Four Techniques That Will Make Your Horror Comic Truly Scary

Getting under your reader’s skin is about more than just showering them with blood and showing off your favourite monsters. Let me teach you the black arts of creating a truly disturbing horror comic

John Carpenter’s Night Terrors: The Coffin Road. Art by Trevor Denham. Colours by Ryan Winn

Why are so few horror comics genuinely scary?

The genre of horror and the medium of comics have had a fruitful marriage since the 1940s, when Prize Comics’ The New Adventures of Frankenstein thought to cash in on the success of Universal’s monster movies. Eighty years on and breakout series like The Walking Dead, Basketful of Heads, and Something is Killing the Children continue to spawn spin-offs and can’t seem to stop winning awards.

Horror comics are as popular as ever. Maybe this has something to do with the genre’s mass-media marketability, as creators look to hawk their horror comic’s IP as a low-budget movie or a TV show somewhere down the line. But just how many titles out there are giving readers that delicious ripple down the spine, that soul-freezing scare that haunts you long after you’ve put down the book, and leaves you jumping at every bump in the night?

​‘Scary’ is a subjective term, for sure. So before I go on, let me give a quick rundown of the comics that have creeped me out over the years...

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