Tales from the Crypt

It’s quite likely that my first taste of narrative horror was provided by Tales from the Crypt, the luridly tongue-in-cheek anthology series that ran from 1989-96 on HBO. Among the images bobbing in the stew of my earliest conscious memories are the grinning, half-decomposed Crypt Keeper, with his pale blue eyes and stringy white hair; the introductory tracking shot leading up a spooky hill and into the ghoul’s cobweb-strewn manse, accompanied by Danny Elfman’s diabolical theme music; and cadaverous character actor William Hickey, swapping bodies with a younger man piece by piece in an episode I probably shouldn’t have watched as a 5-year-old.

Little did I know then that the program’s lineage traced back to a comic book of the same name, issued biweekly for the first half of the 1950s, until public fear of juvenile delinquency gave rise to a censorious Code like the one imposed on Hollywood two decades before, effectively killing the publication. Reprints notwithstanding, the brand lay dormant until 1972, when England’s house of portmanteau horror, Amicus Productions, opted to sample from it and its two sister comics, The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear, to compile a star-studded terror anthology film. A berobed Ralph Richardson, looking more like Friar Tuck than the TV show’s decaying corpse, binds the tales together as the mysterious and seemingly clairvoyant Crypt Keeper, delineating grim futures to five strangers trapped while touring provincial catacombs.

Freddie Francis, an Oscar-winning cinematographer–turned–Amicus house director, uses the power of implication and delayed gratification to heighten shocks: in an early scene, we intuit a man’s bludgeoning from the splotch of blood that appears on the newspaper he’s holding in front of his face like a screen. Later, we endure several unbearably tense minutes as a subjective camera puts us in the shoes of a disfigured man, with onlookers screaming at the sight of his face, unseen by us. (That’s not to suggest we’re deprived of viewing his charred countenance in good time, along with still-pulsating extracted organs, hands protruding from burial grounds, and plenty more nightmare fodder.)

Because some of the segments are only 10 minutes long, we don’t always get the level of detail that distinguishes great short fiction (like “The Monkey’s Paw,” which inspired a vignette here about an avaricious wife whose wishes are granted all too literally), or episodic TV like The Twilight Zone—a show whose penchant for ironic stingers is echoed in all of the tales’ conclusions. The biggest disappointment is the Crypt Keeper himself: Richardson reportedly completed his scenes in one day, which is easy to believe, given how underutilized the superb actor is in his sadly perfunctory framing story. In contrast, Nigel Patrick excels as a martinet who runs a home for the blind with heartless and self-serving efficiency, getting his just desserts in nasty and elaborately gruesome style; and Joan Collins demonstrates real acting chops as a murderess who runs afoul of a Santa-garbed maniac on Christmas Eve. Best of all, Peter Cushing delivers one of his finest performances in the uncharacteristically warm (and poignantly autobiographical) role of a kindly but grief-stricken widower. The typically elegant actor appears shabby and unshaven as an elderly garbage collector whose neighbors enact a calculated scheme to ruin his life. For all the film’s implied and depicted gore, the most horrific thing it shows us is the light in his eyes dimming as he reads a stack of hateful “valentines” and slowly grasps the infinitude of human cruelty.