Is there something about writing Batman that makes you a good horror writer? Or are horror writers drawn to Batman? He did famously teach us that criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot, and he does dress up like a bat to scare people, so maybe it… actually makes perfect sense. It’s weird that nobody has built a Batman movie on that, though. Tim Burton is spooky, but Joel Schumacher went campy, Christopher Nolan came from mind-bending thrillers, and Matt Reeves came from ape movies.

We’ve gotten decidedly off-track here, but the topic this week is 2022’s Night Of The Ghoul from Scott Snyder and Francesco Francavilla, a neat little horror story about horror movies and the ways that parents screw up their kids. Snyder, as alluded to in the previous paragraph, will likely go down as one of the great Batman writers, having successfully guided The Dark Knight through DC’s shaky New 52 initiative (in which the publisher rebooted its entire universe, a move that has since been canonically blamed on Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen, which is really, really funny).

Snyder’s Batman run introduced The Court Of Owls, a cult of owl-themed weirdos who are the best Batman baddies since Bane (or Hush, if you like Hush), and there are some similar secret society scaries in Night Of The Ghoul — specifically an evil cult trying to resurrect a super-monster and a benevolent cult trying to kill the super-monster. It’s clearly something Snyder has a fondness for, and Night Of The Ghoul is lovingly loaded with slightly trope-y horror movie concepts like that.

The story centers around a legendary lost horror movie about a squad of American soldiers in WWII who stumble upon an ancient monster and then accidentally bring it back home after the war, with that story unfolding alongside a present-day mystery involving a film buff and his annoyed son investigating the lost movie and the disappearance of its director. Francavilla gets to show off when differentiating between the story of the movie and the story of the man and his son, with the former done in black-and-white and styled like an old movie (complete with panel borders that look like a burned-up film reel). There are also some tight close-ups of scary stuff or shocking reveals that are straight out of this kind of retro horror movie.

It’s a lot of clever fun, with two creators playing to their strengths on a story that would likely be too expensive (or too gimmicky) to tell in another medium but works great as a comic.

As a Christmas gift to myself and to you, I’m spending the next newsletter talking about my favorite single issue of a comic book: The “What If?” story where Captain America doesn’t come back until the ‘80s, allowing far-right conservatives to take over the country in his absence. It rules.

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