The Four Horror Comics Marvel Needs To Adapt

Admittedly, the world’s most famous vampire isn’t the first name most people think of when they think of famous Marvel characters. But Tomb of Dracula was a staple Marvel comic throughout the ‘70s, a series co-created by industry legend Marv Wolfman. The stories were surprisingly engaging (courtesy of great writers like Archie Goodwin and Gerry Conway), and the crossover potential is one of the reasons we think this title could make for a perfect MCU horror movie.

In the original comic, Drac fought the Werewolf (who already premiered in the MCU horror TV special Werewolf By Night) and Blade (whose own solo Marvel movie seems doomed to never happen). Plus, as a general Marvel supervillain, this legendary vampire fought Spider-Man, the X-Men, and so many more. Honestly, we’d be wildly happy if Kevin Feige threw us a fastball special and had Marvel’s mighty mutants eventually squaring off against Dracula, which could be the MCU’s homage to the original cinematic universe of Universal’s monsters.

Fortunately, not all of the comics that would make perfect MCU horror films are decades old. For example, the 2018 Donny Cate and Nick Spencer’s Damnation comic would make for an excellent movie because of its high-stakes premise: namely, that Mephisto, the Marvel equivalent of the Devil, has plunged Las Vegas into Hell (and you thought the temperatures were bad before!). This forces Doctor Strange to assemble a very eclectic group of heroes in order to fight for the very soul of Sin City.

If the MCU powers that be are willing to fully embrace horror, Damnation has a bit of everything, including a Big Bad villain arguably scarier than we have ever seen before. Plus, the original comic had cameos galore, including Blade and Elsa Moonstone (the latter appeared in Werewolf By Night). Plus, several Avengers are turned into Ghost Rider-like characters, which could be a budget-friendly way for Marvel to include characters like Hawkeye and Captain Marvel whose actors would potentially only have to provide voices for transformed characters brought to life chiefly through CGI animation.

Before anyone says it (stop typing that comment, mister!), the odds of the MCU giving us another standalone Hulk film are even lower than Disney going all-in on horror. But if the stars could perfectly align, we’d love to see a big-screen adaptation of Al Ewing’s The Immortal Hulk. This amazing series has a wild central conceit: namely, that every time the Hulk dies, he returns to life at night, angrier than ever before.

This premise leads to some amazingly gross artwork from Joe Bennett that could give the MCU its first heavy dose of body horror. Plus, the ambitious story balances Hulk’s larger-than-life fights with psychological introspection as he talks with different personalities and discovers all the ways that he (Marvel’s strongest fighter) is heartbreakingly broken. It’s the kind of comic you show someone who thinks Hulk stores are just mindless battles, and we’d love to see it translated into a blockbuster film.

The X-Men will be making their ensemble MCU premiere sooner rather than later, and as longtime comic readers know, there are more mutant horror stories than you can shake an adamantium claw at. They’ve clashed with Dracula before, and in a 2010 comic event, they fought Drac’s son in some creative ways, including Nightcrawler using his priestly powers to turn Iceman’s icy constructs into solidified holy water. There’s also the classic Inferno event in which Jean Grey’s clone is turned into a Goblyn Queen who presides over a demonic invasion of Earth.

More than anything else, though, we’d like to see a movie where the X-Men have an all-out battle with the Brood, their longtime alien nemeses. Sure, these guys were transparent rip-offs of the xenomorph from Alien, but considering that Disney acquired Fox, there should be no problem with greenlighting an “X-Men vs. Aliens” style movie. For Marvel fans, the blunt truth is that a single frame of that movie would be more captivating than snoozeworthy setups for boring villains like Kang or Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom.