The monochrome titles etch out like DePatie-Freleng – if the pair were in the midst of a joint panic attack. Swiftly death-stalked by a scene of a child hunted by dogs, the film then jarringly recalls a canine riposte to Disney’s The Aristocats as drawn by Bill Plympton, its staccato reduction of the crucial amount of inbetweening as distressing as the narrative’s helpless inevitability. It then tumbles into the pitch signifiers of a Black Hole-era Charles Burns: where bio-paranoia mutates into transmigrating vaginal welts, insects, and one-night stands.

And we are only five minutes in.

Bringing together the graphic créme de la noir of Blutch, Charles Burns, Marie Caillou, Pierre di Sciullo, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire, Fear(s) of the Dark bleaks out like Möebius finger-painting Barbara Creed into Georgio de Chirico’s Melancholy and Mystery of a Street. And the dark icing on the cyanide-laced cake? It is an animated portmanteau film that actually works: the finest since the Katsuhiro Ôtomo-curated Memorizu. Fear(s) of the Dark’s “traditional” animation also stands as proof positive that the more CGI seals itself into one of Baudrillard’s moist meta-reveries, the more it distances itself from the cross-hatched fears of our unrendered lives – all of which are present in this wonderfully nasty little film.

But back to Charles Burns. Using his trademark rockabilly mélange of E C horror and go-faster striped chiaroscuro, Burns once again proves that America was actually born the 1950s, as a race of aliens. As his body politic echoes Clive Barker’s monstrous celebration of polysexual perversity, Burns again proves himself to be a clear-dark Lichtenstein for an ever-uncertain post-Kennedy America. In a world where western hegemonies purport that we are under constant siege from the George Kaplans of fundamentalism, Fear(s) of the Dark is more welcome than ever. At least these fears are real: and most handsomely, brutally drawn.