Available from Amazon(US only).
Original air date: June 1989 – July 1996 (US)
Produced by: HBO
Starring: John Kassir as the voice of the Crypt Keeper
Tales From The Crypt was a seven-season horror anthology show based on a number of EC Comics titles popular in the Fifties. As well as the Tales From The Crypt comic, the show drew very direct inspiration from Haunt Of Fear, Vault Of Horror, Crime SuspenStories and Shock SuspenStories. The owner of EC Comics, William M. Gaines, was credited at the start of each episode as having originally published the stories.
The series would have struggled to be any truer to its source material. Most episodes were direct adaptations of the comics they imitated and, as a result, maintained the dark humour and structural sting in the tail. As in the comics, each story was bookended by the Crypt Keeper character (although he was changed from living person to corpse for the show). Even the iconic EC covers were paid homage in the Crypt Keeper segment preceding each tale.
Executive-produced by some pretty impressive names, Richard Donner (Superman, The Goonies) and Robert Zemeckis (Back To The Future) among them, Tales became a playground for some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, both in front of and behind the camera. Martin Sheen, Christopher Reeve and Demi Moore were just a few of the established actors to grace the small screen at a time when it was considered a poor relation to the movies. Tales From The Crypt was attracting plenty of big-name directors to go with this thespian talent but, equally, it was seen by many as a way to branch out from acting and give directing a try. Michael J. Fox, Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger all directed episodes while they were best-known for their on-screen performances.
Over the course of its 93 episodes, Tales From The Crypt horrified and amused in equal measure. While not every episode was an instant classic, the misses usually had some redeeming feature that made them every bit as watchable as the hits. Where else, for example, could you see Lea Thompson (Marty McFly’s mother from Back To The Future) doing her best impression of a Noo Yawk street-walker who says things like “You touch me again, I’ll shoot your dick off,” and being the cause of the hammiest death ever by an actor playing a pimp?
The theme tune which played over the end credits of the show was composed by none other than Danny Elfman, whose other soundtrack work includes numerous Tim Burton movies, Peter Jackson’s The Frighteners (which itself was originally intended to be a Tales From The Crypt movie) and the main theme to The Simpsons.
The EC Comics horror and suspense titles ceased publication in1954 as a result of what many saw as persecution by the recently introduced Comics Code, which – in an effort to curb juvenile delinquency – prohibited the use of the words ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ in titles and banned the depiction of werewolves, zombies and just about everything else Gaines’ books were known for. The EC Comics archives are available from Amazon in various collections.
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