By Kristen Anderson, @chillinkristen

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WandaVision from Marvel and Disney Plus ended recently, and a lot of people (including me!) are super bummed. Not just because of the sweet, tear-jerker ending, but because it was a joy to watch something so full of mystery and ripe for theorizing. I don’t think I’d caught that kind of obsessed TV spirit since LOST was on (though luckily, WandaVision’s ending was much more satisfying).

The other part of the equation is that WandaVision was a little spooky. Without going into spoilers (although if you’ve managed to avoid them already while being an Online Person, I salute you), it had some super fun, classically spooky stuff that was a delight to see included in the already sweet world of The Avengers.

WandaVision was also an opportunity for deep comic nerds to rise UP with their knowledge. Easter eggs were dropped throughout the series that were invisible to an untrained eye but bright neon to the learned. Luckily, Marvel comics has a pool of other horror characters that not only can you seek out and dig into right now—who knows, you may accidentally be doing homework for future Marvel screen projects. 

There’s Sleepwalker, who’s basically a member of the dream police, guarding the minds of sleeping humans from malicious intruders. In these comics, when humans sleep, they enter the Mindspace, a place that only exists in their sleeping brains—and in which monsters dwell. The Sleepwalkers keep them at bay. “Sleepwalker” is actually the title given to these officers, but the comics follow a particular being who is referenced by that name (since their true name is unpronounceable to the human tongue). 

Sleepwalker looks somewhat like the Grim Reaper. He wears a hood and has green skin and red eyes. He’s connected to a human named Rick Sheridan, who caught Sleepwalker entering his dreams and ripped off what was basically his dream cop badge, fusing them together. Sleepwalker can take on physical form while Rick sleeps and gets into all sorts of shenanigans.

Deathlok is another character who’s technically one of many, but the comics hone in on one. Deathloks are soldiers who have died and been re-animated using cyborg parts, and the one we follow is Luther Manning. He wears a red and blue uniform, has a red laser eye like The Terminator, and because of injuries to his face, metal plating covers half of his head in the comics (though when he appeared on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., this wasn’t a part of the costume).

He refers to the symbiotic computer that’s part of him as “Puter,” which I don’t care for. But he does awesome stuff like battle mutants alongside Spiderman and fights a villain named Devil-Slayer (before forming a classic, uneasy alliance), so I guess all is forgiven.

Then there’s the aptly named Terror, nicknamed Shreck (which means “scare” or “fright”). He and the Shrek we know and love are both green, but that’s where the similarities to our favorite swamp ogre end. Terror was an early human who fought a demon that looked like a green bear with spikes on its face and body, and when he killed it, he took on its attributes. Not only did his body turn green and his face grow spikes, but the creature now known as Terror was able to merge the limbs from others onto his own body. He secretes an acid that loosens the connective tissue of his prey and adheres their body parts to him. 

Another creepy comic character is Elsa Bloodstone. She’s a monster hunter born into the trade, who was forced to fight a creature called the Blight Beast of Krakow as a baby in order to toughen up. Though questionable, it worked, and Elsa gained a fearsome reputation in the comic world and outside of it, with comparisons to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She lives in a manor with her mother and Frankenstein’s Monster, who she seems to not need to hunt.

Son of Satan, whose everyday, “Clark Kent name” is Daimon Hellstrom (and he has a sister named Satana...subtle), is a good guy in the comic world. His dad is a devil and his mom is a human, and he interacts with Ghost Rider and Doctor Strange throughout his run in the comics. Hulu put out a series called Hellstrom, but it wasn’t critically well-received, and it was canceled after one season.

Also critically panned were the movies featuring Hellstrom’s buddy, Ghost Rider. The flaming skull played by Nicolas Cage in 2007’s Ghost Rider and 2011’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is a Marvel creation, though not part of the recognized Marvel Cinematic Universe. Can you imagine him roaring up alongside Thor as an equal in The Avengers? Tony Stark would quip at him so hard.

However, if not for the inevitable public outcry at a Cage recasting, they technically could have introduced a different Ghost Rider into the fray. In the comics, Ghost Rider is another title that can be bestowed upon multiple people, kind of like being a knight. Nicolas Cage’s version was Johnny Blaze, a stunt motorcyclist with an attitude who sold his soul to Satan (well, technically the villain Mephisto masquerading as Satan, oops) in exchange for his father’s life.

The Ghost Rider is a human who transforms into a flaming skeleton with supernatural powers, riding a motorcycle that goes magically fast and performs acts that regular motorcycles can’t, like driving vertically or on water. When in their magical form, the Ghost Rider is impervious to physical harm (bullets pass right through them, and knives melt with the heat of their flames), and they also possess super strength.

Since Ghost Rider is a mantle that can be held by many, some interesting characters have gone by the name. Particularly cool are Alejandra Jones—a Nicaraguan woman who teams up with Johnny Blaze—and Robbie Reyes whose Ghost Rider drives a souped-up muscle car rather than the classic motorcycle. Now THAT I bet Tony Stark would have been into.

Blade is another character with movies outside the MCU fray but with their own dedicated fanbase. Played by Wesley Snipes in 3 Blade movies from 1998 - 2004 (and with plans for Mahershala Ali to play him in a reboot), Blade is a human-vampire hybrid whose immunity to vampire bites makes him uniquely equipped to fight them. He wears a long badass leather trench and bandoliers of knives and blades.

A fun storyline in the comics is that he’s kind of frenemies with Dracula—he’s mostly fought against him, even staking him once, but he fell into an uneasy alliance with him against Doctor Sun one time. Doctor Sun was a robotic bad guy who’s essentially a brain attached to a robot, a brain that needs a constant supply of human blood in order to thrive, so he attempted to use mind control on vampires to turn them into an army of blood-getters for him. Dracula wasn’t into it.

Fellow vamp Morbius The Living Vampire started as biochemist Michael Morbius, who suffered from a rare and debilitating blood disorder. His experiments using vampire bats and electroshocks backfired and left him with a “pseudo-vampirism” condition that forces him to drink human blood to survive and makes him sensitive to light. But he also benefited by gaining some of the supernatural powers of full vampires, including super strength and the ability to fly due to having hollow bones like a bird, and super healing (which I guess you kind of need for the bones).

Like many of the scariest Marvel characters, Morbius is an anti-hero. He doesn’t have an evil agenda, but his vampiric hunger sometimes overtakes him and causes him to harm the innocent. He decrees, “If I must drink blood, let it be the blood of the corrupt—of those who deserve to die. The blood of the guilty,” very much so giving himself a Dexter vibe. He does his best, but sometimes stuff happens. For example, when he protected a woman named Barbara Clark from a demon called Nilrac, but then drank her blood and killed her afterward in a fit of bloodlust. Two steps forward, one step back.

It’s specified that Michael Morbius was not a traditionally handsome dude to begin with, but he became even less attractive after the experiment-gone-wrong. Already very pale, he became utterly white, developed fangs, and his nose flattened out to a bat-like snout. Naturally, in the upcoming movie Morbius, he’s being played by famously unattractive person Jared Leto.

Blade, Johnny Blaze’s Ghost Rider, and Morbius had a comic book mashup in the 90s when they formed their own mini Avengers-esque Scary Good Guy club called The Midnight Sons. The group was formed when Lilith, the Mother of Demons, opened an interdimensional rift with plans to take over the world with her children, the Lilin. Aided by Doctor Strange and a host of lesser-known characters, including Elsa Bloodstone, they were able to reverse the rift and exile the demons.

Will we ever see such a horror team-up as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Possibly! The source material is so expansive and multi-layered that there are plenty of resources yet to tap. It would likely garner comparisons to Suicide Squad, DC Comics’ team of villains, and the failed Dark Universe, Universal Studios’s scrapped plans to create an interconnected universe of its classic Universal Monsters. 2020’s The New Mutants was a horror-tinged movie that was MCU adjacent, but its poor reviews aren’t super encouraging.

Still, it might be worth exploring these individual horror characters as a fan since, as WandaVision showed, you never know when a seemingly obscure character might pop up on camera. If you get in on the ground level, you could benefit later from a thrill of on-screen recognition—and maybe a little chill, too.