When Franc Wertham stirred the panic that led to the
censorious Comics Code with his book Seduction
of the Innocent, he did so with outrageous claims about a natural link
between juvenile delinquency and reading horror comics and homophobic theories
about Wonder Woman and Batman. Yet parents weren’t quite crazy to be a little
concerned about the graphic violence and Shock-SuspenStories that appeared on
the pages of many horror titles during the pre-code era. And EC, the poster boy
for seducing the innocent, wasn’t the only book that traded in graphic dismemberments,
dripping corpses, rotting faces, and necrophilia. Such things could also be
witnessed in Journey into Fear, Baffling Mysteries, and the other vintage
titles Craig Yoe has been collecting in his Haunted
Horror anthologies since 2012.
The latest hardback collection of Haunted Horror issues is a different story. The tameness of most of
the stories within is a veritable theme. Neither a drop of blood nor a chunk of
flesh flops to the floor in Haunted
Horror: Cry from the Coffin. The tale of a ghost learning the haunting
ropes called “How to Be a Gracious Ghost” (originally printed in Strange) is fit for an issue of Caspar the Friendly Ghost. There is also
a definite focus on the most basic horror tropes: stories starring ghosts,
vampires, witches, werewolves, and devils, several of which are set on
Halloween, abound.
Fortunately, there are enough twists on the usual creepy
tropes to keep things interesting. There’s a vampire who shares more DNA with
cats than bats (“The Vampire Cat” from Forbidden
Worlds) and another vampire tale with a genuinely surprising twist (“Out of
the Black Night” from Web of Mystery).
The twist ending of “The Witch of Death” (Web
of Evil), however, is straight out of Scooby
Doo. Only toward the end of Haunted
Horror: Cry from the Coffin does the content become dicier, starting with
the racist “Terror in Chinatown” (Web of
Evil- why not just weed out this kind of shit?) and then getting a bit more gruesome with stories such as “The Murder
Pool” (Strange Fantasy) and “Step
into My Grave” (Baffling Mysteries).
Though the artwork in these second-rate titles is often
pretty shoddy, it is always charming and sometimes creepy enough to give some
younger reader a nightmare or two. Consequently, the first 120 or so pages of Haunted Horror: Cry from the Coffin would
function very nicely as a first step in seducing some innocent into the
wonderful world of horror comics.
