Important realisation

I was watching "american horror story" and it made me feel like doing something small with monsters and a haunted house, nothing big.
But when I was thinking how to make it and about the style I should do it in I ran into a road block, the style I recently developed with the Rotterdam comic page isn't at all suited for something grim/dark/grimdark/spooky, it's too cartoony!
So I asked myself "well how should I do it?".
The thing with the black pools of shadow like I did in the Dracula book trailer was met by my teachers with unfavourable responses (the characters anyway, they liked the backgrounds and even those only in black and white). Maybe coloured lines? Nope, too soft for me, it feels suitable for something fantasy-like, but a haunted mansion? I'm sure someone else somewhere could pull it off, but it doesn't feel natural for me.
And then I was reminded of some of the more modern Castlevania artwork by the ever so awesome Ayame Kojima (like this here http://www.castlevaniadungeon.net/Images/Scans/CoD/codpostersmall.jpg ) and it kind struck me that if you're trying to go for a style to go with an illustration or whatever with a specific feel, you should try wherever/whenever possible to use materials that people associate with that feel.
For example, these castlevania games took place in lavish, gothic horror settings with castles, libraries, chapels etc so she used thick, heavy oil paint. The art for Vagrant Story used brown ink on yellow parchment-like background to invoke a feeling of antiquity and dusty old mysterious fantasy.
I guess the basic idea of this rant is that style should be in service to what you're trying to tell, and I guess the next step is trying to pinpoint what I want to invoke and what method best suits this end.
And I haven't been doing nothing, just nothing worth uploading.