Monday, July 16, 2007

Ghouls Rush In

With it’s strikingly similar plotline to Henry Kuttner’s terrifying 1936 Weird Tales story The Graveyard Rats, our next entry crawls out from the April 1952 issue of Adventures Into Terror #9, courtesy of the ever awesome Dick Ayers (in his Atlas debut even!) The story would obviously work just fine on its own even without the very last panel, but leave it to Dick to go the extra mile for a shiver. And why no credit to Kuttner?





9 comments:

Anonymous said...

love this one! seems like I saw it as a movie too. the last panel is more funny than scary

Mr. Karswell said...

The movie you're talking about is Trilogy of Terror 2, a made for TV movie from '96 directed by Dan Curtis... Graveyard Rats is the first of the three segments. It's not too terrible but would have been much scarier if the rat didn't look like such a fluffy muppet.

I found another pre-code comic book adaptation of this story that I'll post next for comparison.

Anonymous said...

yes that was the movie, pretty dumb though and not as good as the first trilogy of terror with karin black

Mr. Karswell said...

Indeed, the first one's a true horror classic!

Anonymous said...

Do all graverobbers dress like Sam Spade?

Mr. Karswell said...

When dressing in this manner the simple acting of pulling up your collar and tilting your hat down renders you completely invisible to all coppers.

Anonymous said...

ha! that was awesome.

Brian Barnes said...

I love the ending. It's utterly unnecessary and makes no sense, but it makes for a good visual and if your story is poor (it's not here,) then fix it with eye-catching art or images.

Pre-code really had a habit of interchanging ghoul/zombie/ghost, didn't they?

Jordan179 said...

"And that's where rat-things come from, Brownie my love."

"Tell me another story, Mommy Keziah ..."