This isn't a horror comic either, but it had it's moments.

I mean, the cover of this one has the Dire Wraiths Smallville'ing a kid and Rom choking a Wraith so hard it melts, so...from 1982, Rom: Spaceknight #36, "The Sign of the Victim is...Scarecrow!" Written by Bill Mantlo, pencils by Sal Buscema, inks by Ian Akin and Brian Garvey.

Rom leaves a Dire Wraith-mutated girl in the care of Namor and Atlantis (which probably means, we never see her again) then uses his translator to listen to some whales singing. He's come to love earth; some of its inhabitants more than others. Case in point: at Clairton Cemetary, Brandy Clark visits the grave of the Spaceknight Starshine and pines for Rom. Brandy wishes she had died instead of Starshine, then maybe Rom could've been happy with Starshine, since they could never be together because she wasn't a Spaceknight...cue violins, except this time we get Starshine's ghost! Not it a spooky way, a friendly ghost who gives Brandy her power, since they both loved Rom. (There may be something else happening there; check later issues!)

Rom eventually hits land, scenic Wales! Where he finds a kid hung up like a scarecrow. Rom gets him down, and the kid explains, he was chosen, as an offering to "keep the evil away from Gwillyn Dale!" (Hill n' Dale?) It's a Welsh village that looks like it's still in the 18th century, which is about par for Marvel at the time: you never see cars in those German villages chasing Nightcrawler, either. The Dire Wraiths had taken a bunch of the village's children, and demanded another sacrifice every full moon. The townspeople don't think they have a choice, because if they fight, they'll lose the kids they already lost, so they keep sacrificing kids...then profit? I don't know what their strategy is here. The kid, Stephen, had prayed for a protector to help, and now he had one. Rom gets attacked by the Dire Wraiths, in one of their typical chatty fights: even through Rom had beat two "High Wraith Witches" in as many days, this one explains the stars were in her favor, as earth was lined up with the Black Sun of their Dark Nebula. They were going to turn the captured kids into weapons, since they knew bleeding-heart Rom wouldn't be able to turn his neutralizer on them.

Stephen gets dragged away into a mystic portal, and Rom is too late to give chase before it closes. Furious, Rom fights hand-to-hand with the Wraiths, and chokes one to death: as it crumbles to ashes, Rom is momentarily furious that he had murdered, even though in the previous panel it kinda looked like he had just punched one so hard its head exploded. Rom recovers his neutralizer from the fight, and gives the remaining Wraiths the choice between banishment or death: they go down shooting, and get banished. Still, Rom swears not to rest until the children are saved... 

Rom is such a fun series, but I think narratively, it was kind of sewn together on the fly? Was there an in-story reason why Rom had the (usually) non-lethal neutralizer to banish Wraiths rather than killing them, while other Spaceknights had more superhero-y traditional murder powers? This issue would've been about the three-year mark, but in-story Rom would've been fighting the Wraiths for much, much longer; and it might be unusual he hadn't killed before then. I've read a lot of the series, but not all of it. By the way, if the long-awaited Marvel Legends Rom only includes his neutralizer and doesn't have his analyzer or translator, you have my permission to riot.