Editorials
[Spoilers] The Devil Is in the Details of ‘Ready or Not’
Spoiler Warning: This article contains plot details.
On the day of her wedding, Grace (Samara Weaving) is meeting many of her in-laws for the first time. Her groom, Alex (Mark O’Brien), has been estranged from his family for the entirety of their relationship, and the family members she has met- like his drunk brother Daniel (Adam Brody)- haven’t left a great impression. Even still, Grace grew up in foster homes with no real family of her own, so she’s eager to please them. No matter how bizarre the requests, like participating in family game night on her wedding night. Grace soon learns just how high the stakes are, but for those paying attention and willing to play along, the devil is in the details and hiding in plain sight.
We can thank Rosemary Woodhouse and a key scene in Rosemary’s Baby for teaching us how to deal with anagrams in horror. When she receives the book All of Them Witches and is told the name is an anagram, she uses scrabble tiles to rearrange it until she discovers with dawning horror that it’s referring to her not so benign neighbor.
In Ready or Not, the driving force behind the entire plot is also an anagram – Mr. Le Bail: the Hasbro gamemaster to the Le Domas clan, and the source of their wealth. Patriarch Tony Le Domas (Henry Czerny) explains the family history, in which their ancestor bested a series of games orchestrated by Mr. Le Bail and granted them obscene riches in return. To keep it, and their lives, anyone marrying into the family must play a game of Mr. Le Bail’s choosing, via his card box. It’s fitting, then, that Mr. Le Bail’s name is a puzzle game to solve as well.
Le Bail is an anagram for Belial.
As for the Le Domas family name, that’s a trickier puzzle to solve. In ancient Rome, a domus was a specific type of house inhabited by the upper class. That fits. Centuries ago, those with the surname Domas were typically laborers and farmers, which lines up with Tony’s story of their ancestor who sold their family to the devil. But, in keeping with the anagram theme, Le Domas spells out Alex’s eventual betrayal of Grace, “A. Sold Me”; or it might simply reference how the Le Domas’ sell themselves to Belial in general. Of course, screenwriters Gary Busick and Ryan Murphy had something more thematically fitting in mind: fallen angel Asmodel. No matter how you rearrange it, their surname is a warning.
Being that the family is in league with the devil, literally, it becomes clear that this bizarre game night ritual is only an initiation into the Le Domas family if they’re deemed worthy. By worthy, I mean corruptible or morally impure. When Emilie’s (Melanie Scrofano) husband Fitch (Kristian Bruun) married into the family, Mr. Le Bail dictated his game to play was Old Maid, a card game for children. Fitch laughed off his confusion, but Mr. Le Bail pegged his personality from the outset. Like his wife, Fitch isn’t the brightest bulb in the clan but he can be counted on to give his support, no matter how badly he botches it. Similarly, Daniel’s wife Charity (Elyse Levesque) was tasked with playing Chess by Mr. Le Bail, a game of strategy. Charity reveals herself to have been a strategic social climber with a death grip on her married into wealth, so that too is a perfect fit.
As for Grace’s unfortunate receipt of the Hide and Seek card, that’s also easy to understand as the movie progresses; her tenacious will to survive and unbending moral code meant Mr. Le Bail realized she wouldn’t be the soul-selling type come dawn.
(L to R) Kristian Bruun, Melanie Scrofano, Andie MacDowell, Henry Czerny, Nicky Guadagni, Adam Brody, and Elyse Levesque in the film Ready or Not. Photo by Eric Zachanowich. © 2019 Twentieth Century Fox
Being a Le Domas family member means more than just wedding night pacts with Belial. There are sacrifices to be made on the regular. The first overt insight into this is when Grace finds the family stable as a potential hiding spot. It’s not filled with the typical horses, though, but goats. Grace is understandably too busy to stop and ponder why the Le Domas’ have a stable full of goats, but those who have connected the Belial dots know. It’s confirmed when the perpetually conflicted Alex confesses to a family member later how much it bothers him that slitting goats’ throats on the regular feels normal. The devotion to Mr. Le Bail is steadfast, regardless whether some Le Domases really grasp what that means.
Because many of the family members question the truth behind Mr. Le Bail and if they really could die at dawn if Grace isn’t sacrificed, Ready or Not tries to play the events a little ambiguous. Is the family just maniacally insane, or are their lives at serious risk? But as the saying goes, the devil is hiding in plain sight. The answers are there from the beginning.
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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