Hammer Head #1
Writer: Ed Brisson
Artist: Damian Couceiro
Colorist: Dee Cunniffe
Publisher: Mad Cave Studios
What would you do if the worst experience of your life—which haunts your every waking moment and your dreams—suddenly started happening all over again?
Laurie Strode
Julie McCormick is a Final Girl. When she was young, she was the only survivor of the Hammer Head killer’s murder spree. Today, she’s a drug addict who just wants to forget.
After getting picked up by the police when trying to score (and possibly killing one of them with a shard of glass?), Jules finds herself in what appears to be a mental hospital while she detoxes.
Later, Jules learns it’s more like a prison. She meets the other inmates, all of whom have dark pasts of their own. Soon they will all learn that Hammer Head isn’t done with Jules yet…
Sidney Prescott
This was very much a setup issue, like the first act of a movie. We're introduced to Jules at her lowest point—strung out, haunted by nightmarish memories, desperate to get high again.
The concept of the Final Girl is a well-known horror device. She’s the last person standing at the end of the movie—and yes, it is a woman the vast majority of the time. What the movies usually don’t show is what happens after the credits roll (unless there’s a sequel, of course), so we don’t normally see what happens to the Final Girl after that. I always assumed plenty of therapy. In the case of Jules, it’s lots of drugs.
It’s easy to sympathize with Jules right away. The issue wastes no time in showing us that she survived something awful, so when we see her in the state she's in, you can’t help but feel for her. Then the cops grab her when she’s trying to score, and she stabs one of them in the neck with a shard of glass. At least I assume she does. It’s never referenced again, so I guess it might have been in her head?
She certainly gets violent with a nurse when she wakes up in the facility; there’s no ambiguity there. We learn that they’re trying to detox her, and it’s going about as well as you’d expect. Fortunately, the warden seems to know her from back in the day and is granting her a little extra leeway. He actually seems pretty likable, all things considered.
Once she meets the other inmates, we learn they all did something pretty bad themselves—something that got people killed. No one remembers quite how they got there, and there’s been no due process of any kind.
Totally not some kind of creepy experiment or anything, right?
We get just enough time to learn a little bit about everyone before it’s time to move the story—and the experiment—to the second act. Everyone is told to get dressed in vintage clothes and find themselves in an exact copy of Jules’ hometown—the one that burned down after Hammer Head killed everyone except her. That’s not creepy at all.
Speaking of Hammer Head, that guy over there looks a lot like him…
Ellen Ripley
Ed Brisson is not a name I would normally associate with horror, so I was immediately intrigued when I saw his name on this. So far it’s all been character-and-world-building, so it’s hard to say how he’ll fare in the genre overall. But he’s off to a strong start. Jules is an easy lead to sympathize with, even with her rough edges. The rest of the inmates don’t get a ton of time here, but we get enough of an idea of what they’re all about to care when they start dying. Which doesn’t take long.
Damian Couceiro doesn’t get to draw a lot of action this issue, but he does a good job setting the atmosphere. Jules’ tiny apartment is so horrible-looking that the padded cell actually seems like an improvement. I’m still not sure if the facility is supposed to be an asylum or a prison, having never spent time in either myself, but it’s certainly not an inviting place no matter what it is. When Hammer Head makes his appearance at the end, things go gory very quickly, and Couceiro is more than up to the task.
Dee Cunniffe’s colors keep the palette on the drab side, which fits the way Jules perceives the world when she’s not on drugs. Horror movies aren’t known for being brightly lit anyway, so this fits the genre perfectly. There are a few moments of blood and gore sprinkled throughout the issue, and Cunniffe makes sure those are appropriately gnarly.
Nancy Thompson
Hammer Head #1 is a bit of a slow start, introducing our lead and setting the tone before unleashing the titular maniac on our unsuspecting cast. Jules is a sympathetic lead, having been the Final Girl during the killer’s first rampage twenty years ago, and now we get to see what happens when she has to go through it all again. Now that the stage has been set, I’m looking forward to seeing what carnage Brisson and company unleash in future issues.