Editorials
Hello Boils and Ghouls: The Legacy of “Tales From the Crypt”
HBO’s horror anthology series Tales From the Crypt premiered 27 years ago today. It would be selfish to solely credit the HBO series for it’s footprint in the horror genre, so to truly understand the legacy that Tales From the Crypt has left behind, one must go all the way back to October of 1950, when the first issue of Entertaining Comics’ (formerly Educational Comics) Tales From the Crypt (then known as The Crypt of Terror) was unleashed upon the world.
In 1950, William Gaines, son of EC’s founder Maxwell Gaines, realized that he and his editor Al Feldstein both sought to create the same type of horror fiction in a post-World War II era when male readers had grown weary of the standard detective comic books that were being released at the time. Readers were demanding something more risqué. They wanted something with lots of gore. Gaines and Feldstein begane to inject elements of horror into their crime stories, and thus paved the way for Tales From the Crypt. No issue was more important than Issue #15 of Crime Patrol, titled “Return From the Grave!” This particular issue, which was the December 1949/January 1950 issue, served as the introduction of the Crypt Keeper, functioning as the host of the story. By the time issue #17 rolled around, Gaines and Feldstein had changed the title of the series from Crime Patrol to The Crypt of Terror. After three issues of that had been published, the series was renamed Tales From the Crypt in the October/November 1950 issue. The series would go on to publish 27 issues before ending in 1955. The final publication was the February/March 1955 Issue (#46).
Of course, Tales From the Crypt wasn’t the only horror series for EC Comics (It doesn’t make a lot of sense does it? That expands to Entertainment Comics Comics.). EC also had The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear to keep up with. Each series had their own host: The Crypt Keeper for Tales, the Vault Keeper for Vault and the Old Witch for Haunt. Each host would invade the other series and trade barbs with the other hosts, while constantly trying to one-up each other. Their sole purpose was to add some levity to juxtapose the sheer horror of the tales being told within the comics.
The Crypt Keeper didn’t always start out as the emaciated skeleton we know today. Hi initial appearance was that of a man in a long robe. He eventually grew more and more grotesque (and more humorous) in the comics before being portrayed by British actor Ralph Richardson in the 1972 film adaptation. It wasn’t until 1989 when HBO premiered their anthology series Tales From the Crypt that the Crypt Keeper took on his now iconic look.
Five Decades of Crypt Keepers
In the mid-50s, horror comics were criticized by authority figures and were thought to have caused delinquency among minors, which was becoming more of a problem in America. As a result, many restrictions were placed on comic books (they were forbidden from depicting zombies, vampires and other monsters), thereby making it nearly impossible to maintain the creative liberties they had once held. Gaines cancelled Tales From the Crypt and EC’s other horror series, releasing a final issue for February/March 1955 (Issue #46).
The world would go without another taste of Tales From the Crypt until 1972, when the aforementioned British film adaptation was released. Two of the five stories included in the film were adapted from Tales From the Crypt while the other three from from Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear. It received moderately positive reviews and was able to earn back its budget of £170,000. The following year saw the release of Vault of Horror, which served as the sequel to Tales From the Crypt. Oddly enough, none of the vignettes in Vault of Horror actually came from the Vault of Horror . Four of the vignettes were adapted from Tales From the Crypt, with one coming from Shock SuspenStories. In a questionable creative decision, the Vault Keeper was left out of the film.
On June 10, 1989, HBO premiered its adaptation of EC’s Tales From the Crypt, simply titled Tales From the Crypt. To fully understand the cultural significance of Tale From the Crypt, one must realize that in 1989 HBO was primarily known as a premium cable channel where you would watch uncensored movies. The channel didn’t have the amazing lineup of television series that it has right now. When Tales From the Crypt premiered, it was the first show put on television that was able to escape the censorship put in place by the network standards and practices and put as much profanity, gore, sex/nudity and drugs as they wanted on the screen. Because of this, it put HBO on the minds of television viewers everywhere. Not everyone was in love with the series, but enough viewers watched it to make it one of HBO’s biggest hits (which makes it even more depressing that it isn’t available on HBO Go due to rights issues). The pedigree of the show’s executive producers is quite impressive, made up of several talented film directors and producers: Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver, Walter Hill and David Giler.
In this adaptation of the EC Comics series, the Crypt Keeper was a ghastly skeleton puppet voiced by the superb John Kassir and operated by the late Van Snowden (who did the puppetry for Chucky in the original Child’s Play). Since the series premiered 27 years ago, HBO’s incarnation of the Crypt Keeper has become the definitive version of the character, with Kassir’s memorable high-pitched cackle permanently ingrained in people’s memories. As for the episodes themselves, the stories were taken not just from EC’s Tales From the Crypt, but their entire collection of horror comics (the aforementioned Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, Shock SuspenStories, as well as Crime SuspenStories, and Two-Fisted Tales).
My association with Tales From the Crypt is that of it being a taboo. Tales From the Crypt, Married….With Children and The Simpsons were the main three shows I remember my parents forbidding me from watching as a kid (I was born in 1989). Hell, I wasn’t even allowed to watch the animated series Tales From the Cryptkeeper and that show was made for kids, but I digress. Before I became more seasoned in the horror genre, I had actually thought that the television show was an adaptation of the films Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood (they used to play on Syfy, formerly Sci-Fi Channel, all the time). Silly me.
As many of you may know, a reboot is being planned for TNT under the supervision of M. Night Shyamalan. While that may sound like a terrible idea, anyone who watches Wayward Pines knows that Shyamalan can actually do very good television. Everyone had an initial scare when it was announced that the reboot would not feature the Crypt Keeper, but luckily those worries have been alleviated by Shyamalan himself.
Take some time today to celebrate the 27th anniversary of HBO’s Tales From the Crypt! The DVDs are selling for affordable prices on Amazon so there’s really no excuse not to! Don’t forget to share your memories of the series in the comments below. To read more on the subject check out our own Daniel Kurland’s 15 Best Episodes of the series,a television show he is extremely passionate about, since he so rudely stole writing duties from our own Jess Hicks. Have fun, kiddies!
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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