Tales from the Crypt

Ah, HBO. Here in the year 2014, those three little initials are shorthand for quality, original programming; small screen event television almost certain to be immeasurably superior to the megabucks offerings of your local multiplex. The network also boasts a rich tradition of brining monsters into our living rooms, with the unsavoury actions of Livia Soprano, Gyp Rosetti, Cy Tolliver and Joffrey Baratheon horrifying viewers of all walks of life. Way back in the late 1980s, however, HBO introduced us to an altogether different kind of miscreant; a wisecracking living corpse, a teller of tall tales that focussed on vampires, zombies and the evil that men do. Jackanory it most certainly wasn’t – we’re referring, of course, to the legendary Tales from the Crypt. In the 80s, TV anthology horror was as much a fixture as leg warmers, John Hughes movies and the musical stylings of Duran Duran. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone had enjoyed a redux, James Coburn invited us to his Darkroom, a certain pizza-faced dream demon hosted Freddy’s Nightmares, and genre enthusiasts were gripped by the Ray Bradbury Theater. Perhaps the most prosperous purveyor of small screen shivers was producer Richard Rubinstein, who enjoyed phenomenal success with Tales from the Darkside (the brainchild of none other than George Romero, director of the beloved portmanteau picture Creepshow) and Monsters. Bright and breezy 30-minute creature features with their tongue frequently placed firmly in their cheek, these shows were heavily influenced by the infamous EC horror comics of the 1950s, with a perverse sense of morality at the dark heart of the stories. Those comic books, the source of so much controversy at their heyday, had fuelled the imagination of generations of filmmakers. Titles such as Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear and Shock SuspenStories were the ultimate contraband to the decade’s horror-hungry children, packed with grisly and hilarious capers with a twist in the tale – a quirk of fate that invariably saw the story’s resident scoundrel learn that, in the world of EC, no evil deed goes unpunished. These ten-cent terrors were a sales sensation – a fact that publisher William Gaines kept under wraps for as long as he could, fully aware that the industry operated on a copycat basis whenever someone managed to source a golden goose. Gaines was, of course, entirely correct. By 1953 newsstands were groaning under the weight of EC imitators, with titles such as Chamber of Chills, Tomb of Terror, Adventures into Terror and Worlds of Fear exchanging hands in treehouses throughout America. EC’s titles, however, sat head-and-shoulders above the rest. Unlike most competitors Gaines paid his pencillers handsomely, which ensured eye-popping artwork was complemented by superior wordsmithery – while so many comic book scripts were churned out by hacks, dripping with sweaty desperation and clunky A-to-B storytelling, EC’s team ensured their books were heavy in prose, taking unabashed influence from the likes of Ray Bradbury (to excess, in some cases – an amicable end and agreement was reached when the publisher took to plagiarising Bradbury’s stories). Perhaps the biggest innovation of all was EC’s trio of creepy comperes, dubbed The GhouLunatics - The Crypt Keeper, The Vault Keeper and The Old Witch. These unpleasant urchins introduced a new dynamic to comic book storytelling, bad-mouthing and bickering with one another throughout their groanworthy pun-laden introductions and conclusions, and setting the tone for the anarchic sense of humour that was EC’s stock in trade – as well as reassuring readers of a nervous disposition that the events unfolding on the page were Only A Story. Sadly, the EC horror boom burned as briefly as it did brightly. Comic books were far from a respected artform in Gaines’ era, with campaigns against the format starting as far back as 1940 – Chicago Daily News editor Sterling North described funnybooks as “guilty of a cultural slaughter of the innocents”, while J. Edgar Hoover opined that comics depicting violent crimes were “… extremely dangerous in the hands of the unstable child”. It was a publicity-courting child psychologist by the name of Dr. Frederic Wertham that picked up this baton and ran with it for all its worth, launching a campaign against comic book culture that brought the industry to its knees, nearly bankrupted EC, and changed the face of four-colour publishing forever. Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham’s supposedly scientific study into the link between comic books and juvenile delinquency, has become something of a pop culture phenomenon itself over the years. Ever hear the one about Batman and Robin being a gay couple, and their adventures thinly-veiled homosexual propaganda? That was a Wertham special, as were many more crackpot theories It should be noted that Wertham wasn’t necessarily a bad man, and he certainly had the interests of children at heart. Alas, when it came to comic books he had quite the bee in his bonnet, and seemingly an inability to think straight; Seduction was published in 1954, but Wertham was on record in 1948 as claiming that most of his maladjusted young patients were “comic book addicts”. The fact that most American teenagers in general were “comic book addicts”, and the vast majority had no psychological problems, seemingly held no water with the good doctor. In the words of Gaines himself, “It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.” Sadly, the metaphorical frigid old maids of the US senate committee agreed with Wertham’s philosophies; concerns over the content of comic books grew, and the Comics Magazine Association of America was born. Headed up by John Goldwater, president of the resolutely family-friendly Archie Comics publishing line, the CMAA devised the self-censoring Comics Code, an agreement to ban the words Crime, Horror, Weird and Terror from the titles of comic books, and forbidding “all scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism and masochism”, as well as any depiction of “the walking dead, torture, vampires, ghouls, cannibalism and werewolfism [sic]”. In other words, all the good stuff. This left EC with barely any product to publish (though most retailers had blackballed them by this point anyway – the reputations of Gaines and his company took a real battering over the whole affair), with only the beloved and immortal MAD magazine keeping them afloat. The last EC horror comics shipped in 1954, with a glorious sideswipe from Gaines declaring that “Naturally, with comic magazine censorship now a fact, we at EC look forward to an immediate drop in the crime and juvenile delinquency rate in the United States. We trust that there will be fewer robberies, fewer murders, and fewer rapes!”. Kids moved onto their next craze, and horror comics vanished from contemporary consciousness. Despite this, Tales from the Crypt always had its fans. Amicus Films released a classic anthology adaptation in 1972, bringing five classic scare-strips to the screen, with an equally well-received sequel (entitled Vault of Horror, naturally) following a year later. It was the original stories that lingered long in the memory of those who read them first time around though, with one such reader being Walter Hill – director of The Warriors and, as an uncredited writer on Alien, a man who knew a thing or two about scaring people senseless. Hill devoured reprints of the stories with his writing partner David Giler, and the pair started to dream of a new movie adaptation. Things started to take off in 1983, when Hill and Giler convinced uber-producer Joel Silver to jump aboard the project. Silver was keen, and purchased the rights to the EC catalogue from William Gaines for a bargain price. The next Hollywood big-hitter to join the team was Richard Donner, a huge fan of the source material in his teenage years in the 1950s – and, as the director of the superlative Superman, a man who knew a thing or two about adapting classic American comic book stories for the screen. The project meandered in development hell for a few more years, until Joel Silver reconnected with Robert Zemeckis on the set of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Shooting the breeze with the director, Silver mentioned that he was now considering adapting Tales as a cable show, which piqued the interest of Zemeckis no end; cable meant breaking free of the censorship shackles of network television, and ensured that EC’s excesses could be presented on screen in all their goofy, gory glory. Zemeckis signed on as the shows fifth musketeer, sharing a joint Executive Producer credit with Hill, Giler, Silver and Donner, Gaines gave his blessing to the idea, and HBO snapped up the show. Suddenly, Tales from the Crypt had left the realm of dream project and was a reality – and five of the busiest men in Hollywood had an episode each to deliver. The first season of Tales from the Crypt, comprising of just six episodes, aired on Saturday nights in the summer of 1989. The show was an immediate ratings success, and it’s not hard to see why; in addition to the talent on both sides of the camera (the founding quintet were joined by genre legend guest directors Mary Lambert and Tom Holland, and stars such as William Sadler, Lea Thompson, Amanda Plummer and Joe Pantoliano), these Tales were like nothing that had been seen before, comic books brought to vivid life before our very eyes.

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