The Top 10 Horror Moments in the Batman Cinematic Universe

While director Matt Reeves may have described the most recent Batman movie, The Batman (2022), as “almost a horror film,” horror as an aesthetic mood or idiom pervades representations of the character and his world across cinematic history. The stylistically and tonally diverse cinematic projects of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, and Christopher Nolan and now, Matt Reeves, have deployed some quintessential tropes of horror filmmaking in the course of envisioning the caped crusader and his adventures. Batman has served as a convenient and uniquely ingenious cultural device that allowed directors to crystallize the social and political horrors of their times on the cinematic scape. This list consists of the Top 10 Horror moments in the cinematic history of Batman. The scenes are ranked in order of least to most horrifying, with no. 10 being a semi-comical scene that draws on horror aesthetics, and no. 1 being an out-and-out jump-scare moment.

#10 Batman encounter with Dr. Meridian on rooftop (Batman Forever, 1995)

The fear around female sexuality is highlighted in this scene with Dr. Chase Meridian and Batman. Dr. Chase approaches him near the bat symbol and drives him into a corner. Batman’s whole persona is constructed around being a mystery to those around him, which allows him to act as an agent of fear, and therefore, social order. Dr. Chase threatens to unmask him by questioning who he is “beneath the suit.” The camera, in Dr. Chase’s point of view, watches Batman run away and jump off the building, escaping the sexual encounter. Compared to the slasher film killer POV, Vera Dika points out “The characters presented by the point-of-view shot are the objects of sexual investigation and/or the intended victims of the killer” (89). Dr. Chase sees Batman as a sexual object and threatens to eradicate which invokes Batman’s greatest fear–the fear of being demystified and understood.

#9 Poison Ivy is born (Batman and Robin, 1997)

After Pamela Ivy is pushed into a stack of chemicals by the evil doctor, she rises as Poison Ivy. He observes that she looks beautiful for a dead woman, which betrays the doctor’s terrifying fascination with death and Poison Ivy. She claims to now agree with his philosophy that Mother Earth must rule. Yet with her newfound powers, she turns on him and kills him with a poisonous kiss. During the kiss, her face takes on a vampiric expression, angled perpendicular to the camera, while her eyes remain open, as if she is sucking the life out of him. The horror here lies in how feminine sexuality has been perceived by men as something to control and use. It is the horror of this abuse that Poison Ivy embodies and ignites in a revenge narrative that depicts feminine nature getting back at patriarchal domination.

#8 Catwoman Taser Kiss (Batman Returns, 1992)

“How about a kiss, Santy Claus?” Catwoman says to Max Shreck, right before she kisses him with a taser between their lips and her hand on an electrical wire. She uses one of her nine lives to kill Shreck this way, the man that had killed her. The scene is set in a dimly-lit sewer, setting up a dark atmosphere. The sudden emergence of lighting comes from sparks flying out of the impact created by the taser kiss between Catwoman and Shreck. With a direct reference to Shreck’s earlier sexual advancements on her, she uses her sexuality as the ultimate death weapon. She kills him with a form of striking power, an electrical power plant, using his own creation–a huge power plant to control the city of Gotham–as the agent of his destruction. Catwoman continues to kiss him to death as he burns to a corpse.

#7 Two Face and Riddler Meeting  (Batman Forever, 1995)

Part of Schumacher’s project was to depict the horrors of repressed sexuality, reflecting a time period where the AIDs crisis was at its peak. The characters represent these horrors of repression in the US, especially when Two-Face and the Riddler meet for the first time and discuss the possibility of working together. The horror here is invoked when Two-Face and the Riddler engage in a flirtatious banter as they talk about the destruction of Gotham. The possibility of two men–one of whom is disabled–dressed in a camp aesthetic and engaging in sexual activity is codified in the erotic charge that enfolds their conversation. The horror continues as they talk about developing a mind-reading device to invade the minds of Gotham’s residents and expose their darkest secrets. They also go on to specifically conspire about creating terror by exposing people’s sex lives. The social horror of repressed sexuality forms the subtext of horror in this scene and film.

#6 Batman is attacked by citizens controlled by the fear toxin (Batman Begins, 2005)

The entire city of Gotham has been sprayed by the fear toxin and the residents, controlled by their worst fears, are ripping each other apart. In the hold of terror, they end up coming together to attack the man who is supposedly their protector, Batman. Batman stares into the space around him and watches the citizens of Gotham emerge out of the smoke and close in on him. They collectively mount upon him, mirroring a zombie apocalypse kill where the victim gets surrounded and devoured by zombies, but Batman manages to escape. Why would Nolan want to present the citizens of Gotham, acting under the fear toxin, as zombies? What is so terrifyingly dead about these people? Thinking through the dystopian class disparity characterizing the city of Gotham might offer a potential way of responding to this question.

#5 “I’m Batman!”/Batman as Slasher Scene (Batman Begins, 2005)

Batman’s first high-profile act of vigilantism in Gotham and also the first time in the Nolan trilogy that he refers to himself as Batman. A horror effect is created with the camera techniques associated with the contemporary slasher film (read: the Scream series, Halloween etc.). The camera shifts between following the victim and giving us their POV, creating the sense that the victims (in this case, the petty criminals of Gotham city) are being stalked. The lack of reverse shot between Batman and the victims connects to Dika’s point on the killer’s POV, “the traditional reverse shot…would not only reveal his person but also give us access to his humanity”. In one shot, a criminal is looking into the darkness, expecting to find Batman there and Batman emerges right behind him, out of the blue, mirroring a quintessential slasher scene. While these techniques contribute to the horror of the scene, the question worth asking is: why would Nolan set up the vigilante as the slasher/monster and the criminal(s) as the victim/kill in this sequence?

#4 Bruce Wayne’s parents die (Batman, 1989)

The Dutch angles of the camera give a distorted quality to the moment. Young Bruce is exiting a theater with his parents. You can hear the sound of their shoes on the sidewalk echoing against several other pairs that follow them down a dark alley, similar to the famous alley scene from Cat People. The fear in Batman is the same as the screams of Bruce’s mother becomes a distant sound and the gunshot fired by the younger Joker is the dominant noise. The entire shot is in slow-motion, filmed from the perspective of young Bruce watching his parents get murdered in a flash. The Joker asks Bruce in a hauntingly slow voice, “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” as he prepares to shoot the child, before being forced to escape. The shadows and darkness of the alleyway depict the bleakness of the moment, the reality of Gotham city’s crimes highlighted to the audience.

#3 Scarecrow sprays Batman with the Fear Toxin (Batman Begins, 2005)

Scarecrow, an evil psychologist who works for the mob and manufactures a fear toxin that upon inhalation, causes the victim to witness their worst fears. Batman is sprayed with the toxin, and is struck by flashes of childhood trauma from the sight of bats fluttering into his face to the memory of his parents being shot. There is a grotesque aesthetic: Batman and the audience see a bat emerge out of Scarecrow’s mouth. Scarecrow is set up as a monstrous figure in this scene: the boundaries of human and nonhuman are crossed and an effect of disgust is produced because of the bat’s emergence from his mouth. The camera oscillates very quickly between these flashes of the terrifying visions that Batman sees and his traumatized body withdrawing in confusion. This fast-paced back-and-forth creates an unsettling effect that intensifies the horror of the scene.

# 2  Selena Kyle Dies (Batman Returns, 1992)

Selena Kyle’s boss, Max Shreck, pushes her out of the window of a tall building. While harassing her, he corners her into a window. He scares her into saying, “I mean it’s not like you can just kill me,” and responds, “actually it’s a lot like that.” This scene highlights the horrors of power held by businessmen like Shreck, allowing them to rule Gotham and, particularly, their employees. Since Kyle is a woman, Shreck feels empowered to casually push her through a window without any consequences. The camera follows Shreck’s predatory prowl as he pushes Selena out the window and her body rips through a banner imprinted with a grim smiling face. She lands on the ground with her last breath escaping her. As her terrifying shriek fills the entire sequence, the audience is forced to connect with her and recognize Shreck’s abuse of power.

#1 The Riddler Kills (The Batman, 2022)

It starts with the incumbent mayor Don Mitchell Jr. watching a telecast of the recent electoral debate between himself and Bella Real, who is trying to change Gotham’s prospects by demolishing the Gotham Renewal Program, a program pioneered by the late Thomas Wayne. The camera faces the Mayor as he watches the TV. As he moves away, we see the Riddler suddenly appear behind him, his eyes made visible in the otherwise dark room through a momentary flash of lightning. Mitchell is blind to Gotham’s underclass, which the Riddler represents. Eerie music plays as the Riddler yells and jumps out to hit Mitchell on the head with a heavy metal object. Mitchell dies and the Riddler breathes heavily, sitting on top of his body, covering his face with duct tape. This moment invokes the crisis Gotham rests upon: white men like Mitchell holding positions of power while the rest of the city struggles with their careless decisions on how to fund Gotham.

 

Works Cited:

Dika, Vera. “The Stalker Film,” American Horrors, edited by Gregory Waller, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

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Amira Shokr resides in Blairstown, New Jersey where she teaches English and History. She earned her BA and MA in English from Lehigh University. Her academic interests include Medieval literature, critical horror studies, and film.

Christian Farrior is an instructor of first-year writing while in his second year as an English MA student at Lehigh University. When he is not teaching about the cultural rhetoric of superheroes in his classroom, you can find him researching for his main areas of interest, which include cultural studies and constructions of race in the Early Modern era. Christian is pursuing a PhD in literature and cultural studies.

Arush Pande is a first year graduate student in English at Princeton University. He received his BA in English from Ashoka University, near New Delhi, and his MA from the Department of English at Lehigh University Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Arush wants to study the various tropes and idioms that characterize the literature of the Anthropocene in the 20th and 21st century. He is particularly interested in narratives of environmental justice, especially those that emerge from the Global South. When he is not sobbing over a book in a quiet corner, you can find him doting over cats, or endorsing Bollywood ‘masala’ films to anyone who cares to listen.