Fearsome Five: Five Scariest Batman Villains

Batman, the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight, is celebrating his 80^th anniversary this week. Sure, John Constantine battles demons regularly and Swamp Thing is as his name implies, a thing that lives out in the swamp, but Batman comics have always seemed horror adjacent, and not simply because he chooses to dress like what Dracula turns into when he wants to fly. Sure, Batman is obsessive about avenging the death of his parents to the detriment of any lasting relationships with people who aren’t part of his crusade, but look at Batman’s villains. To name all of Batman’s villains that could be in a horror movie would be to list most of his rogues’ gallery, but here are his five scariest.

5) Scarecrow—Dr. Jonathan Crane has devoted his life to the study of fear, what it is and also how to cause it. He usually employs fear toxins which forces people to hallucinate their own worst nightmares. The idea of losing control is scary, particularly for someone like Batman who likes to be in control, but how do you regain control when the reality around you is suspect? Everything from the comics to the Batman: The Animated Series (TAS) has played with these hallucinations and what they do to Batman each time he is unlucky enough to get a dose of Scarecrow’s toxin.

Also, keep in mind that Scarecrow, who literally studies fear, is number 5.

4) Professor Pyg—Fans of body horror may find something intriguing or disturbing in Professor Pyg’s modus operandi. No, he doesn’t seek to free his porcine brethren before they are slaughtered, nor is he a huge fan of mud. Professor Pyg is a surgeon and what he remakes are innocent people. He remakes them through surgery and torture into Dollotrons, mindless automatons who Pyg believes are perfect. While he does snort and does wear a pig mask, Pyg’s exploits are terrifying because he sees imperfection everywhere and will not stop until he remakes the world into his own idea of perfection. Fans of the Arkham series of video games might remember the Pyg mission where Batman must track down people who are kidnapped and surgically altered by Pyg. A pretty recent character, having been created by Grant Morrison in the 2000’s, animated television never delved too much into the surgery aspect of Pyg’s character, possibly not knowing how to deal with what exactly happens to his Dollotrons once Pyg is captured.

3) Clayface—There are many men who have taken the moniker (and there was even a female version who called herself Lady Clay), but many focus on two aspects/powers of the characters: the ability to shapeshift and the ability to melt flesh with physical contact. Another aspect that seems constant is the Phantom of the Opera trope used to give these characters tragic backstories as monsters who must live apart from humanity. Alan Moore’s story of Clayface Preston Payne, who could dissolve flesh, plays into this when this Clayface discovers the love of his life, a mannequin immune to his touch, but creates a character that is dangerously unstable and unquestioningly sympathetic as he tries to figure out his relationship with Helena as Batman tries to recapture him.

The animated series gave us Matt Hagen gave us a shapeshifting Clayface whose backstory mimics the infamous Phantom, an actor who has become disfigured is given a chance to resurrect his career with a chemical that lets him change his face, but an overdose of the chemical, thanks to some criminals shaking him down, mutates him into his current Clayface form.

Some might say that he could simply pick a shape, that he doesn’t have to be a monster, but Clayface, in his introductory TAS episode “Feat of Clay,” explains tragically why that can’t work. Hagen explains that his shapeshifting is “like tensing a muscle,” meaning he has to concentrate to maintain a form that isn’t his clay one. Matt Hagen can walk among people, but it’s only for a short while. No matter who or what he becomes, he must still live with the knowledge constantly of what image will be waiting for him in the mirror.

2) The Joker—Arguably Batman’s most famous villain, comics like Death of the Family and The Killing Joke have played up the dichotomy that Batman and the Joker have shared. Batman, a man who studies friends and foes alike, creating multiple dossiers on them, has very little information on the Joker. Even the Joker himself, according to The Killing Joke, says that he has trouble remembering his own past. The uncertainty factor is there, meaning the Dark Knight cannot always see his nemesis’s motivations, sometimes only arriving after Joker’s horrific acts, and the Joker has had more than a few. From paralyzing Batgirl to beating Robin to death with a crowbar to cutting off his own face, the Joker never runs out of ways to disturb Batman and the audience. In fact, the only really clear motivation for Joker’s crimes seems to be to get the Batman’s attention. He sees himself as Batman’s greatest rival and that ultimately gives the Joker purpose, and he has no qualms about how he gets Batman’s attention. Joker has ended up the ultimate test of Batman’s No Killing rule because of this. Imagine Batman knowing that the Joker’s horrific acts are committed basically to get the Dark Knight’s attention and continue their eternal struggle.

1) The Batman Who Laughs—From the pages of Dark Knights Metal comes what would happen if Batman actually gave in and murdered the Joker. This alternate Batman is from a dark multiverse where Batman finally kills the Joker, releasing a chemical that infects Batman. Similar to Joker’s Joker Venom, this chemical not only gives Batman the same skin condition, but also renders him brutally insane, a perfect amalgam of hero and villain, who then goes on to kill every one of his universe’s heroes. The Batman Who Laughs is scary because he keeps a crew of feral Jokerized Robins chained at his side. He even has a history of killing superheroes throughout multiverses, but there’s also Batman’s analytical mind irrevocably twisted to evil that makes the Batman Who Laughs truly terrifying. Batman is all about control, everything from his metahuman battle strategies to his No Killing Rule reflects this. The Batman Who Laughs is basically Batman, with his knowledge and skills on how to take down virtually anyone of any power set, with no control, no moral backstop. He is basically a combination of the two most dangerous aspects of Batman and the Joker and a literal nightmare for our world’s Bruce Wayne.

Screen to Scream: The Lure and The Merry Spinster's "The Daughter's Cells"

People who have looked into fairy tales beyond Disney movies know that there is much more to them than princesses being awakened by true love’s kiss, or simply the notion of true love as some magical McGuffin or panacea capable of ridding prince and princess alike of everything from unsightly blemishes to Stockholm syndrome. Digging deeper finds worlds where the magic in fairy tales comes with a very high price tag and love can simply be complicated, or even lethal. One example of this is Hans Christen Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”, later made by Disney into a feature film featuring a plucky animated mermaid and singing sea life, but the original tale is much darker. The Lure, a Polish retelling of the version set in the 80’s, and Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s book The Merry Spinster, particularly the tale “The Daughter’s Cells” looks at this particular story and gives insight into the disturbing dynamics in these tales.

The Lure starts off in a nightclub where the owner makes a fascinating discovery, two young girls who grow fish tails when they become wet. If you’re thinking Splash, the movie with Daryl Hannah and a younger, too-talented-to-be-here Tom Hanks, then you’d be forgiven, but The Lure is no comedy. It’s a surreal float through tides of 80’s nostalgia, synthwave heartbreak, and musical theater (yes, this movie actually is a musical where the musical numbers are sung in Polish). The sisters become not sideshow attractions but singers, using the same voices that were bait for unlucky sailors to bring in customers and as their fame grows, so do their tastes for the surface world. Rather than become interested in clocks and silverware, the two mermaids Silver and Gold take up smoking, doing drugs, and Silver even falls in love with a human singer. This movie dips into so many genres as to become avant garde or even a genre all its own. Relying heavily on magical realism and of the two mermaids becoming acclimated to their life on land as entertainers, this movie shows the sacrifice that one of the mermaids makes for true love tragic as well as surreal and ends with a horrific, bloody bang.

Fans of Mallory Ortberg’s blog Children’s Stories Made Horrific will know the kinds of stories that are in The Merry Spinster. “The Daughter’s Cells,” the first entry of the collection, takes apart “The Little Mermaid” by turning it into something voyeuristic and alien. The mermaid in this tale isn’t merely some lovestruck teenage girl who happens to have a fish tail, but an actual creature of the deep who wants a prince she has noticed. She is not so much infatuated with the prince in this story as she is fascinated by the many weird customs of those that live above the water. When she looks upon the prince, she studies him more like a lab experiment or something merely novel, like a new promotional item at your go-to restaurant. When the mermaid finally goes through with her devil’s bargain and walks on the land, she still has trouble understanding why so many people want to follow her around and put her in dresses. Ortberg’s greatest accomplishment through this story and the others throughout this collection, which is something The Lure does and what Disney will probably never do, is peel back the curtain and show the subtly horrific hierarchy and poisonous moral ideas inherent in these stories. Silver gives up her entire identity to be with the one she loves, who sadly doesn’t love her back (very much from the original Andersen-penned tale), but Ortberg’s mermaid doesn’t let emotions overwhelm her. In fact, she eventually forgoes using feminine guile to bewitch the prince and opts for methods that would seem brutal in the prince’s world of opulence and civility, yet she is the story’s obvious hero.  Ortberg’s Merry Spinster takes inspiration from tales ranging from “Beauty and the Beast” to the Bible to create stories that play with our expectations created by a steady diet of these tales. These and other stories that take the fairy tale into horror territory show the true price of happily ever after.

New Arrival: Rust Maidens by Gwendolyn Kiste

There are a lot of stories involving characters looking back, particularly when they were younger, when they had years of living ahead of them as well as miles of potential. Some would say there is an inherent sweetness involved in looking back at who you were when you had fewer responsibilities and way more opportunities to daydream. However, horror is all about peeling back the sunlit façade and revealing its festering, squirming underside. Sometimes, on closer inspection, those memories of childhood, of coming of age become tainted, particularly when a traumatic event or entity (a shapeshifting clown monster, for example), is introduced. Offering two narratives, looking back on the past while setting the tale in the present offers the protagonist perspective, even explaining many of the protagonist’s actions in the present. Gwendolyn Kiste does the same thing with the protagonist in her novel The Rust Maidens, a girl named Phoebe Shaw, but Kiste does more than simply keep the focus on one protagonist, the girl she was and the woman she’s become. Kiste also shows a city’s, perhaps even a world’s, transformation.

The story takes place in two eras, the early 1980’s where Phoebe has just graduated high school with her best friend Jacqueline and an older Phoebe who comes home to a neighborhood that is collapsing before her eyes. As she looks at the ruins of what her Cleveland neighborhood Denton Street has become, she remembers how things changed for her and how things changed for Jacqueline and four other girls the local news called the Rust Maidens. These girls grow wounds on their bodies that don’t bleed but leak water, their bones beneath look metallic, and their nails have the look of broken glass, as though each girl is literally becoming the decay around them. Kiste definitely gets to play up the body horror in these transformations, but she really gets emotional mileage out of people’s reactions to the Rust Maidens, treating them like either sideshow attractions or as an overall blight on their community. Phoebe begins her life as a high school graduate thinking about leaving, and now she must do some real growing up to try and help her best friend and what she’s become.

Phoebe is a sympathetic character because of her strong moral center despite her often rash decisions, and she particularly contrasts herself with her parents, who seem to be acting for what they perceive as the good of the community. Having the older Phoebe look back on her younger days shows how that youthful idealism she felt has been irrevocably tarnished by simply existing after this experience. Even after all that, however, there is still a core of Phoebe that wants to do right by the Rust Maidens and who must pay penance. The movement back and forth between the two narratives flows very well and readers will want to follow along to see how both narratives, past and present, end.

Another main character that deserves mention is Denton Street itself, both the past and the present incarnation. Closely tied communities where decisions are made through de facto committees have given way to isolation and many of the landmarks Phoebe remembers are derelict, decayed, and waiting for the wrecking ball, which makes sense that the Rust Maidens began here. Reflecting society today, where manufacturing jobs dwindle and once-thriving towns are left to collapse, the city itself is its own character than can only disappoint the men and women that give their lives and livelihoods to factory work only for these factories to abandon them. It is in this city, which has become a beautiful ruin, that Phoebe tries to discover what she lost.  

New Arrival: Little Black Spots by John F.D. Taff

Many have said that the art of the short story is dead, but rumors of its death are greatly exaggerated (Or to use a more contemporary phrase, fake news). Short stories are the perfectly digestible tale for people on the go. Don’t have the hours and days to devote to a 600-page epic? There are plenty of short stories out there you can read on your lunch hour. This is especially true in horror. I was introduced to horror through short story collections like Stephen King’s Night Shift and Jeff Gelb’s Hot Blood series. While the horror short story has lay dormant beneath the public’s consciousness yet sprouting up in anthologies and magazines showcasing the cream of the carnage-laden crop, the short story is not only very much alive, but writers like John F. D. Taff are taking it in new, exciting directions while keeping it very much grounded in a reality very much like ours. If you’re not familiar with Taff, read some of the stories in his collection Little Black Spots. Then, be sad that you haven’t heard of him before reading this article.

Little Black Spots shows that Taff has explored different kinds of horror and is not afraid to incorporate what has come before him in his own unique visions of terror. If you’re a fan of Clive Barker’s body horror or Hot Blood’s erotic horror, you might like his tale “The Bunny Suit.” While shopping for Halloween costumes, a couple finds a bunny suit for the wife to wear. If you’ve ever read a story where there’s something bought from a mysterious shop (basically the premise of the Friday the 13^th television series) then you know that this item is more than just a discount costume and the wife becomes something else when she puts it on. But the real horror comes from the husband’s narration of the tale, as he reacts to his wife’s changes and how he is the one who is forced to remove his own disguise.

“A Winter’s Tale” has a group of children whose home life might remind people of Harry Potter, except with more parental alcoholism and neglect. However, it isn’t a giant or a wizarding school that comes for these children. A finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Short Story, this tale works on a myriad of different levels, from the beautiful depictions of the winter landscape to the simple horror of the children’s home life, including the pressures weighing on protagonist and older brother David, the only caregiver for his family. His mother is a modern day below-the-poverty-line version of Lady Tremaine (Cinderella’s stepmother) and his father has been gone for a long time, so it is David who must deal with the horrors in his life, both supernatural and tragically mundane. The reader is shown in heartbreaking detail what kind of horrible person the mother is, but the father might in fact be worse.

“Purple Soda Hand” is a personal favorite of mine. The title alone was enough to pique my curiosity, but there’s also a solid, colorful addiction horror story that begins with a child discovering a bottle of soda with a surprise inside. It’s less a Cracker Jack or bottom-of-the-cereal box surprise and more the need-to-call-the-health-department-immediately surprise. But this surprise doesn’t make the soda taste any different. In fact, young Mike would do anything to drink that soda, including and especially the heretofore unthinkable.

Throw in some erotic horror, sad vampires, severed hands, and possessed parking garages and you have a collection that shows a willingness to experiment with subgenres and demonstrates the ability to tantalize as well as terrify. Fair warning: the publishers who made this book call Taff Modern Horror’s King of Pain, hence the collection’s title taken from a lesser-known song by ’80 band The Police (Is Sting somehow collecting royalties?).  Taff doesn’t write like he’s in pain, but he sure makes his characters experience pain, which you will also experience as you empathize with these well-drawn and downtrodden protagonists. Bring an ibuprofen and a nightlight as you partake of these little black stories.

Have You Read This? Joe Hill's Strange Weather

The book in this month’s Have You Read This, Strange Weather, seems like a no-brainer in a season where I was, honest to God, wearing a t-shirt last week and worrying about windchills getting to single digits for this one. It most certainly fits this time of year, but I had actually planned on writing about Joe Hill’s novella collection for a while now. I had read a few of Joe Hill’s works, from his seminal graphic novel collection Locke & Key to his short story collection 20^th Century Ghosts. Sure, Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King, as synonymous with horror as Hulk Hogan is with pro wrestling, but reading him for so long has meant that I have got to see him grow quickly as a writer and move ever so slowly out of his father’s shadow.

One could argue that the stories in this collection are held together by the subject of weather. Storms, in particular, are incidental plot devices in the first two tales, while the latter ones uses clouds and rain more extensively. The stories here really run the gamut between fantastical nostalgia to apocalyptic horror to real world suspense. The four stories chosen for this collection show how Hill has grown as a writer in different areas.

The first in the collection, “Snapshot,” is the most reminiscent of Hill’s father, using a mystical object to explore the real world terror of loss. Like any of King’s child protagonist, Michael has trouble fitting in, but this story is also about finding connections in the little moments we have with others and the horrifying consequences of having those moments with someone taken away. This story should resonate with anyone who has ever lost a loved one, particularly if that someone was stolen by degrees.

“Loaded” is a tale of real world terror that deals with the current epidemic of gun violence. There is no need for magic or demons from the Macroverse for horror when you have a man with a lot of anger and access to automatic weapons. “Loaded” not only pulls its horror from the headlines of school and office shootings, this piece also jabs at the media for being all too willing to put the “good guy with a gun” on a pedestal after he foils a shooting. As more of his story unravels, so does his sanity until he becomes a very bad guy with a gun.

“Aloft” is the piece that feels the most like Hill’s unique voice, not as much horrifying as it is fantastic, particularly when first-time skydiver Aubrey becomes stranded on a cloud that serves as both concierge and jailer, giving him whatever it can form from its vaporous substance but not inclined to return him to Earth. Though it’s more whimsical than the other selections and a welcome break, what really helps this story stand out from just an adventure piece as he searches for rescue is the double narrative that takes place before Aubrey’s fateful jump and how the world below him influences his thoughts and actions as he is stranded hundreds of miles above it.

“Rain” is a very standard apocalypse scenario but with a very interesting premise: what if the rain that fell suddenly became lethal, no longer falling drops of water but crystalline shards of death. The protagonist Honeysuckle is interesting and she encounters several oddball characters who help her but who also have no qualms about being violent now that society and civility is on the decline. This story also borrows from our world by referencing our current political leadership and Hill does paint a bleak picture of a world where the skies can rain death at any moment, but the end is also left with a surprisingly hopeful message, showing how people can be duplicitous and all too willing to hurt each other but are ultimately at their best when they have each other’s back.

More and more, authors are trying their hands at shorter works, churning out collections full of a multitude of stories, from novellas to short stories. Hill has demonstrated time and again that he has no shortage of imagination and can no doubt feed a reading public eager for stories that can be read during a lunch break or a wait in the doctor’s office. Even if the weather outside started raining frogs, I could relax knowing that, as the frogs pelt my window, that writers like Joe Hill will write plenty of fully-realized, well-written stories to keep me occupied, whether that storm lasts for an hour or a season.