Editorials
The ‘Indiana Jones’ Supernatural Horror Movie That Almost Was
Considering the face-melting, heart-ripping, accelerated aging and giant man-eating ants, the Indiana Jones franchise has always flirted with horror. Some of his adventures dabbled a little more than others; there’s a reason Temple of Doom outraged the PG-13 rating into existence. With the exception of spin-off novels and comics, in which the good Doctor has fought vampires, discovered dinosaurs, defeated an army of gorilla slaves and survived a place literally named Horror Island, Indiana Jones hasn’t tackled an out-and-out horror story on the big screen.
That’s not to say he didn’t come close.
In the summer of 1977, on a beach somewhere in Hawaii, two directors were hiding from the world. Steven Spielberg had barely survived the grueling production of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas didn’t want to know how badly his sci-fi gamble Star Wars was bombing. They were musing about other projects when Lucas brought up an idea he’d been toying with for a while, a Saturday matinee James Bond. He told Spielberg he had an entire trilogy planned for his old-fashioned hero and they shook hands on the spot.
That character turned out to be Indiana Jones, and George Lucas turned out to be a liar.
Lucas only had loose concepts for adventures beyond Raiders of the Lost Ark and certainly no plans for a connected trilogy. When success all but demanded a sequel, Lucas pitched two very different, very persistent ideas – a story about the Chinese legend of the Monkey King and another set entirely in a haunted castle. Spielberg vetoed both. The Monkey King idea was too far-fetched and he’d had his fill of ghosts producing 1982’s Poltergeist.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom opened in the summer of 1984 to an eager, confused public. It was darker, grosser and altogether less family-friendly than its predecessor. It had its fans (and more over time), but plenty of critics and baffled parents considered it an ugly insult to taste. Many compared it unfavorably to another 1984 adventure movie, Romancing the Stone. Despite being written before Raiders, everybody and their extended families called it a rip-off, but that still counted as a compliment considering the gloom of Doom. Regardless of the reception, Indiana Jones’s second adventure became the third-highest grossing movie of 1984. But the real damage, the damage behind-the-scenes, was already done.
Spielberg was hurt. Backlash over the film’s juvenile gags and careless depiction of Indian culture took on a personal sting. He needed to step away from big-budget B-movies, to prove his maturity as a filmmaker. But that didn’t stop George Lucas from working his old sequel ideas with a writer who almost made too much sense.
Diane Thomas was waiting tables in a roadside diner when she sold her script, Romancing the Stone, to Michael Douglas for $250,000. It was the eighth highest-grossing movie of 1984 on a third of Temple of Doom’s budget. The press deemed her a screenwriting “Cinderella.” Lucas took note.
Thomas’s script followed Indiana Jones on a Universal Horror-style adventure into a sprawling, haunted castle as per Lucas’s long-simmering concept. Unfortunately, she only finished the first draft before her untimely death in 1985. Not long after, Spielberg passed with the Poltergeist defense for a second time. But George Lucas wouldn’t abandon his Indiana Van Helsing idea that easily, so he found another writer from a familiar neighborhood.
Chris Columbus, fresh off of Gremlins, the fourth highest-grossing movie of 1984, took Lucas’s other direction and turned out several drafts for “Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.” At least one of these drafts, with the alternate title “Indiana Jones and the Garden of Life,” has since found its way online and provides a startling reminder of how many franchise “rules” were only cemented by Last Crusade. Columbus’s “Monkey King” includes, among other assorted strangeness, adorable pygmy sidekicks, steampunk Nazis with machine gun arms and a scene where Indiana Jones outruns a three-story-tall, one-hundred-foot long tank on the back of a rhino.
The oddest part, however, might be the opening gambit, which manages to squeeze Lucas’s entire haunted castle concept into about ten pages.
The year is 1937. Indiana Jones is on vacation in Scotland and struggling to catch trout when torch-wielding villagers interrupt him. They’re crippled with fear over the latest in series of grisly murders. How grisly, you ask?
Jones, along with Inspector Scotsman MacStereotype, are enlisted to solve the case once and for all. The villagers can barely even offer ambiguous warnings about the killer not being human before a mysterious light draws the heroes to:
From there, it becomes Indiana Jones and the House of Dracula. Jones follows disembodied laughter down the castle’s labyrinthine halls, through ornate bedrooms covered in cobwebs and macabre detail. The local police get picked off one-by-one, disappearing in a split-second of darkness or, well:
Eventually, after falling through a subterranean crypt and fighting hellhounds, Indiana Jones confronts the allegedly immortal master of the house, Baron Seagrave, only for a pair of seven-foot-tall suits of armors to animate and attack. After he drops a chandelier on them, Jones holds a sword to Seagrave’s cackling throat until the authorities arrive.
Then the script casually confirms the existence of non-divine ghosts in the Indiana Jones universe:
“Indiana Jones and the Monkey King” didn’t pass Steven Spielberg’s muster either. He found it too far-fetched for an Indy adventure and it’s easy to see why. Not long after, Lucas would dig up another old sequel conceit, which Spielberg once dismissed as too spiritual. But this time he’d change his mind on the Holy Grail.
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was the second biggest box office smash of 1989. And even if it’s not exactly haunted, Lucas finally got his castle…
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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