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There are interesting things happening in the horror sphere these days - as if you need me to tell you that. Tiny films from new directors are exploding at the box office, movies like Obsession and Backrooms are not just raking in cash for the studios that produced them, but are opening doors for creators with weird visions to believe that the movies they want to make are not just possible, but wanted. 

At least, that's kind of how Todd McFarlane feels.

I recently sat down with the Spawn creator to go over a host of new projects that he's working on - primary among them his upcoming comic miniseries, Spawn '77. But I wasn't going to let the conversation end without asking about King Spawn, the McFarlane-steered film that seeks to adapt his comics under the Blumhouse banner. And luckily for me, McFarlane was happy to share where his thoughts were on the long-in-development film.

"I keep saying that it needs to be dark and gritty and ugly and scary at moments," McFarlane told me, "Creepy. It needs to be all that. Sometimes some of the writers sort of got away from it. But the writers are pros; you give them a leash, and you hope that they come back and deliver something that blows you away. They haven't so far, but part of it is that I keep saying no to the scripts because I just go, 'That's not it.' That's not it, that one's too far to the left, that one's too far to the right. Unfortunately, it's my taste that basically gets to call it Goldilocks, where it's right in the middle."

However, one thing that's in McFarlane's favor, the Image Comics co-founder related, are the aforementioned new horror movies that are taking "dark and gritty and ugly and scary" in all-new directions.

"Things like Obsession and Backrooms," the comics staple continued, "And even a new one recently, Leviticus; there's a vibe to those movies that, to me, is some of the stuff I've been saying for 10 years about Spawn. We don't have to have a ton of special effects. We don't have to have a ton of blowing up. We don't have to do all that stuff. We can still get stuff across and make him seem big and powerful and all those things, without having to have a super villain fighting in middle of Times Square. Otherwise, we're just doing Marvel and DC light, right?"

McFarlane reasons that bigger studios like Marvel and Warner Brothers have "$200 million" and more to spend on a movie, so... "Why would we try and do that at a fraction of the price? Why don't we lean into what Spawn can be as a character that Captain America and Superman 'can't be?' What they can't be is dark. I mean, I'm talking serious dark, not Dark Knight, Batman dark. I'm talking fucking dark. Why don't we lean into that?"

But now, that lean is more possible than ever, and McFarlane points to indie horror as a reason.

"Part of it is because those movies are successful right now," he concluded. "It's easy to get them [producers] to go, 'Yeah, maybe we should go a little creepy and dark.'"

Todd McFarlane's Spawn is available now wherever you get your comics. Todd McFarlane's Spawn, the movie, is also available now.

Interested? Here's where to find your closest local comic store, courtesy of Sweet, and here's a guide to how (and where) to read comics online.