BLACKEST NIGHT: Geoff Johns on the horror angle

In an interview by Laura Hudson (via Sean), Geoff Johns says some things that make me wonder if Blackest Night really holds the kind of horror promise I'd been hoping for:

ComicsAlliance: There seems to be a strong horror element in "Blackest Night." Do you have any particular influences from the realm of horror either in movies or TV?

Geoff Johns: No, not really. It's just suspense. I mean, I like Hitchcock. I studied Hitchcock. But I don't really get into gore. I like the seventies horror films like "Changeling" or "Audrey Rose" or "The Omen," "Rosemary's Baby." All the kind of classic seventies short films, I really got into those and the suspense of those. There's a scene in "Blackest Night" that's I think the scariest scene in the book, and it's just all about suspense and quiet.

CA: Do you think of them as zombies?

GJ: No, they're not zombies. They're Black Lanterns. They have intelligence; they have personality. There's much more to them, as you'll find out in the series. It's taking the undead, like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" took vampires, and making something totally different with them. I didn't want to do something like, oh it's Ralph Dibny as a zombie going RAAAWR because it's not scary. It's not as scary as him coming in [as a Black Lantern] and talking to Barry Allen in issue #3, which is really creepy because of the way he relates to Barry Allen -- they're old, old friends. But that's the horror of it. Same with Firestorm. The lighter the characters were, the scarier they are as Black Lanterns.

I guess I got it all about as wrong as possible when I said,

Geoff Johns explicitly aims to make it a "horror story about superheroes," and by every indication, he's taking for his model the relatively recent cycle of slick, A-list, big-budget remakes and pastiches of the low-budget zombie flicks from the grindhouse era.

Instead, he all-but-disavows the horror label in favor of suspense. For influences relevant to this story, he name-checks Hitchcock and a few older (wouldn't be an issue for me normally, of course, but it doesn't sound like he's seen them recently, either), really mainstream horror movies--and by "mainstream," I don't mean horror mainstream but mainstream mainstream. Then he says he doesn't like gore. Does that ring true to those of you who've read him for a while?--because it sounds quite at odds with the way Sean characterized his prior work:

[F]or several years in the early days of the comics blogosphere, Geoff Johns was THE poster child for superhero decadence. He's been dismembering superheroes and supervillains for so long it's like his trademark.

What stands out here most to me is the contrast between Johns's perfunctory tone in answering the horror questions, and the way he comes alive when the questions turn to the whole emotional color spectrum thing. It's a long and substantive interview, and horror seems to be the topic that engages or excites him least in the course of it.

Well, okay. It's just that the horror angle is what enticed me to check out Blackest Night in the first place, and seeing superhero horror done well is the only thing I'd expect to hold me as a reader through the long haul. I'd be really shocked if the continuity porn aspect hooked me somehow (as opposed to, say, driving me away), or if all this emotional spectrum stuff actually turned out interesting to me (my eyes were glazing over at those points in the interview where Johns sounded most animated).

I was pretty excited about horror-blogging this crossover, but it remains to be seen if there's any real point to that exercise (some indications are promising, others not so much). This next week will be an interesting one, since we'll be getting Blackest Night #2, Blackest Night: Batman #1, and Green Lantern Corps #39.