Celebrate Halloween with the Dark Knight

By Nick Tankersley Comments 0
Published: October 30, 2009

There are few popular culture personalities more suited to Halloween than the Dark Knight. Batman is the embodiment of Halloween, a dark hero, costume-clad, always caught in a showdown with a rogues’ gallery of bad guys that inspire the true spirit of the season.

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Oct 29Monsters, vampires, and even Batman provide Halloween comic-book fun.

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As you slowly morph from the day-to-day grind of normal life into the shadowed hell-tastic tone of black and orange, look no further than Batman for inspiration. Here are some Caped Crusader books, movies and video games that are just right for this holiday:

→ "Batman” and "Batman Returns” (films, 1989 and 1992). Although Christopher Nolan launched Batman back into the mainstream with "Batman Begins” and "The Dark Knight,” it was Tim Burton’s duo of films that brought the bat in black to the big screen. (I am ignoring anything with Adam West.) Burton’s offerings are far more fantastical than Nolan’s, owing more to the 1980s comic rejuvenation of Batman than the recent blockbusters. Burton’s Batman films are costume masterpieces that revel in a usual Burton world, where everything is slightly bent by a warped funhouse mirror.

→"The Long Halloween” (comic book, 1996-97). The Batman mythos has had many twists and turns, from its early days in Detective Comics to a brief stint in mid-’60s camp to an eventual rebirth and refocus in the 1980s. Since that decade — when some of comics’ best built a more contemporary and, ultimately, darker version of the hero — Batman has enjoyed a creative renaissance in the publishing world. This is no more evident than in Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s 13-issue serial "Batman: The Long Halloween.” This mini-epic features Batman battling an unknown killer with the help of the yet-to-be Two-Face, Harvey Dent. "The Long Halloween” is a beautifully drawn and wonderfully scripted look at the Two-Face origin and the eerie world of Gotham during the haunted month of October.

→"Batman: Arkham Asylum” (video game, 2009). Released this year for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, "Batman: Arkham Asylum” may be the greatest superhero video game ever. It is a truthful addition to the Batman canon and an immersive dive into one of Gotham’s most notorious locales, Arkham Asylum. Promising at least a dozen hours of entertainment, Arkham Asylum is full of enough scares and absolutely terrifying moments to make this a midnight game player’s dream.

→"Batman: The Animated Series” (TV/DVD, 1992-97). If there is one perfect piece of Dark Knight culture that has been created in the past 20 years, it’s the phenomenal "Batman: The Animated Series.” This award-winning animated series is a richly rewarding watch, featuring all Batman bad guys both known and relatively unknown, and an intelligent attention to the philosophical depth that is inherent in the Batman story. What else can one say about a series that convincingly crafts an origin for Mr. Freeze, saving him from the campy horror of Joel Schumacher’s atrocious "Batman and Robin”?

Of course, this isn’t all Batman has to offer, but this group provides an atmospheric Halloween sampling.