When you’re looking at the history of Star Wars and Marvel Studios movies and TV, you can draw a couple of conclusions. Out of all of them, the fact that they both borrow heavily from combining their main genre with sub-genres is pretty huge. Marvel does this all the time: you take a political thriller and add superheroes, then you get Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Star Wars borrows heavily from the Western genre, among others. However, both gargantuan properties really haven’t done much with the horror genre. Horror is obviously a huge blanket term that could really be anything that’s thrilling. The Mandalorian has had monsters and aliens that are quite frightening. Marvel has done the Werewolf By Night Special Presentation.

There’s plenty of stuff from books, comics, and games that could be tapped into for both. Take Death Troopers, for example. What better way to make Star Wars terrifying than to keep a story away from the Jedi and set it on a derelict starship that’s overrun by zombie Stormtroopers? From what it looked like in pre-production, we might’ve gotten the first Marvel Studios horror flick in Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. When Scott Derrickson departed that picture, those elements were brought down a bit. What we ended up with from Sam Raimi was still a bit horror-themed, but not full bore.

What If…? gave us Marvel Zombies, which was a pretty thrilling episode, and we’re supposed to be getting an animated series based on that universe. That kind of creativity and ingenuity in bringing together two favorite genres is the kind of thing that adds longevity to your franchise.

How many Star Wars and Marvel stories are out there that you could combine with horror? Plenty. There are some terrifying superheroes out there. The Incredible Hulk going mad? That’s frightening. Professor X using his powers for bad? From Star Wars, you can picture some crazy Sith supernatural horror stuff. Or just do something like Death Troopers that is street/surface level. It doesn’t all need to be carried by original trilogy characters. There’s plenty of room for storytellers to take the best things of these and combine them with horror tropes.

Hell, Star Wars takes from the Western genre. What about Bone Tomahawk with Star Wars? The Sand People on Tattooine could be just as frightening as cannibals attacking a Western town. There are some traces throughout the Marvel and Star Wars universes that could lead to some absolutely smashing horror stories, they just need to be tapped into.

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