"At Hill House Comics we aim to shock the senses and soak the page in red, with new, hooky horror from seasoned old hands and young masters of the field, all set free to share their most disturbing nightmares... for your pleasure! The books are backed by DC's second-to-none comic book craftsmanship, and we're working with the very best editors on parole from Arkham Asylum to craft unputdownable tales of menace and madness. I can't wait to share some fresh scares with comic book readers everywhere. It's going to be fun."
— Joe Hill
Hill House Comics is a DC Comics imprint and "pop-up line" of Horror Comic Books curated by Joe Hill. The first two books came out in November of 2019, with three more coming out in December 2019 and January 2020.
Owing to their subject matter, Hill House Comics are technically also part of DC Black Label, as they are more adult-oriented, but they are not a part of the DC universe.
Titles:
- Basketful of Heads (2019-2020) — Written by Joe Hill with art by Leomacs. This is the story of June Branch, whose boyfriend was kidnapped by a group of deranged criminals. All she has to save herself and her boyfriend is an 8th-century Viking axe that can cut through a man's head... and leave it still alive.
- The Dollhouse Family (2019-2020) — From the team of Mike Carey and Peter Gross (Lucifer, The Unwritten). On Alice's sixth birthday, her great-aunt sends her an antique dollhouse for her to play with. Soon, however, she finds that she can shrink down and actually visit the people who live in the dollhouse...except they have secrets of their own and a mysterious Black Room that Alice can visit.
- The Low, Low Woods (2020) — Written by Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body and Other Parties), with art by Dani. "A mysterious plague is afflicting the small mining town of Shudder to Think, Pennsylvania. It strikes seemingly at random, eating away at the memories of those suffering from it. From tales of rabbits with human eyes, to deer women who come to the windows of hungry girls at night, this town is one of those places where strange things are always happening. But no one ever seems to question why..."
- Daphne Byrne (2020) — Written by Laura Marks, with art by Kelley Jones. In late 19th century New York, Daphne's father has just died and she's left alone with her grief-stricken mother. But she can also feel something else inside her... an insidious presence.
- Plunge (2020) — Written by Joe Hill, with art by Stuart Immonen. In 1983 the Derleth disappeared at the edge of the Arctic circle. Forty years later, it started broadcasting a distress signal. But what happened to the crew of the Derleth?
Each issue will also contain part of a backup story called "Sea Dogs," about a group of revolutionaries during The American Revolution that bring in a pack of werewolves to fight the British.
The line returned in 2021, kicked off with a direct sequel to Basketful of Heads.
Titles:
- Refrigerator Full of Heads (2021-2022) — Written by Rio Youers with art by Tom Fowler. For a year now, the mysterious axe that unleashed pandemonium during the hurricane of '83 has waited at the bottom of the bay but nothing that powerful stays buried...
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The Dollhouse Family
- Deal with the Devil: The Dollhouse offers members of the Moyne family any one thing they want in the world in exchange for becoming permanent residents within it.
- Eldritch Abomination: Cloax and Aparadon, though the latter is decidedly more benevolent. The conflict between the two has inspired the afterlife beliefs of many worlds, including Earth's, where they're implied to be the inspiration for demons and angels.
- Eldritch Location: The Dollhouse technically counts as one, even if it is a one-foot-by-two-foot one that is portable.
- Evil Orphan: Jenny Leach is one, bullying the other foster children, as well as self-harming and framing others to make sure they don't get adopted before her. She becomes even worse after she enters the Dollhouse, becoming a foul-mouthed Mouth of Sauron to the Black Room.
- Humanoid Abomination: Cloax takes the form of a woman with a tail, in addition to the Dollhouse itself.
- Leaking Can of Evil: An eldritch evil sealed in Ireland devised an escape by luring a land surveyor within its prison, implanting a piece of itself in him and letting that piece be passed on to the first woman he impregnated. The afterbirth from that pregnancy became the Dollhouse, which carried out its progenitor's will of retrieving all the pieces of itself from the man's descendants so the it can reincarnate free from confinement.
- Mystical Pregnancy: A barren woman was miraculously impregnated by a man tainted by an eldritch being, dying in childbirth. The afterbirth crawled off and transformed into the Dollhouse, as an extension of the cosmic horror.
The Low, Low Woods
- Gone Horribly Wrong: The truth about the strange creatures and occurrences that plague Shudder-To-Think. A magic spell that was supposed to punish the men for their decades of sexual abuse and give those victimized women peace by transforming them into something free of their trauma backfired horrifically. The men were supposed to sucked underground and repeatedly drowned within the river of forgetfulness, over and over again since the water would make them forget. Instead it created a literal Hell beneath the ground and the men were turned into skinless monsters. The women were transformed into strange creatures such as rabbits and trees as well as the bizarre deer woman El and Octavia encountered. It's also why Jessica and her mother have been slowly turning into human sinkholes.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: This is the bulk of the problems in at least two different ways.
- The series opens with El and Vee waking up in a movie theater with absolutely no memory of the film in question and strong evidence something happened to them. Vee's given a potion that will make her forget she's forgotten, as in it will erase her feeling of being unable to remember what happened so it no longer nags at her.
- The cause of the blackouts is due to a nearby river that may in fact be the River Lethe, as in the river of forgetfulness. The men of Shudder-To-Think have been routinely using the water to rape and molest the women of the town as much as they want. By the end of the series, El, Vee, and the witch distribute two bottles to all the women in their town. One will make them remember what they went through, the other will erase the feeling they've forgotten something.
- Older Than They Look: The witch looks like a little girl, but her mother died in 1922. The only indication she's aged are her hands, which are wrinkled and gnarled.
Plunge
- Artifact of Attraction: One of the artifacts provided by the crew of the Derleth, the Ingot, is stated to be so beautiful that it drives people to possess it with murderous jealousy. They'll allow one person to hold it but will physically threaten anyone else from getting a glimpse to keep fights from breaking out.
- Canon Welding: In Russel's deep dive into the worms hive mind, it's revealed that the Worms came to Earth as a result of the same intergalactic battle between Cloax and Aparadon from The Dollhouse Family that led to them being imprisoned on Earth as well. There's also mention of the same staelin geal substance that repels the worms much like it does Cloax.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Lacome, of Rococo Oil, has all the hallmarks of one from the instant he first appears. Sure enough, he cements himself as such by his willingness to sell out the rest of humanity to be devoured by the Child in exchange for the material wealth offered by the Worms.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Child, the amalgamation of the Worms revealed in the climax, a squidlike monstrosity that begins to devour reality itself, until Carpenter is able to destroy it using the Oil.
- Fighting from the Inside: All three "gifts" from the Worms — the Ingot, the Oil, and the Walkman — were chosen by the crew of the Derleth as a means for the main characters to destroy the Child.
- Mouthful of Pi: As a sign of their advanced intellect, the Worms claim to have calculated pi to the last digit. Lacome states that's impossible, but everything else about their scientific capabilities makes it seem likely.
- Puny Earthlings: Intellectually, the Worms are capable of advanced mathematics and engineering. They synthesized extremely potent fuel in the form of metallic hydrogen that's stable in the Earth's atmosphere, can modify a Walkman to read every mind in the vicinity and crafted an object that causes intense obsession on sight which they are immune to because they can see by souls. Literally they can also grow larger than a killer whale if they choose. They demonstrate both on purpose to coerce the humans into releasing the Child for them, because they can't physically touch the hatch themselves.
- Shout-Out: The Derleth is named after August Derleth, who published H. P. Lovecraft's works and wrote extensively about and in the Cthulhu Mythos.
- Most of the characters are named after the cast and characters of John Carpenter's The Thing (1982).
- Tempting Fate: Lacome, who has lost the least out of any character in the story, ends the story by examining a tiny piece of glass stuck in his thumb and snarking that his day can't get any worse, completely unaware of the straggler Worm crawling toward his face to make him a host.
- Unobtainium: The Oil given by the Worms is compared to a stabilized version of Metallic Hydrogen, a single flask of which could power California for centuries.
Daphne Byrne
Sea Dogs
- Our Werewolves Are Different: Three of them are hired by American revolutionaries in order to secretly go aboard the HMS Havoc and slaughter everyone on board.
Refrigerator Full of Heads
