See Nightmare Lurker.

Huh. Yes, that seems quite good. The simplification is definitely preferable. And the "exile up to two" works really well with the "+1/+1 for each". It's a lot closer to the mechanic I was trying to find before I made Nightmare Lurker.

However, I'm concerned that exiling cards of your choice without targeting, and repeatedly exiling, is unfairly negative to graveyard decks. Maybe that's not a problem, maybe they deserve it, but it seems like, targeting graveyard removal should be a particular thing you need to include as an answer, and if it's a whole mechanic (albeit one I really like), it means anyone playing a graveyard deck (including things like just using flashback cards), will just randomly lose a proportion of the time, because someone happens to be playing a couple of dread cards for other reasons.