10 Scariest Ever Batman Comics Stories

1. Arkham Asylum: Serious House On Serious Earth

Batman dracula
DC Comics

The ultimate in helpless Batman stories, and one in which the Dark Knight is reduced to an utter blubbering wimp, spending most of his time crying and running away. Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum is arguably the scariest Batman story ever told - a bleak, surrealist nightmare in which Batman is depicted as little more than a regular guy, almost as helpless as the other hostages of Arkham.

Admittedly, this modern classic isn't much of a Batman story (by anybody's characterisation, the Bat is almost unrecognisable), but it is an excellent horror tale, and finds the Joker and his fellow madmen on fine form.

Flies are munched, men impaled, a man in a wheelchair is pushed down the stairs and there's a little girl's lopped off head in the doll's house. Dave McKean's artwork puts the 'serious' into Serious House on Serious Earth, making Arkham Asylum a genuinely terrifying read.

A far cry from the judo superheroics of the videogames, then.

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Contributor

A film critic and professional writer of over ten years, Joel Harley has a deep and abiding love of all things horror, Batman and Nicolas Cage. He can be found writing online and in print, all over the Internet and in especially good bookstores.