One reason “The Court Of Owls” could be calling to Reeves is the chance to make a more horror-ish Batman film, but one that doesn’t break with the tone of the first movie. It’s easy to compare the Court to “Eyes Wide Shut,” a film that showed just how scary groups of people in masks can be. The labyrinth sequence in “The Court of Owls” features a Batman who is utterly outmatched, to the degree that it causes him to imagine the Court’s members as literal bird demons. To me, Batman embodies unbreakable calm and controlled fury, and seeing him so helpless sends a chill crawling up your spine.
The atmosphere of “The Court of Owls” comes through because Snyder was, at the time, a horror writer. His breakout comic was “American Vampire” (co-written with Stephen King himself), and his first book after he got “Batman” was the seven-issue mini-series “Severed” (co-written with Scott Tuft, drawn by Attila Futaki.) Set in the American West during 1916, the story centers on two runaways who are targeted and groomed by a cannibalistic serial killer. It’s a tale that takes after “The Night of the Hunter” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” and is just as frightening as those films to boot.
“Batman,” though, made Snyder into one of DC’s golden boys and he’s never let go of superheroes since. These days, he’s writing the reimagined “Absolute Batman” with artist Nick Dragotta. On Snyder’s original “Batman” run, you can track his evolution; each story arc feels successively less like a horror story, more like a superhero epic.
“Death of the Family” is one of the freakiest Joker stories ever and comes close to the claustrophobia and dread in “The Court of Owls.” Then “Zero Year” shifts hard into more action-adventure; the color palette of the comic gets a lot brighter too, with lots of garish pink-purple backgrounds.
There are still some flourishes of horror in “Zero Year,” though. Most notably, Snyder reimagined the early Batman villain Doctor Death as suffering from bone mutations and resultant body horror.
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When you get to “Superheavy” (about Jim Gordon going around in a mecha Batman armor) though, it’s clear the book has chosen the brighter parts of “Zero Year.” Many of Snyder’s more recent creations, like the “Batman Who Laughs,” the “Mad Max” riff “Nocterra” (drawn by Tony Daniel), and the aforementioned “Absolute Batman,” feel designed to be cool, edgy, and extreme, but not scary the way his earlier comics were.
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“The Batman” ended with Bruce accepting that to save Gotham City from its worst self, he needs to be a symbol of hope, not fear. Could Reeves’ films undergo a similar trajectory from darkness to light as Snyder’s comic run did?
“The Penguin” is streaming on Max. “The Batman Part II” is currently scheduled for theatrical release on October 1, 2027.