Josh Simmons is the cartoonist responsible for the critically-acclaimed wordless horror graphic novel House, available from Fantagraphics. His next projects include Jessica Farm, also published by Fantagraphics, and Night of the Jibblers for the Kramers Ergot 7 anthology. He is also the first, and probably last, person to use the term ‘nuggs’ in this blog, and for that I will be forever grateful.

When I was about 15 I went to see Candyman in the theater with zero expectations, fully expecting it to be a ho hum, halfway decent waste of time. I’d started getting disillusioned with a lot of the books/movies/comics I had enjoyed up to that point, gettin a lot pickier in what I enjoyed. But from the very start of the film, with the screen completely filled end to end with bees, and the deep intonation of Mr. Candyman’s shpiel, I was seriously unnerved and sucked into the flick. And the rest of it did not disappoint; I recall really brutal violence hinted at or barely off screen; people getting ripped from genitals to throat, a little boy’s pecker chopped off and tossed in a toilet. This was probably one of the last times that a movie really scared my nuts off. However, I haven’t seen it in years, the present me may well consider Candyman silly garbage.

I must have been 17 when I was home alone one night and decided to watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. I also had a mass load of marijuana, and so ripped nuggs before and throughout the film. I knew next to nothing about David Lynch at that point and had never
seen one of his films before. From the start I was sucked in and intrigued by the movie, but shortly into the flick was the scene that put serious chills up my spine. Laura Palmer is in a psychiatrist’s office and is crying and freaking the fuck out; She grabs his head and pulls his face real close, spitting out with slow, feverish intensity: “Fire.” “Walk.” “With.” and then for the “Me.” suddenly for a split second she has blue skin and orange teeth and virtually growls/roars the word. I jumped out of my skin over this scene, and then was afraid to walk around anywhere else in the darkened house for the rest of the night. The remainder of the movie’s surreal fever dream bad trip vibe seriously sold my ass on Lynch’s movies from then on.

Today’s journey into fear comes courtesy of Sam Costello, original member of the defunct horror weblog Dark, But Shining and proprietor of Split Lip, a monthly showcase of gruesome and original comic stories just entering its second year. Don’t let his poor taste in choosing testimonials dissuade you.

It’s a foundational tenet of horror that fear is motivated by, among other things, the unknown. Whether the unknown is embodied in The Other or a dark corner where something might be lurking, that possibility, that mystery is a source of fear.

Fear of the unknown is at the root of my favorite new horror movie of the last year or two, The Descent. When I started thinking about this essay, I expected to write about The Descent. It deserves to be written about — it’s nuanced, intense, and so scary that after seeing it I used my cell phone as a flashlight to illuminate the far corners of my bedroom.

But despite The Descent’s use of a fear of the unknown, I knew I’d be writing about something else when I saw this picture:

That’s a hole in the floor of the ocean, featured on a site with a collection of pictures of, no snickering please, giant holes.

No matter how scary I think The Descent is – and that’s pretty scary – this picture is far scarier, this goes to the gut, the viscera of what makes the unknown scary.

That hole, called the Great Blue Hole, is off the coast of Belize. It’s 1,000 feet wide and 400 feet deep.

I think this hole, especially seen from this perspective, is scarier and encompasses fear of the unknown better than any movie I can imagine.

I’ve always found large bodies of water, especially those so dark that you can’t see what’s beneath you, somewhat frightening. It’s a child’s fear, but even as an adult every so often I’ll swim in a lake with forests of long weeds growing from its floor that invariably brush my legs or wrap lightly around my feet. At the moment of their touch, a queasy electric charge shoots through my body, lighting my stomach up with fear.

It’s irrational, of course. What’s in a lake that’s going to harm me? A monster? Of course not, but those dark waters beneath me could contain anything – anything – and I wouldn’t know it.

I look at that picture of the Great Blue Hole and I imagine swimming or sailing over it. I imagine cruising along in the beautiful blue water, seeing the ocean floor beneath me and not worrying at all about unknown depths. But suddenly the ocean floor has fallen away profoundly, deeply.

And nothing happens. That’s surreal, it violates our understanding of how the world works. When a hole opens up below you on land, gravity pulls you down into it. When you see a hole below you, you should fall. Instinctively, in your pre-human, lizard brain, you know you should be falling and you panic. But you don’t fall in water. The world has fallen away from you and you haven’t followed it.

More than that, a hole like this feels wrong. These geological features occur, but we don’t expect them. And if something so profound as the ocean floor – the very skin of the earth itself – can collapse like that, then what could be in the hole? If the world contains mysteries deep enough to contain that hole, then what does the hole contain?

These pictures are beautiful, of course, but they’re also awe-inspiring. And that’s just the right word: awe. Dictionary.com defines it as:

an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like

Isn’t that feeling inherent in horror, the feeling that arises in a character when the monster is seen for the first time, when the terrible truth is acknowledged, when the unknown becomes known?

Of all the horror sub-genres the one that seems the least likely to succeed as a comic book is also one of the ones that has been attempted the most often; the slasher. Tim Seeley is a man who finally got it right, by taking the emphasis off of the villains and placing it on their unlikely enemy, the final girl, in his horror comic series Hack/Slash. You would figure that this preoccupation with slasher fare would be reflected in what scared him, right?

The last thing that creeped me out was the H.P. Lovecraft story “The Whisperer in the Darkness.” The way he describes the method of communication between the creepy crab/fungoid aliens was both otherworldy weird, and oddly familair…the man is THE master for a reason. He could make bizarre, incomprehensible things eerily possible, and the skittering, flying crab thingies were no exceptions. It didn’t hurt that I read it while I was vacation in San Francisco, and had spent the day at Fisherman’s wharf, surrounded by the boiled bodies of those delicious water bugs.

You may be wondering what I’m up to when I’m not horror blogging or practicing 36 styles of danger. Well, recently I’ve been trying to get back into drawing, starting out with a bunch of random doodles which I thought I’d share with the class.

Hugo is my homage to classic comic strips, like Wash Tubbs and Captain Easy, Little Orphan Annie and Popeye, among others. I’ve been doodling him and his pet frilled lizard, Chloe, for a decade now, and I’ll probably be doing the same for the rest of my life.

She’s saying ‘Magnus’ because she’s about to fight robots. The goat head is her arch nemesis. He’s yelling ‘Nooo!’ because that’s what Nagy yells every time he impersonates the Goat Lord.

Me, circa 1989.

A comic character which I had a small part in creating has found a new home at The Shifter Archive. Jenny is a public domain character whose power is the ability to exist in all dimensions at once, the better to allow different interpretations of the character without worrying about continuity. I recommend anything by Nelson Evergreen, especially the very first completed Jenny story Name’s Not Down, and if you’re looking for something with a horror bent, there’s Graveyard Shift, Mrs. Zirma, and many more.

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

I’ve been reading comics for nearly three decades now. For the past few years my comic book habit died down in favour of classic comic strips, but I’ve always managed to keep my toe in the water. That said, the only titles that I’ve bought regularly over the last five years are The Walking Dead, Conan, and Little Lulu. Yeah, that’s right.

Little Lulu is right up there with Little Orphan Annie as a comic with a reputation based more on surface impressions then on actual content. John Stanley, the writer and breakdown artist on Little Lulu, is known in comic circles as being one of the all-time great cartoonists. And although he’s best known for his humourous work, another area in which Stanley excelled was Horror.

Comic Books Are Interesting Except When They Are Not Interesting has posted a sweet one-pager by Stanley entitle Goblin’s Ball. The first time I read it I wondered where the rest of the story was.

Thanks to The Comics Reporter for the link. If Goblin’s Ball appeals to you, I also posted a link to Stanley’s legendary horror comic The Monster of Dread End on International Read A Comic Book Naked Day which you may find interesting.

EC Comics may be considered the tops for horror comics, and Eerie and Creepy may have their charms, but I’ll always have a special place in my heart for DC Comics’ ’70s output, if only because those were the comics my grandparents would stock in the cottage. Nothing beat spending a rainy day with cheap four-colour terror spread out all over the floor. Ghosts, House of Mystery, House of Secrets, The Witching Hour, Unexpected and more, there wasn’t a DC horror title I didn’t have seared into my brain since I began to read. Or so I thought until Datajunkie posted a couple of issues of Forbidden Tales of the Dark Mansion. Like the man says, it’s chock full of trippy Filipino goodness, so check it out.

James Farr is the evil mastermind behind the incredibly popular cartoon serial Xombie, which is quickly becoming an industry onto itself with spin-offs including an illustrated novel, a comic series currently available from Devil’s Due Publishing and a feature film in the works. What scares you, James Farr?

The Shining. Yes, it’s a ridiculously obvious choice. Although I can’t honestly remember being scared by any other film quite so much. Aside from the seemingly random yet masterfully placed flashes of dead children, angry bathroom ghosts and blood that could ride elevators, the overall atmosphere was consistently chilling. The same feeling you get being alone in a giant, empty house, or traversing the halls of a strange hotel late at night - The Shining was able to maintain that basic, profound sense of unease for the entirety of the film.

Also, I think we all know it’s only a matter of time until Jack Nicholson comes to kill us with an axe.

Has it been a year already? This month marks the first anniversary of Split Lip, the monthly horror webcomic by Sam Costello and a rotating stable of artists. Having dabbled in comics myself from time to time, I know how difficult it is to maintain a schedule, especially when you’re dependent on others. Not only has Sam hit the mark each and every month, but his team has done so with a wonderful variety of work. At this point I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Split Lip is the predominant original horror comic work on the internet.

The latest comic available at Split Lip is Fitcher’s Bird, an eerie adaptation of a Brothers Grimm tale. If you haven’t visited yet I recommend browsing through the extensive archives while you’re there. Well over 100 pages of comics for all tastes await.

I haven’t really given much thought to the Dark Tower comic book series published by Marvel since the first issue was released, which is why this interview with the plotter and editor behind its launch caught me by surprise. It turns out that issues of Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born has been exceeding 100,000 copies sold on a regular basis, and has been consistently within the top five bestsellers for the direct market. This is pretty amazing for a non-superhero title.

What’s especially encouraging about it is that many of the people buying these comics are probably not regular readers of the medium. One of the main problems with the direct market’s reliance on superhero comics is that there are only so many superhero purchasers to go around. When the major comic companies release yet another superhero comic it prompts the purchaser of that comic to either pay more money for his or her monthly fix, drop a title (which counteracts the point of releasing the new title in the first place) or give up buying comics altogether. On the other hand, while a title like Dark Tower or Buffy will still draw in a crowd that is comprised at least in part of people who buy superhero comics, a significant portion of the people buying the title will be new customers with money that isn’t already tied up in superheroes. It may even persuade said readers to check out other comics, and eventually grow accustomed to the nuances of the medium.

The greatest casualty of the Comic Code Authority clamp-down of the 50s was EC, home of Tales From The Crypt and Vault of Horror, among many others. The only publication to survive from EC was Mad, which did so by converting to a magazine format and slipping past the Code and onto newstands. While a similar decision to save the horror titles wasn’t considered, if it had the result may have looked something like Warren Publishing’s Creepy and Eerie comic magazines.

Dark Horse Comics have announced that they not only plan on releasing all-new stories under the Creepy and Eerie titles by such horror luminaries as Steve Niles and Bernie Wrightson, but that they will also be reprinting the earlier stories in hardcover collections.

When I first heard the news, I hoped that they were considering reprinting them in the same format as their upcoming Savage Sword of Conan reprints, similar to the Marvel Essentials or DC Showcase volumes. If anything would actually benefit from a pulpy presentation it would be Creepy and Eeerie. Here’s hoping this doesn’t mean they’re planning on colouring them.

“”Death Note” stories contain elements of mystery, death and revenge, and are harmful to children’s psychological development.” - From a statement by the Chinese government on illicit horror material.

It’s easy to get lost in the minutae of North American horror cinema and neglect the big picture. While most bloggers, myself included, are pondering the fate of R-rated horror, half a world away there’s a genuine War on Horror.

It all started with Death Note, a hugely popular horror manga which tells the story of a boy who comes into possession of a notebook which has the power to kill anyone whose name is written within. With the help of the internet, Death Note and other horror publications have fallen into the hands of eager students in China, who find the stories to be a great way to deal with stress and anxiety. Some students were so taken with the story that they created their own Death Note binders, which they used to catalogue the names of people they were angry with. These people included their own parents and teachers, who did not take kindly to being marked for death.

The result has been a nationwide crackdown on all horror material. According to the agency in charge of dealing with pornography and other harmful materials, they have confiscated 5,912 “Death Note” books, 11,930 other illegal horror books, and 1,364 horror CDs and DVDs, most of which are likely bootlegs to begin with. The government also intends on clamping down on horror content on the internet.

The ban has even resulted in actual death threats from students directed at teachers, which has only strengthened the government’s stance.

Sam Costello has posted another one of his splendid Split Lip stories, this one entitled School Supplies and illustrated by Brian McGleenon. It’s an ode to EC Comics, concerning two 19th-Century graverobbers and the gruesome revelation they discover under the cemetary grounds. The artwork has been getting consistently better at Split Lip the past few months, and while McGleenon stumbles in a few panels, others manage to evoke the spirit of “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, with just a dash of Stephen Gammell for good measure.