Batman's Scarecrow as Slasher?

That's the angle being used by Joe Harris, writer of DC Comics' The Joker's Asylum #4: Scarecrow, set to hit newsstands and comic shops on July 23.

"Anytime I can do something even slightly 'horrific' with spandex super-heroes and their rogues gallery, I'm a happy guy," Harris told Newsarama. "I was raised on a steady diet of movies like Friday The 13th as well as other slashers, along with higher-concept movies like April Fool's Day and the A Nightmare on Elm Street series. I treated Scarecrow like a slasher movie threat...a masked maniac in the mold of Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, but with a pathology known to Batman readers."

Harris has a background of sorts in horror cinema, having written the bizarre 2003 twisted tooth fairy tale Darkness Falls, as well as the 2006 David Arquette political slasher The Tripper, one of the original "8 Films to Die For."

Illustrated by Juan Doe (can that possibly be a real name?), the one-shot issue sets deranged psychotherapist Jonathan "Scarecrow" Crane loose on a houseful of teenage girls, in classic slasher fashion. As with the rest of the series, the Joker acts as a sort of "Crypt Keeper" style narrator.