A Short Word From the Crypt

Recently, I had the unique experience of watching three episodes of a television series I had long forgotten. Back in 1989, HBO began a show which ran for seven strong seasons, featuring a slew of talent in directors, cinematographers, actors, and composers that very nearly started the comic adaptation craze of the late 90s into the new Millennium. Tales from the Crypt based itself in a comic series of the same name from EC comics - a collaboration between publisher William Gaines and editor Al Feldstein from 1950 to 1955. Every week, HBO ran a 25 minute episode based on a story from the comics, featuring John Kassir as the Cryptkeeper himself.

The three episodes I had the pleasure of re-watching (at a new, more mature age) were from season 2: Korman's Kalamity, Television Terror, and The Secret. The campy, over-zealous acting style was apparent in all three episodes, independent of differing directors. The comic-book method has an host of problems regarding the traditional idea of "acting" (reference Toby McGuire and Kirstin Dunst in Spiderman). Every actor is playing a character, and there is no conviction that they are, in fact, this character. The pantomime is charming, perhaps comedic, while the stories play out as grizzly tales of murder, monsters, and mayhem. Suddenly, watching horror is confidently laughable.

However, what I found intriguing about all three tales (and a number of others which were described to me by the possessor of the collection) was that behind each episode's real monsters, there is a twist presented that reveals a human being's capacity for evil. In that, the real monster is not the one in the monster make-up, but the person who allows the monster to take over.

In Korman's Kalamity, a horror-comic artist (in the episode, the comic is entitled Tales from the Crypt. Yay, self-reference!) takes experimental infertility medication which, instead of making his sperm work, makes his imagination fold into reality. The monsters he draws come to life and terrorize the city. His overbearing wife, thinking he's a two-timing bastard and not entirely wrong, spurns the work. When he draws a monster version of her that comes to life, it attacks the wife, thus freeing Korman of his marriage to pursue the extremely loose romance with a police officer investigating the attacks.

In Television Terror, a hot-headed correspondent reporting live on tabloid news enters a haunted house which turns out to be filled with undead/poltergeist activity. With the camera rolling, the horror unfolds and the network continues its feed as ratings skyrocket. A young, ambitious on-site producer, ignoring his screams for help, makes the call to continue rolling all the way to the anchor's dramatic demise.

Finally, in The Secret, an orphan boy is sent by a wicked, old orphanage owner to a home, away from his friends and surrogate mother/orphanage caretaker. At the old mansion, he is fed nothing but sweets and is always locked in his room all day and night. The adoptive couple turn out to be vampires with a sweet tooth who chase him from the house into the full moon light. This, however, backfires when the boy's own secret comes to light that he is, in fact, a werewolf with an appetite for vampires. He returns to the orphanage, to his friends, and utters a veiled threat to the orphanage owner, solidifying his place there for good.

The episodes, albeit contrived and campy, reveal a darker side to the human psyche that allows for evil to reign. Just like the question of which is worse: attacking someone, or watching someone get attacked and doing nothing, the truth is that both are manifested in the same domain of evil. As the Cryptkeeper makes his terrible puns to loosen our grip on the terror of the stories, there is left an unsettling lump in my stomach. The wife, the TV personality, the orphanage owner, all portrayed as smug, haughty, and ultimately antagonizing characters to our protagonists (the comic-artist, the young producer, the naive boy) are enabled by the narrative to suffer the consequences of their self-serving lives. However, their crimes are crimes of annoyance and ridicule, and we, the audience, allow their gruesome fates because of this fact. The punishment hardly fits the crime, if you reason it out, and the punishments could have been halted at any time by the protagonist, who has now become a kind of anti-hero by means of inaction: a passive human evil.

For horror-comic adaptation, I was surprised at the level of depth that had been reached in this regard. Though many of the character relationships were loose and hardly believable, and much of the acting was caricature, at best, this glimmer of real threat loomed in the subtext, which is what I love about what people call "bad horror movies." Despite all the "bad," there is an undeniable basis for horror, oft repressed by the viewer in leu of laughter.

Tales From the Crypt on Wikipedia