Todd McFarlane wants everyone to know the Spawn movie is seriously scary

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

There are so many superhero movies out there that in order for any of them to stand out they have to find a way to embrace other styles and pull from other genres. For the new SPAWN movie from Todd McFarlane you could easily determine he’s going for a blend of horror and superhero flick, but in a new interview, he made it known that he’s very much favoring the former and that he wants this movie to frighten people on a deep, serious level.

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The director and creator of the character was speaking to IGN about the new movie and said he wants this to be a dark, scary movie, to the point where he wishes he could take the whole superhero element away.

"Here's what I'm trying to get Hollywood to understand because they still don't quite get it is I want to do a dead serious, scary movie that happens to be a superhero, right? And so, they keep tripping into this superhero part and I wish I could almost take that piece out of it.”

While Spawn is a popular comics character, and audiences may be expecting a comic book movie of a somewhat traditional sort, McFarlane compares his movie to other horror and sci-fi movies like JAWS, ALIENS, THE THING and even this year’s THE NUN. These are all movies where the creepy creature lingers in the background, which is the style he wants to embrace for SPAWN.

"We just saw one a couple weeks ago called [The] Nun. It's called Nun She's not onscreen the most and she really doesn't talk a whole heck of a lot, right? I mean, these kinds of movies have been done forever. I'm just saying that in a movie like Jaws, it's called Jaws but the shark isn't onscreen talking and whenever the Hollywood studios say, 'How can you not have the lead character not talk?,' you and I can stand here and come up with a hundred movies that have done this in the last twenty years. And you don't even have to go back the last twenty years because there's one two weeks ago called The Nun and The Nun did it, right?"

"So get your Nun hat on. Get your Aliens hat on, get your John Carpenter's The Thing, get your Jaws hat on. The Grudge, The Ring, get that hat on [and] my script makes sense. You put Captain America, Hulk on? It reads funny."

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He continued, saying that he’s had a hard time conveying to people that the movie is meant to be hella scary and not simply a superhero movie with a few scares. THE WALKING DEAD’s Greg Nicotero is doing the design for the character, and he believes bringing in the designs to the studio heads will get his point across quite nicely.

"But I just saw earlier today, Greg Nicotero showed me some physical pieces of the costume and I'm going, 'That's it.' We've been designing it anyways but I finally got to see it physically and I go, 'That's it.' So next time I go into the studios, I'm bringing all that stuff with me because, obviously, I didn't do a good enough job in the script to convey that. They're reading words in my script that are way different than what i see in my head and I just want to scare people. I just want to scare people on a serious level."

The man seems passionate about freaking us all out, and clearly, we should all be prepared. I have no idea how scary a movie like this can be, but my body is ready for a seriously scary comic book movie. This character is cloaked in black and has a burned-up face, so, yeah, I think it can live up to those expectations.