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Screamland is back for a second series through Image Comics. The pitch, if you haven’t heard it, envisions a world where classic movie monsters—think Frankenstein’s Monster, the wolfman, Dracula—were not only real but celebrities in film. Now what if each of them was well past their sell-by date in the popular consciousness? What would their lives be like?

Co-writers Harold Sipe and Christopher Sebela are currently in the midst of their second arc, moving beyond the murder mystery at the heart of the first series and into the wider world of washed up horror icons. The new series hits on June 8th, and Mssrs. Sipe and Sebela were kind enough to tell us about what they have in store for their monstrous cast in the current volume.

MTV Geek: So much of the series is about the characters’ reactions to the changing horror landscape. Could you walk us through some of the ways modern horror has screwed up classic monsters?

Harold Sipe: I wouldn’t say screwing them up so much as completely leaving them behind. What was the last monster flick? It’s like the face of modern horror is all sparkling teenaged vampires, zombies or torture porn psychos. Chris is a bit more dialed into modern horror but I kinda got off the bus after the first Nightmare on Elm Street flick. That was the last one I really enjoyed for the most part.

I think the whole of horror flicks used to have a lot more class. That is my overall reaction that finds its way into Screamland. I think most of the characters and I are on the same page on this.

Christopher Sebela: Mostly modern horror doesn't care about classic monsters at all, except maybe to use them to point out how much scarier things are now. It's hard to be terrified of a lumbering guy stitched together from dead bodies when the alternatives are the entire world dead and wanting to eat your brains, a ghost girl crawling out of your TV for revenge or the lady in front of you at the grocery store kidnapping and torturing people in her basement for kicks. In Screamland, that is the killing blow to the classic monsters' egos. Most of them are just angry and/or depressed that no one finds them scary anymore.

But I think modern horror is justified in its move away from the classic monsters. They're classic for a reason. The same way that Elvis Presley's “Hound Dog” isn't quite the world-burner it was when it debuted, a dead guy wrapped in bandages with a little fez isn't quite the terrifying specter it used to be when we've lived through decades of nukes, holocausts and yearly threat of extinction of life as we know it.

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