Tales From the Crypt Season One Review

Mmm … another old classic comes out of the vault and on to DVD …

When Tales From the Crypt made its appearance on television back in ’89 I was, frankly, completely ignorant of its importance. EC Comics? Never heard of them. The stack of talented directors, producers and actors involved? Sure, I’d seen some of their films, but did I really understand who they were? Nope. All I knew at the time was that, not being a real big fan of puns, the half rotted away narrator made me groan in dismay an awful lot. Coming back to it on DVD now, though, there really is a staggering amount of history and talent at play …

Based on tales from the classic horror stories published by EC Comics back in the fifties – stories that triggered congressional hearings and the creation of the Comics Code of America – Tales From the Crypt was an aggressive mix of horror and comedy brought to the screen for HBO by Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver, and Walter Hill with the direct input of EC publisher William Gaines. You can literally not over state the cultural importance of those classic old EC Comics and this group of hugely influential film makers approached the stories purely as fans, bringing them to the screen as purely and directly as they could, to the point of frequently using the original comics as storyboards.

The six episodes of the first season feature an axe wielding Santa Claus, renegade taxidermy, an out of work executioner plying his trade in public, a rapidly aging call girl and a young Joe Pantoliano as a circus sideshow performer who has had the nine lives of a cat surgically grafted into his body so that he can die repeatedly for fun and profit. Remarkably well produced, particularly for television, the Tales blend of gore and self aware humor has proven hugely influential and the stories stand up remarkably well. While the transfers do show a bit of age – there is the occasional bit of spotting on the transfers – they are remarkably well preserved and generally very clean.

As good as the shows themselves are, as essential for classic horror fans, the big prize here for me is a documentary produced in 2004 charting the rise and fall of EC Comics with new interviews with the writers and artists, the daughter of William Gaines, archival footage from the congressional hearings that spelled an end for horror comics in the US, as well as conversations with a pair of comic historians and current artists influenced by the old EC books – R.L. Stine, George Romero and John Carpenter. Clocking in jus under an hour the doc is jammed full of fascinating information that sets Tales From the Crypt into its full context. It’s a basic talking head doc, yes, but those heads are jammed full of first hand information of a long dead era and they make for absolutely fascinating viewing. Good stuff.