animal, the ruler of his territory, for most of the movie, which is a pulp/horror/adventure epic. Kong is pretty implacable on Skull Island; his tragedy is death by "civilization"'s greed. The Hulk is Kong on Skull Island, since Kong in Manhatten is a dead Kong. You can't "finish" the Hulk's story, so the Hulk will always be on Skull Island. If, that is, you want him, as Bruce Jones did, to be "The Monster."

However, the Hulk most of us know, love, and identify with, is Mighty Joe Young Hulk. Joe Young is a brute, violent when threatened, kind when met with kindness, courageous, maybe too curious, too naive. Joe Young has friends and defenders, and is constantly in danger of being killed by the ignorance/greed/fear of others. Such was the Hulk from about 1968 to 1988 or so.

Personally, I love the Banner "thug" Hulk from issues 4-6 or so of the original series, which isn't Kong or Joe Young. The Thug Hulk is pretty much Moe Howard as Mr. Hyde.

But the most popular version of the character isn't mine or Bruce Jones', and the mistake of turning the Hulk into "The Monster" is in trying to deny that popularity. It's like making Sherlock Holmes a serial killer. It just doesn't work.

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