Horror is a mask Marvel should wear more often
The first episode of Marvel’s Agatha All Along starts from an unexpected place. Picking up her broom and flying into another freewheelin’ genre parody that made WandaVision an early delight, Agatha navigates an episode of Mindhunter as creator-director Jac Schaeffer wades into a genre Marvel has successfully dipped its toe in before: horror.
Marvel’s top creatives have long touted the studio’s ability to play in different story types. During Marvel’s post-Avengers height in 2018, Kevin Feige said he didn’t “believe in the comic book genre” or “the superhero genre” of movies. Each of Marvel’s movies were “different,” he said, tailoring their heroes to the frameworks that served them best. To Feige, Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a “political thriller,” and Civil War was a “psychological thriller.” It wasn’t just subcategories of thrillers. Ant-Man was a “heist movie;” Spider-Man: Homecoming operated like a high school soap opera à la John Hughes. However, after Endgame, the movies have settled into a new genre: “Marvel Movie.” Like many Marvel media installments of late, Agatha All Along quickly downshifts into a road comedy, where the hero and a less powerful or controllable sidekick offer quippy banter on a quest to find a blue, glowy orb. The problem is, in this gear, Agatha is so boring, it’s scary. Only when the show remembers it can play on horror tropes, injecting some Leprechaun 3-inspired body horror into the engine, does the show sputter to life. For all its Spirit Halloween trimmings, Agatha is trapped in a very Disney version of terror that cribs aesthetics from the The Haunted Mansion ride and Hocus Pocus 2.
Why doesn’t Marvel lean harder on its horror bona fides? In 2022, the company gave it its most earnest shot ever. Sam Raimi’s Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness led pearl-clutching fans to ask if the MPAA had been too lenient with its PG-13 rating. It was a rare reaction for the studio to receive, as it had spent the last few years delighting audiences with Easter eggs, cameos, and crossovers. Strangely enough, this time the fans were reacting to the filmmaking, not the nostalgia. Later that year, Werewolf By Night became one of the better-reviewed Marvel installments of the studio’s messy fourth phase.
Since the beginning, Marvel movies have couched their superheroes, spandex, universe-altering MacGuffins, and silly names in self-effacing humor. Giving the audience some distance to laugh at the MCU’s goofier elements broadened its appeal and gave it unexpected staying power. When Iron Man debuted in 2008, many believed the dark and gritty influence of The Dark Knight would plunge superhero filmmaking into a world of darkness. With Marvel’s domination complete 16 years later, its version of ironically detached sci-fi action-comedy has been replicated throughout entertainment, from Borderlands to Star Wars.
With Agatha, it does seem like Marvel is heading down the Witches’ Road to horror, a path paved in comics history. Before it was called Marvel Comics, publisher Martin Goodman launched Timely Comics, and in the early Wild West of comics publishing, he littered newsstands with knockoffs of better hero books. As the initial superhero boom subsided in the mid-'40s, Avon Publications released Eerie Comics #1, arguably the first horror comic, inspiring a wave of classic horror titles like American Comics Group’s Adventures Into The Unknown and, more famously, EC Comics’ landmark titles The Crypt Of Terror and The Vault Of Horror.
Goodman followed suit, publishing Amazing Mysteries in 1949. Marvel Tales and Adventures Into Terror soon followed. Even Captain America, whose popularity waned in the post-war years, got in on the act. With issue #74, Goodman rebranded Captain America Comics as Captain America’s Weird Tales. The first issue sees Red Skull enjoying eternal damnation in Hell, adding Cap’s name to the list of the damned, dragging him to the underworld, and fighting him on the River Styx to the Devil’s utter delight. The rebrand didn’t take, and by issue #76, Captain America Comics returned to fighting living Nazis as Timely settled into a period of mimicry, cribbing from E.C. wherever they could. That doesn’t mean they were bad. Stories like “Find Me,” which sees an artist painting a piece so infinite he falls into the paper and becomes trapped in his work, and “The Brain,” the story of a dead Nazi’s still-living brain convincing an American G.I. to develop bioweapons, evoke a menace that elevates the ludicrous narratives.
At the end of the horror trend, Goodman’s distributor collapsed and caused Timely, now called Atlas, to implode. One employee remained: Goodman’s cousin-in-law Stan Lieber, who published under nom de plume “Stan Lee.” Lee, responsible for eight books a month, hired Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Don Heck to fill out the company, and they began working on horror, mystery, and suspense books. There was an almost organic transition from horror to superhero comics as interest in the genre rekindled, and Goodman started to push for more capes. By the early '60s, first drafts of the most iconic characters in pop culture began to emerge. The November 1960 cover of Journey Into Mystery warns, “Here comes… the HULK,” who at the time was a Gossamer clone named Xemnu, the Living Hulk, who by 1972 would be worked into the Incredible Hulk mythos.
Even The Fantastic Four’s first appearance more closely resembles the pages of Adventures Into Terror. In his history of Marvel Comics, All The Marvels, Douglas Wolk writes, “Fantastic Four #1 can be read as a modern monster comic disguised as an old-fashioned cape comic. As its first issue begins, another one of Kirby’s rocky orange monsters, the Thing, is ineffectually fired upon by police and takes refuge in the sewer system [...] The second half of Fantastic Four #1 involves a bunch of other subterranean creatures and their shriveled embittered master, the Mole Man.” More of Marvel's future stable began appearing in horror books. While “Dr. Droom” first appeared in June 1961, by year’s end, the proper Dr. Doom, “the monster in the Iron Mask,” debuted in the pages of Tales Of Suspense #31. Iron Man followed several issues later.
Throughout its Silver Age, many Marvel heroes have origins pulled from monster movies. These stories often focus on experiments gone wrong or a bite from a cursed animal that turns an ordinary human into something supernatural. Spider-Man’s origins aren’t so different from the Wolf Man’s, and Hulk is a transparent descendant of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. Soon, the relaxing rules of Comics Code censorship allowed Marvel to launch The Tomb Of Dracula, allowing Marvel heroes like Spider-Man and Howard the Duck to square off against Transylvania’s favorite son.
Climbing out of the Tomb is another Marvel Trojan horse. 1998’s Blade film took a more science-fictional approach to the “suck puppies” he hunts. Far more interested in high-tech weaponry, martial arts, and Wesley Snipes looking badass than scares, Blade established the Marvel aesthetic for the new millennium, one that 2000’s X-Men all but codified. Still, the blood rave remains the film’s signature image, and it’s pure horror. Blade’s unforgettable bloodletting increased in Blade II, which blurs the lines between horror and sci-fi. Director Guillermo del Toro isn’t shy about pinching ideas from Alien and The Thing, crafting effects that ooze pus and sweat like a proper creature feature. Two years later, Sam Raimi introduced Spider-Man 2’s villain, Doctor Octopus, in an unforgettably terrifying surgery scene straight out of Evil Dead 2. It remains one of the best and most compelling sequences in superhero movie history.
In some ways, Marvel has embraced horror’s gorier side. The sadism of Deadpool & Wolverine’s opening credits is far more cynical and gratuitous than anything in the first Terrifier movie. Yet there’s still an aversion to doing something actually…scary. To speculate on the state of Blade, which has been in development since 2013 and was recently pulled from the 2025 schedule, part of the concern may be that Marvel has already let Sony introduce vampires to audiences. Unfortunately, instead of being scary or heroic, it’s simply Morbin’ time. However, that hasn’t stopped Sony from populating its series of Spider-Man villains with supernatural characters, the telekinetic Madame Web, the werewolf-coded Kraven, and another Jekyll grandchild, Venom.
Two years after The Multiverse Of Madness, Marvel has struck a friendlier tone with its horror titles, which is a shame because horror would actually give these movies some stakes. One problem with the current MCU is that whenever someone dies, a different version of them can simply be pulled from another universe. To wit, Marvel just made another billion dollars off that trick, but it doesn’t hide that Deadpool’s quip undermines the movie's stakes, deflating the violence instead of making it mean something. That’s not to say Deadpool needs a Folie À Deux makeover; Raimi’s Zombie Strange is a good example of horror done to excite and engage, not simply to punish. Marvel’s stable of filmmakers knows horror because it's where many of them started, including Raimi, Scott Derrickson, Nia DaCosta, and James Gunn. Like del Toro, Gunn (now heading up DC’s film universe) recalled his time in the low-budget genre mines to give his Island Of Doctor Moreau riff, Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol. 3, an underpinning of body horror. He populates Rocket Raccoon’s journey to self-acceptance with the living rough drafts of a mad scientist’s quest for perfection, giving the film an emotional spine with stakes and sci-fi scares. Gunn also gave cameos to Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman in two of three of the films as if to remind us where he came from. Yet, while The Guardians had no trouble integrating horror trimmings, the last Doctor Strange was weighed down by the Multiverse, not the Madness.
Horror is a costume that Marvel has long worn, often to its benefit. The company wouldn’t even exist without its commitment to the genre. As the company has grown into a movie type of its own, one that’s become a model for other aspiring tentpoles, it has overplayed its hand. These movies aren’t funny anymore, nor especially exciting. If Kevin Feige needs a direction to take Blade that won’t remind viewers of Morbius or Wesley Snipes, consider adding a few more scares. It’ll cut deeper.