Editorials
‘The Return of the Living Dead’ and Its Most Memorable Zombie, Tarman [It Came From the ‘80s]
It Came From the ‘80s is a series that pays homage to the monstrous, deadly, and often slimy creatures that made the ‘80s such a fantastic decade in horror.
George A. Romero may have set a terrifying new standard for modern zombie movies, but it was Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Lifeforce, Total Recall) who proved just how funny zombies could be. Filled with outlandish humor, punk rock attitude, and endlessly quotable lines, The Return of the Living Dead remains one of the best horror comedies of all time. The bumbling humans fighting their way through an accidental zombie outbreak found an opposing foe far smarter and more talkative than zombies that came before. Many of which standout in a cast of colorful characters. Ahead of them all, though, stands Tarman, one of horror’s most endearing and expressive undead.
Tarman is the ground zero zombie in The Return of the Living Dead. When Frank (James Karen) shows new employee Freddy (Thom Mathews) the ropes at the Uneeda Medical Supply warehouse, he leaves no corner of the place uncovered. Including the large canisters in the basement containing military chemical 2-4-5 Trioxin, and a corpse, of course. Frank decides to show off further by testing the drum’s sturdiness; he pierces it instead. It lets loose the gas that reanimates all of the dead in the vicinity. Considering the warehouse is adjacent to a cemetery, well, it’s terrible news for the living. When Freddy’s friends come looking for him, they find the gangling, slimy corpse from the cannister, lovingly dubbed Tarman for his oozing tar-like appearance. Tarman is very, very excited to be in the presence of live brains. Poor Suicide (Mark Venturini) becomes breakfast.
A significant component of a special makeup effects artist’s job is problem-solving. They have to adapt and find viable solutions under the pressures of time and financial restraints, consistently. The production for this film came with a whole new layer of difficulty for Kenny Myers (The Crazies, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End) and his team. That’s because he was hired three weeks into the six-week shoot, after the film’s original makeup effects artist had been fired. Since all of the previous artist’s work had fallen apart after three weeks of filming, it meant Myers and crew had to start over.
Luckily, they didn’t have to start entirely from scratch; production designer William Stout (The Mist, Pan’s Labyrinth) was overseeing the shoot and had a lot of watercolor sketches of the living dead to model the makeups after. The previous artist had already created Tarman, which had already received some camera time, so Myers could only improve and tweak the design. His first step was to make the undead character as expressive as Stout’s sketches.
He started with the eyes; the original look featured painted ping pong balls, but Myers gave them more depth, new irises with lenses, and then coated them with epoxy for that glazed, life-like look. He hired a seamstress to rebuild the suit entirely, which was then covered with methylcellulose for the slimy effect.
While Allan Trautman (The Happytime Murders) played Tarman, the closeup of the zombie biting into Suicide’s skull was played by Myers’ hand, who rigged the head of the Tarman suit to work as a puppet. He and his team created an insert for the mouth the hide his hand as he puppeteered the biting action. The crew made a fake head for Suicide out of gelatin for the closeup of the bite.
Though his on-screen time is relatively brief, Tarman remains one of horror’s most memorable monsters of all time. From the way his eyes get big with excitement, to the way he gurgles out that iconic word, “Braaains!”; it’s endearing and downright impressive when you consider how much turmoil went on behind the scenes in bringing him to life.
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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