Forbidden Worlds #11 (American Comics Group, November 1952) is a five-feature pre-Code horror anthology behind a Ken Bald cover, and one of the most classically Gothic issues of the series' early run. "The Clutching Curse" traps a couple in a haunted house for a night at a ghost's insistence — break the curse or don't leave. "The Wax Demons" sends a professor into a wax museum stocked with history's worst killers, and finds the exhibits considerably less inert than advertised. "The Mummy's Treasure" and "I Am Doomed" fill out the fiction, and the issue closes with a text-and-picture feature, "True Vampires of History: Elizabeth Bathory", recounting the legends around the Hungarian countess remembered as the Blood Countess. Interior art comes from Charles M. Quinlan, Charles Nicholas and Harry Lazarus, under editor Richard E. Hughes, in a 32-page, full-colour, ten-cent package.

Forbidden Worlds launched in July/August 1951 as a dime comic subtitled "Exploring the Supernatural!", the companion to ACG's Adventures into the Unknown — the medium's first ongoing horror title. ACG was a small, resolutely independent New York publisher founded by Benjamin W. Sangor and co-owned by Fred Iger; the corporate name on the paperwork at this point was Preferred Publications, Inc. of Buffalo. Its horror line kept a house style distinct from the competition: atmospheric, often wry, and far lighter on gore and sexual content than the EC and Harvey books of the same year — one reason both ACG horror titles survived the 1954 Senate subcommittee hearings and the Comics Code without wholesale reinvention. By issue #11 the series had been monthly for five months and had settled at 32 pages, down from the 52 it launched with. It ultimately ran 145 issues to August 1967 and won the 1964 Alley Award for Best Regularly Published Fantasy Comic.

Read today, issue #11 is most interesting for the "True Vampires of History" feature. Presenting Elizabeth Bathory as documented fact rather than fiction, it belongs to a whole genre of pre-Code filler — the pseudo-educational horror page — that let publishers claim informational value while delivering exactly the same thrill as the comics around it. It is also a neat illustration of how thoroughly the Bathory legend had entered American popular culture by 1952, decades before the horror films that are usually credited with popularising her. Around it, the wax-museum and haunted-house stories are the genre's most durable furniture, executed by capable journeymen at monthly speed. And because the 1952 material is generally treated as public domain in the United States, the original issue is freely readable through Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum.