It may be hard to believe today, but the Incredible Hulk was initially conceived by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby as a horror comic. The Jekyll and Hyde influence is plain for all to see, but gradually, over time, the Hulk lost touch with his horror roots, being rebranded more as an action character than as the menacing figure he started out as.
Those who've been keeping up with Marvel's comics will know that perception of the Jade Giant is beginning to change once again. Al Ewing and Joe Bennett's Immortal Hulk series has brought the character back to his horror roots, pitting Bruce Banner and his alter-ego against a manner of terrifying creatures since debuting in 2017, with some looking as though they could've been ripped straight from John Carpenter's The Thing.
It's not just Ewing and Bennett who love Hulk best when he's in the horror genre though. No, replying to Shannon & Swift's thread, Dick Grunert shared a frankly incredible pitch for an animated Hulk project, which would've seen Banner's other half fight what was effectively the same creature from Carpenter's 1982 classic.
It sounds almost like it could've been a storyline from Immortal Hulk, but it never happened. Disappointed doesn't even cut it.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
