Big name directors turn the classic EC horror comics of the ’50s into an HBO cable series.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
The only time Tom Holland ever worked in TV was as director of a segment for Steven Spielberg's AMAZING STO- RIES. The episode was called “Miscalculation,” and Holland, who has directed such distinguished horror features as FRIGHT NIGHT and CHILD'S PLAY, recalled having had a scene of his reshot because he had displayed, he later learned froma story editor, too muchcleavage.
It wasn't the kind of experience that made Holland want to quit his day job in features for a career slinging saccharin on the tube. But when producer Joel (48 HOURS, ROAD- HOUSE, LETHAL WEAPON, DIE HARD) Silver asked him to direct a segment of his new cable series, TALES FROM THE CRYPT, handed him a story culled from EC's mid- 50s Vault of Horror comic book and told him he could do virtually anything he cared to with it—within the bounds of budget—Holland signed up for scale-plus-10 and was damned happy, he said, to get it.
Holland liked the idea of doing feature-like work for TV without being required to invest the time, energy and commitment a movie demands. He was also encouraged by the track record of the producers involved and by the company he would be keeping—Robert (BACK TO THE FUTURE, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?) Zemeckis, Walter (48 HOURS, THE WAR- RIORS) Hill, and Richard (LETHAL WEAPON, SUPER- MAN) Donner had preceded him in directing the show's pilot trilogy of tales. And doubtless he was consoled by the freedom from the hassle of network timidity and interference that TALES FROM THE CRYPT seemed to offer.
Indeed, once the big guns had been brought aboard, Silver apparently had little trouble attracting such lesser lights as Holland, Howard (PRETTY IN PINK) Deutch, and Mary(PETSEMATARY) Lambert to the project (though attempts to sign up Penny Marshall fell through). Silver was even able tocut the per-cpisode budgets on this second slew of stories from the $850,000 meted out to his heavy hitters to between $500,000 and $600,000 for his second stringers. The two sets of trilogies will be distributed abroad by Universal/ MCA as two feature films, with the first to hit video stores in this country in October. And HBO has picked up its option ontheseries for 19 more shows,
Late last May, after wrapping his episode, Holland gazed out at the San Fernando Valley sprawled idyllically in the muddy mist below his breakfast patio and chortled like the hooded old EC Comic Vault-Keeper himself. “If 1 had handed in my episode [“Lover, Come Hack to Me"] to AMAZING STORIES, “he said, the laughter welling up from a place deep within his tennis-taut abdomen, “they would have had a fucking heart attack.”
EC Comics, you see, had been notorious for their pronounced lack of most redeeming social and aesthetic attributes, offering a graphically horrific layer cake comprised, according to monster meister Stephen King, of “terror on top, horror below, and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion.”
Silver and HBO believed, however, that the comics could, if handled properly, be called on to scare the stuffing out of audiences weaned ona disquieting dict of thin network pablum and the more visceral brew available on screen and cassette.
Holland's episode certainly gave William Gaines, founder of the EC Comics line of horror titles The Haunt of Fear, Tales From the Crypt and Vault of Horror—and the man perhaps best known as the creator of Mad Magazine—a few arrythmic moments. The silver-locked and gray-bearded Gaines, who still churns out Mad Magazine {rom his own private vault—a hideously over-air conditioned [3th floor Madison Avenue office in New York—shuddered slightly while contemplating Holland's episode (which Holland wrote with former writing partner Michael McDowell),
“I've seen 15 or 20 scripts,” Gaines explained one Friday, early last March, “and by and large I liked them. The producers seem to respect the material, and they have accepted my advice on several plot points. But there is a lot of sex and profanity in some of these scripts which | don't always think is necessary.
“Of course our comics had a lot of gore.and that madesome people uncomfortable. I myself never had a problem with the gore. But, my God, you've got people humping each other in these things.”
At 67, Gaines doesn’t feel comfortable with humping not in plain view anyway. Dragging people's kishkes along the floor or stuffing the family jewels into a blender these practices he doesn't mind, not even with kids watching. But mildly hot sex and what Gaines calls “cuss words” make him nervous.
TALES FROM THECRYPT as envisioned by producers Silver, William (TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE) Teitler, and Donner, however, is decidedly not intended for kids, even if they themselves were exposed to and developed a reverence for the comics as children.
The pilot trilogy screened last June 10 turned out to bea potent, if somewhat inconsistent brew, largely, itis rumored by sources very high in the production, because of some initial trouble with the quality of the scripts—most of which, thankfully, were eventually ironed out,
The Hill adaptation of “The Man Who Was Death,” which was written by Hilland Robert (ACTION JACKSON) Reneau and which starred Bill (K-9) Sadler, as an out-of-work executioner, emerged as a fully updated, highly stylized little feature performed with wit, expertly cut and reminiscent of Hill’s 48 HOURS in its comic book intensity. The Zemeckis episode, Fred (THE MON- STER SQUAD) Dekker’s adaptation of “And All Through the House” featuring Larry (L.A. LAW) Drake as a murdering Santa Claus and Zemeckis’ wife, Mary Ellen Trainor, was less successful, working better as an exercise in comedy than terror. Gaines, however, thought the Zemeckis episode was “excellent—the best anyone has ever done,” and that all of EC’s horror stories had been intended as comedy and should be interpreted as such.
Donner’s rendition of “Dig That Cat—He’s Real Gone,” which was penned by Terry (DEAD HEAT) Black and starred Joe(MIDNIGHT RUN, EMPIRE OF THESUN) Pantoliano as a death-defying carnival performer, contained some interesting cutting, but also seemed oddly understocked in the chill department. It's premise of a gland transplant from a cat giving Pantoliano nine lives is certainly amusing and the segment is expertly filmed and performed, but ina time of genome mapping and hot and cold running fusion, who can believe any of this malarkey?
he inevitable question is this: in the age of sordid tabloid TV, can this TALES FROM THECRYPTstill pack the wallop that made such an indelible impression upon Stephen King and hordes of horror writers, filmmakers. and aficionados, by carving out a niche for itself somewhere out there in Stuart Gordon terri- | tory? Or will this series, which however unfettered aesthetically, cannot eScape the constraints of time and budget, ultimately devolve into being horror’s answer to HAPPY DAYS?
Even Gaines realizes that some of the veins mined by EC have, by now, been tapped dry. “The cornier vampire and werewolf stories we did just won't work today,” he said. “We killed them off.” The remaining stories haven't lost all of their juice; a few of them, in fact, appear to be virtually timeless, if excessively spare for dramatic adaptation. But those who rediscover the comics in the TV adaptations or in expensive, boxed hardcover sets which sell fora hefty price, may regard the once-potent shocks contained in their pages as fairly quaint. These are, after all, the days of Ted Bundy, wilding, and AIDS.
Still, it’s strong stuff for HBO, a cable company whose very name—Home Box Office—implies it places a premium on family entertainment, The cabler’s embrace of TALES FROM THECRYPT comes fromthe realization that merely occupying a niche as a clearing house for feature films that have stopped moving at the corner video shop will not propel them into, or sustain them during the raving Ws. “Original programming,” explained Chris Albrecht, senior vice president for original proprogramming at HBO's West Coast headquarters and the man responsible for such recent | anthology shows as VIETNAM WARSTO- RIES, is the only thing we can offer our subscribers exclusively. We can givethemadult |_ fare with a feature film sensibility that simply is not available on network television.”
Gaines, who serves as “creative consultant” on the HBO series, intends to see that the comics are done justice to. Gaines has been fiercely protective of the EC Comics properties in the past. In the early ‘70s, producers Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky of English-based Amicus Productions turned out two ECinspired anthology features TALES FROM THECRYPT (1971) and VAULT OF HOR- ROR (1972). Though the films were commercially, if notartistically successful (see 2:4:5 and 3: 1:26), Gaines pulled the plug before Amicus could mount THE HAUNT OF FEAR or TALES FROM THE INCRED- IBLE, the latter based on EC's science fiction comics.
“| stopped doing business with Rosenberg because I was not happy with the way they would never take any of my suggestions,” said Gaines, “I felt they were screwing with the stories, which offended me. Although we made a lot of money with the deal, I called it quits.”
According to Walter Hill, TALES FROM THE CRYPT was subsequently optioned by Danny Grodnik, a producer and now the publisher of National Lampoon magazine, who some 10 years ago, approached Hill to direct an episode for a feature adaptation Grodnik was allegedly pitching (unbeknownst to Gaines) to Paramount. Grodnik’s project, Hill noted, was alsoto have showcased episodes by John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, but Paramount is said to have eventually lost interest. Gaines, however, said his only recollection of Grodnik was that he hadannounced his interest to produce a movie based on Mad.
Then there was John Hughes’ 1985 production of WEIRD SCIENCE, which only used the EC Comics title—Gaines said he didn't much care forthe movie. The film’s producers came back and asked to use the title for a prospective TV series, but this time Gaines declined, insisting that he would only do so if his horror material were used in the series, which didn't prove amenable to the producers,
Gaines’ EC comics material “bounced around Hollywood” until 1988, when producer Joel Silver, who Gaines said had been interested in it for longer than he can remember, approached him with a deal. Gaines was sufficiently impressed by Silver's credentials and zeal tosell him the rights to as many of the 500 or so stories that had appeared in EC's various horror and science fiction comics as Silver was prepared to adapt in his series. Once the series came to an end, however, the rights would revert back to Gaines. In return, Gaines was hired as a script consultant and was promised he would sce the scripts chosen for production in advance and that any advice he could proffer would gratefully be taken into account.
o-producer William Teitler was not involved in the formative stages of TALES FROM THECRYPT. He came onto the project in October 1988, a month before Robert Zemeckis was slated to begin shooting his episode. The relatively short amount of time earmarked for preproduction was dictated by Zemeckis’ commitment to begin shooting BACK TO THE FUTURE I and III later that Fall.
“We realized that here was this tremendous opportunity slipping between our fingers,” recalled Teitler, “and we decided not to let Zemeckis get away. So we pulled together Fred Dekker’s script and began to get the project going.”
A soundstage in North Hollywood was quickly rented and a largely non-union production team was assembled. Kevin Yagher, the 26 year-old creator of killer-doll Chucky in Tom Holland's CHILD'S PLAY was brought on to design the animatronic Crypt- Keeper (see sidebar, page 24) and set designers began assembling his inner-sanctum. Richard Edlund of Boss Films, meanwhile, set about designing the series’ quick-paced opening sequence (see sidebar, page 21).
“What seems wonderful to me about this production,” said Teitler, “was that these directors brought the same expectations to these halfhour segments that they brought to WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? or 48 HOURS or LETHAL WEAPON. They are not compromising their artistic vision for television, Quite the opposite. They are merely filling them into a smaller container, telling stories as they are used to telling stories.”
Zemeckis was too young to have read the EC horror comics as a child—he caught them onthe rebound during the 60s, and when Silver suggested he sign on, Zemeckis agreed on the condition that “they be true to the comics in tone and spirit.” Silver assured him that this was his intent and, recalled Zemeckis, “the next day all the comics came to my door, and Joel said pick one.”
Indeed, Zemeckis said he had long harbored the hope of directing a horror film, but that he could not, given the pinnacle his career had reached, become involved in a project of the stature of, say, A NIGHT- MARE ON ELM STREET sequel. “It would have to be loftier than that for me to invest time in a feature,” he said. “Which is too bad, because directing horror is really directing. | would have hated to go through my life as a director without having done it.”
TALES FROM THE CRYPT’s heavy hitters of horror (l to r) are director Richard Donner, producer Joel Silver, director Robert Zemeckis and director Walter Hill, posed on the subterranean set of effects man Kevin Yagher’s Crypt-Keeper, the puppet jokester who hosts the HBO TV series.
“And All Through The House.” the pilot episode directed by Robert Zemeckis, had Lindsey Whitney Barry as the little girl who lets in murdering Santa Claus Larry Drake (right), based on Johnny Craig's 1954 strip trom Vault of Horror #35 (below).
LOOK, MOMMY! LOOK! SANTA CLAUS IS HERE! I LET HIM IN!
Out-of-work executioner Bill Sadler gets a taste of his own medicine in director Walter Hill's noirish “The Man Who Was Death,” based on a strip (below) in the April 1950 first issue of EC's Tales From the Crypt, graphic horror with the ambience of an Edvard Munch.
Some months later, in the big house, a screaming man was dragged toward the electric chair! There was fright in his pallid features, fear in his writhing mouth! I--I’m scared! I don’t want to die! No...no! Stop...stop! Aaaaaggh!
Dekker was brought onto the project by Silver, with whom he had been friendly for some time. The two had long wanted to work together, said Dekker, and the tongue-incheek sensibility Silver recognized in the EC material seemed to recommend the writer, Moreover, said Dekker, “Robert Zemeckis was familiar with my work asa writer and asked that I do his segment.”
Dekker told Zemeckis he wanted to adapt “The Thing From the Grave,” a romantic triangle about a woman with two suitors, one of whom kills the other and the woman as well, Eventually the original suitor rises from the grave and exacts his revenge. “I felt and I said this to everyone recalled Dekker, “that we were lacking the prototypical Tales From The Crypt story, in which there is romantic deceit, treachery, and you always have someone rising from the grave with maggots falling out of their eye-sockets.”
Zemeckis found himself attracted to the Johnny Craig story “All Through the House,” not knowing that it had been adapted for the screen 15 years before by Amicus. Dekker acknowledged the story as one of his own favorites, “But I had nixed it right off because of the Amicus movie.”
Zemeckis was intent on doing an episode which, he said, would be contained both directorially and practically. “1 wanted todosomething onone set and with a small cast—I felt a limited environment would let me do something suspenseful.” Upon learning from Dekker that Amicus had appar- ently felt similarly, Zemeckis, somewhat disheartened, rented the cassette of the first TALES FROM THE CRYPT feature. He decided upon viewing it, however, that what he had in mind for the story was nothing like what had been done.
Dekker said he and Zemeckis collaborated on the story “beat by beat.” But they realized that the comic strip alone, however accomplished, could not possibly sustain half an hour of narrative. Holed up in Zemeckis’ office at Amblin, where Zemeckis was writing his RACK TO THE FUTURE sequels, they devoted three days to embellishing the story's initial “McGuffin” with enough obstacles to flesh out the story to fill the allotted time. Armed with sundry plot points, Dekker sauntered home to bang out a first draft.
Dekker learned to appreciate Zemeckis’ capacities as a writer, which he called “a god- send.” Explained Dekker, “In Hollywood, writers are generally sucked into the black hole of development, meaning that if you agree to write something it is almost a certainty that you will write it five or six times, But Bob knewexactly where he was going, and basically the way | wrote it the first time was the way it was shot. The only thing Bob changed was some dialogue on the set to make the actors more comfortable, and he did come up with one more obstacle for the film’s zinger ending,” which entailed Trainor inadvertently locking herself in a closet from which she watches in terror as the psycho Santa climbs past her into her daughter's upstairs bedroom, one of the series few genuine shocks thus far.
According to Gaines, Zemeckis and Dekker were also initially inclined, as had been Amicus director Freddie Francis I$ years earlier to little effect, to have Trainor, who has just murdered her husband, throttled in full view by the renegade Santa. But Gaines demurred and made his misgivings known to Zemeckis.
“I didn't like the ending of the British version and the Americans, | learned, wanted to do the same thing,” said Gaines. “To Zemeckis* credit, though, | suggested that they just leave her screaming her head off, like we did in the comic. They did, and | think it came off beautifully.”
Zemeckis acknowledged that he felt impelled throughout the production to stick as closely as possible to the intent of the original Craig story. “I have always been a fan of Gaines and I would have hated to think that he'd been disturbed by anything we had done, because we worked hard to keep it pure.
“But there isacertainamount of updating that has to be done—particularly in the area of the attitudes and morality conveyed in the original comics, Also, in the comics, the tale of retribution and the suspense is intellectual, In the film you had to make it visceral. Another thing | thought needed changing was that the comic was told from the murderer's point of view, I have never liked telling stories that way.”
Zemeckis shot his episode in a week, Having emerged from two tortuous years on WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT”, his second sojurn in TV (Zemeckis, like Holland, directed a segment of AMAZING STO- RIES) was, he was purported to have said, “like a trip to Disneyland.”
“I think what TV offers,” he noted, “is the chance to hone your craft a little bit without having immense amounts of money at stake. You can try some things, you can experiment, sort of like whenacomedian tries his stuff out at the Comedy Store before doingan HBO special.
“Doing cable TV basically lets you flex as a film director, If all you ever do is features, you always have tocover your- self. In these you just go for the style—as long as you don't tamper with the material.”
Zemeckis said he cast Larry Drake as the crazed Santa because “he had the right edge and spin on the character, He's playing the intensity of a psychotic character, but he also has his tongue firmly planted incheek.” As for Trainor, with whom he had worked on ROMANCING THE STONE: “She's never done anything this intense before—neither have |, for that matter. It’s a little unsettling having your wife play a murderer.”
Joe Pantoliano as Ulric the Undying in “Dig That Cat... He's Real Gone,” director Richard Donner's episode about 4 carnival daredevil who inherits nine lives from a cat, based on the 1953 strip drawn by Jack Davis (above) from the October issue of The Haunt of Fear #21.
Ladies and gentlemen, Ulric, the Undying, is getting into the coffin now! In a moment, its lid will be sealed and it will be lowered into the grave!
Tom Holland directs Stephen Shellen as a husband about to meet up with an axe in “Lover Come Hack to Me.” Holland said he liked the freedom of working on HBO.
erhaps but for the grace of motion pictures, director Walter Hill expects he would have become a cartoonist or comic book artist. “There are those who say, in fact, that I've achieved my ambition,” he noted somewhat sardonically.
Hill was cight or nine years old when he first encountered EC Comics, and he preferred them over “the stuff the [George] Lucas crowd seemed to like, which was a li.tle too clean for my tastes. The stories in EC were interesting, but it was the renderings by guys like Al Feldstein and Jack Davis that I thought was just breakthrough work.”
Hill first picked “The Man Who Was Death” as the basis for a screen adaptation a decade ago, when he had been approached for the Paramount production that was to have placed him in league with Cronenberg and Carpenter. The art, he recalled, possessed a distinct Munchean quality that appealed to him, while the story—in which a prison executioner finds unemployment not to his liking in the wake of the repeal of the death penalty—suggested to hima character study in the style of an Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.
Unlike Zemeckis, Hill had no reservations about sustaining the narrative through the eyes of his protagonist. In fact, Hill has his executioner talk to the camera, trying to seduce the audience to his point of view, It is a theatrical conceit which, given the fate that awaits him at the end, is somewhat akin to that employed by director Rudolph Mate in the 1949 suspenser D.O.A.
“I wanted to get into the guy’s head,” said Hill. “The trick to this piece, if it works, is that although this man is a seriously twisted, grotesque individual, there is something seductively human about him. Truffaut once said that there are no monsters, only the monstrous. It’s probably as antithetical a statement as you could make regarding an EC comic but I think it’s true.”
Indeed, as Talbot, actor Bill Sadler’s homespun spin on matters of life—and mostespecially death—are oddly engaging. Death, Talbot explains as he makes his rounds through some of the seedier sections of Los Angeles, is a disease which must be confronted honestly and with dignity. “It’s a disease,” he declares. “You eat it, you drink it, you breathe it, you fuck it—we're all pregnant with it. I like death.”
Hill cast Sadler, a relative unknown in a series that has avoided using name-brand Stars, because “he read the hell out of it.” Sadler, who is a country boy from upstate New York, played the Okie cornball executioner to the hilt. “The great thing was I didn't have to direct him,” said Hill. “Sometimes directing is moreacase of Staying out of the way than pushing things. He wasinthere from the first minute I met him and I tried not to break the roll. Instead I concentrated all of my energy on the look of the piece.”
Hill's lack of obtrusiveness during the shoot is characteristic of his style of direction. “I like things to be plastic,” he said. “I don't like showing up with a list of 17 shots. What I like is to rehearse and then figure out how to shoot the scene. Figuring out how to shoot things has always been very easy for me.”
The look Hill got is distinetive—sort of a noir sensibility tinged with early shades of cyberpunk. Initially, Hill said, he had contemplated doing the episode in black and white—an idea that also appealed to his director of photography, John Leonetti, who compared the final product to “a black and white film shot in color.”
“I wanted a lurid comic look,” explained Hill, “a more classic EC visual style. I used a lot of wide-angle lenses, a lot of backlight and a ton of color. The reason | opted for color in the end was I was told I had to do it. Sure I thought it would work in black and white. But I also thought there was a good argument— which I came up with myself—for color. Doing it in black and white would not have been honoring the tradition of EC Comics. We really needed to make a connection to the comics. So there I was arguing against myself and winning.”
Hill does not believe that audiences watching this stuff from the vantage point of the tail-end of a decade not known for its seething social conscience will be put off by the moral tone of these stories, which, he acknowledges, is as grim as can be. “I don't think the times are amoral or immoral any more than any other decade can be said to be so,” said Hill. “The abortiondebate is certainly about peoples’ conceptions of morality. And I think that the debate is going to get bigger.”
If there is any blame to be meted out for the decided dearth of grim Grand Guignol in TV and even features, noted Hill, it should be placed at the feet of studio and TV executives who, he believes, have spent the last 15 years undermining two millennia of dramatic history, mainly by tagging as many of its films as it could with requisite happy endings.
“Hollywood has not only avoided tragedy,” intoned Hill, “they've refused to let it exist. The studios lack the confidence that American audiences will sustain a movie with an unhappy ending. This is worse than silly—it is stiflinga lot of good stories. Hopefully with the advent of original cable programming we can expect to see anend tothis kind of nonsense.”
Yet Hill would not want to pursue a career in TV—not even in the unfettered environment of cable production. The idea was to make little features for the small screen, but Hill discerned some differences in approach. “I covered a little less and didn't make as many shotsas I usuallydo. Youdon't have as much money on the set that you'd have even ina fairly low-budget film. Youjust have to put a finer point on your pencil.”
Hill also hopes that the current spate of comic book adaptations coming out of Hollywood—one which does not seem to be plagued by the campy sensibility and poor production values that have characterized previous waves brings newattentionto what he believes isa distinctively American and much maligned art form. “The American comic book,” noted Hill, “has grown, flowered, regressed, and gone through all of its phases totally without any kind of literary or artistic criticism except in Europe, where they've recognized comics as art for years.
“The thing is, even though film is plastic and comics are two dimensional, they have their economy of approach in common. In comics you have to establish character and plot and atmosphere with very little room to move. They have even less room than you get in TV, and that’s not a lot.”
Walter Hill sets up a shot of convict J. W. Smith in “The Man Who Was Death.”
ou can see Walter Hill directs in low key; Richard Donner, by his own admission, is a screamer. At the North Hollywood soundstage where much of the show is shot, Donner good-naturedly gave everybody a hard time.
The only one of the first three TALES FROM THE CRYPT directors to have worked regularly in television during his formative years, Donner expected to “come in, kick ass, and teach all these non-union kids how to do a show in three days, like we did on the TWILIGHT ZONE.” Donner directed some of the best of the old show, including “The Beast at 20,000 Feet,” as well as at least one of the segments from the revived series
“Except it’s taking eight days, we're going at it till 11 p.m. every night, and I guess I've made a fool of myself in front of a lot of people,” said Donner, only half-jokingly.
Donner, who joined Silver and Teitler on the credit roster as the series executive producer, was shooting LETHAL WEAPON II when Silver suggested he team up with writer Terry (DEAD HEAT) Black and direct an episode. The prospect of a return to TV asa director did not thrill him at first. “When I left TV for motion pictures,” he recalled, “I felt a tremendous weight off my chest, mainly because of all the restrictions in network TV."
Yet the day after Donner wrapped LETHAL WEAPON Il, in March, he showed up in North Hollywood. Maybe being made an executive producer had something to do with it. Or perhaps his willingness to take TV on again stemmed from his recognition that he was being presented with a chance to do the kind of TV he only dreamed might be possible during his early years in the industry.
“I can tell you,” said Donner, “that had this show gone to the networks they would not have done it,”
The selection of the story for Donner’s episode—“Dig That Cat—He’s Real Gone”™—was Black's, who said he liked his horror “goofy,” and that this Story was as goofy as they got. Donner recalled that the episode was culled from one of about 25 comics chosen by Silver's production people as “premium” stories.
Black said he especially enjoyed writing the opening and closing pun-laden “bumpers,” or remarks, about the story for the Crypt-Keeper, who professes, at one point, to be worried about the show being “buried in the wrong time-slot,” or that people might not like Ulric’s “lifeless performance.”
Donner’s reasons forapproving the story were a tad more base: “I love killing people,” he said. “And I hadn't killed so many people in so many different ways since I did THE OMEN.”
Donner said thatasa kid, the comics he read were even raunchier than the stuff Hill claimed to be partial to. “Mostly it was Maggie and Jiggs doing dirty stuff that was premium,” he recalled. For horror, though, nothing beat EC, and their influence, even in film, said Donner, was eminently discernible, “I don't know if [Roman] Polanski read EC comics in Poland as a kid, but we all had these somewhere in our lives and a lot of us were influenced by them. We are all influenced by things we read under the blankets.”
Black, who appeared in the episode as a corpse, recalled having first encountered the material under his own covers as well. “I’d read them ’til I was too scared to go on and I’d put them away. But then I’d be compelled to go back and read them some more. I knew I’d get nightmares but I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Dig That Cat—He's Real Gone” was too fanciful to demand much in the way of updating, but Black noted that Donner proved a regular fountain of “bizarre ideas.” Said Black, “They were all good bizarre ideas, but for the writer it can be a nightmare—you have to keep going back and redoing it.
“Donner came up with all of these great ways for Ulric to die. The comic had him in an electric chair, but they were doing that in the Hill episode and Donner wanted less conventional, more carnival-like modes of execution—the kinds of things you'd do in front ofa paying audience.
“The burial remained, however—it's a marvelous framing device; the guy is alone and isolated, he's slowly dying and can reflect on what's happened. The punch is great even though you suspect all is not going to go well from the first scene. A lot of the old TWI- LIGHT ZONEs Donner did had this circular structure.”
According to Black, the EC story on which the episode is based is a ridiculous story with a nasty edge toit, which made it appropriate for adaptation. He is not convinced, as is Dekker, that there actually isa prototypical Tales From The Crypt story. “What all of these do,” he said, “is share a view of the world in which there is this horrific aspect, or dimension, which you never suspected existed. That this world is in some ways even ghastlier than you could have imagined as a kid under the covers. So the plots, whatever they are, are always secondary to this sense of flavor.”
What the plots do determine, however—and it is this that Donner appeared to have overlooked when he approved his episode—is the level of complexity that will characterize any particular production. Zemeckis had opted for a story that transpires in one house among four people, two of whom serve as little more than ciphers. Although Hill ranged all over Los Angeles with his episode, he too stuck fairly close to his protagonist. “But the silly thing I took on is massive,” said Donner. “It’s a bloody carnival.”
Yet Donner thinks that spending as much time and money shooting these episodes as he and his colleagues did— eight daysand $850,000 each was “nothing less than self-indulgent. You shouldn't even spend $500,000 on a half-hour episode,” sajd Donner, talking now like a producer. “If you're going to shoot the thing likea comic book you have to write scripts to fit the budget. You have to rely on the imagination of your directors, to say, look guys, here are your limitations —now create. That's what we did in TV and that’s how we got out of TV.”
Donner said he may direct another episode if he has the time—and if the series is picked up. He is also hoping to recruit other top-drawer directors. Martin Scorsese, among others, has been approached. “Joe Dante will do one, and Steven [Spielberg] was going to do one—we wrote one for him. I wouldn't say they're banging our doors down out there, but there have been a lot of inquiries from name directors.
“The thing is, there are a lot of bright people out there who haven't had an opportunity to direct and I'dliketogivethema chance. If we can get a good focus group and a good story editor behind this—God willing—we'll go through all 550 EC stories and then go on to original material.”
Robert Zemeckis poses with wife Mary Ellen Trainor and Larry Drake on the set of “And All Through the House.”
omics were never much of a draw for director Howard Deutch as a kid, and he'd never done horror as an adult. And rather than havea bit of fun slumming, as it were, he spent a goodly portion of his time on the set of TALES FROM THECRYPT inaprotective snit because hisstarand girlfriend, Lea (BACK TO THE FUTURE, CASUAL SEX, Deutch’s own SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL) Thompson, had to work 36 hours straight in his episode before being whisked back to the set of BACK TO THE FUTURE I] and III. Thompson's ordeal was caused by the necessity of having her head encased in a special plaster cast by Kevin Yagher so that she could be transformed into a hideous crone. Wreaking this transformation on Thompson, however, was apparently considerably less trying than updating the story in which it was slated to occur, “Only Sin Deep,” the Haunt of Fear story from which the episode had been adapted, was, according to screenwriter Fred Dekker (who was actually earmarked, at one point, to direct the segment), “hopelessly old-fashioned.
“The problem was,” said Dekker, “that as classic as many of these stories are in painting pictures of human depravity, a lot of them are tired. This story especially was far too ‘S0s." Dekker shared his concerns about the story’s lack of believability with the producers, but they insisted that he was wrong. Dekker then suggested that the story be done as a period piece, but that approach, too, was nixed, It was Robert Zemeckis, said Dekker, who saved the story by suggesting that the Thompson character become a drop-dead beauty who wants to give up her profession—the world’s oldest. “That certainly made it work for me,” he said.
Howard Deutch chose the tale, about a girl who pawns her beauty, because of its Faustian, or, as he put it, “Dorian Gray” quality. “I have always been intrigued by the idea of someone making a deal with the devil and getting his comeuppance,” said Deutch. For Deutch, however, the challenge of directing a horror mini-feature for TV (beyond working within the constraints of a significantly curtailed budget) lay, rather, in “striking a balance between the frightening aspects” on the one hand and the “humor and perspective and humanity” on the other
“IL really wanted to do something that I had never done before. The comics offered an opportunity to get involved in a world that is pure and simple and offers us a chance to take us back to our childhoods, At this point in my life, many of my contemporaries and | want very much to relive our childhoods
“I worked on everything in this segment—everything from adapting the script to production design,” said Deutch. “Largely it has been just like directing a feature. The talent has certainly been of that level. Fred Dekker, for instance, is awfully talented at making the transition from the comic to the script form. I think ladded the humor. But I wouldn't say we updated it much—the story does have a period feel to it, which we stuck with.”
Lea Thompson sports Kevin Yagher's old age makeup for “Only Sin Deep,” while cradling a picture of her former beauty. The episode, directed by MTV specialist Howard Deutch, was based on Milt Kamen's April 1954 strip from The Haunt of Fear #24, the story of a female predator who loses her looks (above).
Night shrouded the city. The man lay in the darkness of the alley, unaware, in his alcoholic stupor, of the pilfering hands that rolled him for the tawdry treasure in his pockets. His watch shone in a yellow gleam, matching the gleam of the woman’s calculating eyes. She laughed at this male pick-up of an evening. Men were her tools, her pawns, her prey in this grim game of life. Lorna Vanson laughed again in a throaty purr—as a tigress over her kill. “Thanks, buster! Thanks a lot!”
Tom Holland chose George Evans’ Haunt of Fear story “Lover Come Hack to Me™ because it offered him as much of an opportunity to generate heat as it did chills. In its tale of two ill-fated honeymooners, a kept man marries a bashful but pretty wallflower, only to learn from a haunted vision that the girl’s mother killed her father 20 years before, and that he is about to meet the same fate
“What was particularly interesting for me,” said Holland, “was the voyeurism inherent to the story. This guy is fucking this girl and he thinks he’s King Kong—he'sin control—and then he’s blown away when he discovers how much he’s not. Thisis nota ‘50s sensibility.”
Holland's episode, by his own admission, contains little suspense. “It is a bizarre little piece; a reversal story with no relationship to the comic beyond the bare bones of the plot. Had I written it strictly along the lines of the plot contained in the comic book, I would have had a 15-minute piece.”
Holland cast Broadway stage actress Amanda Plummer as the ugly duckling bride. Plummer had won a Tony Award as Agnes of God and had also appeared in THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. Who better to play a woman Holland regarded as severely off-center?
“The story is characterdriven. You have this slightly off girl who is being fucked over by this man who married her and your heart is just breaking for her. But in 20 minutes you end up sympathizing with the guy What I really had fun with was Plummer’s metamorphosis from virginal wallflower to a woman who has ‘fuck me’ written on her forehead. And when I finally kill [her husband], it goes right over the top pushes hard against the envelope of good taste.
“Let's face it—this is a lot more graphic than anything you get on network TV.”
Holland, who is in his early 40's, has a difficult time recalling when he first encountered EC Comics. He remembers reading some kind of horror comics behind the post office with the other kids in his neighborhood, but it seems to him that he was just atad too young to have read them in 1950. A few years ago, however, he bought the bound set of black and white reprints but wasnt immediately entranced by them
“These stories had utterly no redeeming social value or even any characters you could like,” said Holland. “In that sense they contravened the normal dramatic stands. But when Joel Silver told me I could be as sexual or violent as I wanted I seldom am—and that he was bringing a feature mentality to TV, | became very interested.”
Holland walked away from the experience, believing he may have created his most interesting work to date. For this he credits Silver and Teitler, who, he said, never balked at his most outlandish embellishments. “It was pure joy working with them.” he said. “They were extremely supportive and encouraging, which is not something you usually find in TV.”
If Holland was at all hampered by the tight TV format, it was by budgetary cuts. Holland was ostensibly allotted $600,000 for his episode, although sources high in the production allege he more likely spent a half-million. This did not leave him with enough money for the kind of elaborate makeup effects that empowered Zemeckis to have his wife pluck a fireplace poker out of someone's head. Holland got around this, he said, with some deft cutting “and a ton of blood
“Hell, I bathed her in the stuff,” he said. “I thought Joel would go running from the room when he saw this—I had taken the image of CARRIE one step further. But Joel just smiled approvingly. He said my episode, more than any other, best reflected the TALES FROM THE CRYPT sensibility.”
Holland doesn't know if he can afford to make working for the show a habit, however. “I'd love to, but my God, the amount of work that goes into these things! You have to work with a writer, you have to shoot it and dub it. I'll tell you—I could not doa full season of this—not for scale-plus- 10
“I suppose I'd do another one. But I'd better doa feature and make some money first.”
Blood-spattered Amanda Plummer axes hubby in director Tom Holland’s “Lover, Come Hack To Me,” based on George Evans’ May 1953 strip in The Haunt of Fear.
All Charles could do was to watch horrified as Freda lifted the huge battle-axe again and again until the figure on the bed became a soft, wet, red mash... “She...she’s mad! Absolutely mad!”
Mary Lambert was never afforded the luxury of picking a story of her own fromthe EC collection and developing it with a writer from scratch Which may have been just as well—working for TV stressed her out considerably.
Late in April, Lambert had PET SEMATARY in the can and was about to leave for a brief vacation when Joel Silver called her agent and asked if she'd care to direct a segment of TALES FROM THE CRYPT. She would have to appear for work, however, Silver said, the next day. Lambert declined, insisting that she needed the time off. In the end, Silver agreed tc postpone the shoot bya week if she agreed to commit to a segment.
Silver had chosen for her a story from The Vault of Horror called “Collection Completed,” about a man (M. Emmet Walsh) who takes up taxidermy as a hobby and in return for flaying his wife's favorite cat, finds himself as the subject for her sawdust and needles.
As nasty a bit of business as ever there was in an EC comic, the story was routed out to a number of writers, among them David Arnott (who writes for SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE), A. Whitney Brown, Jr., and Battle and Randolph Davis. Lambert received a version which, she decided, required further tightening, some plot changes (in one version, the wife played by Audra Lindley was depicted as bereaved over the death of her child—a plot element Lambert said had nothing to do with the story) and the infusion of a more pronounced feminist sensibility than was originally evident.
“I thought the story was interesting as a comment on communications and marriage between people,” said Lambert early in June while editing her episode. “This couple had been married for 47 years and the man was embarrassed to be in the bathroom with her. He had used his job as a way of getting out of the house and ignoring his wife's need for fellowship and communication. She, in turn, has poured this hunger into her animals, which to my mind was equally disturbing, if ultimately harmless.”
rovided a script, Lambert did not profess a slavish devotion to the original EC material. She was no latecomer to the comic format however—growing up in Arkansas, the 37 year-old director recalled having had one of the largest and most eclectic collections in her town—“everything from Superwomanand Modern Romance to Nancy and Dennis the Menace.” She had not, though, ever been deeply interested in horror comics.
Casting the segment proved far more troublesome, she recalled, than any other cle- ment of the production, including the extremely taxing sixday shooting schedule necessitated by the half-million dollar budget she had been given. The problem, she said, was that there was simply not enough time to consider people for the roles and have them consider participating.
“The whole casting procedure in Hollywood is so formalized—there are so many rules you're not supposed to break, although they are all the time. So you give it tosomeone and have to wait two or three days and then show it to someone else. There's just not enough time for that in this kind of project. Also, actors who have achieved a certain stature in their professional lives often won't meet you unless you're offering them a part.”
Lambert’s lot was further complicated by the use of animals—more specifically, four cats, three dogs, a parrot, and a guinea pig. Getting a cat to wear a party hat and sit contentedly at a table—especially when it’s 10:00 p.m., the tail end of a by-now 16-hour day, and the producers want to wrap for the day in 15 minutes—can be grating. Yet Lambert found the experience “humanizing. Everyone else on the set had specific motives for being there: they were getting paid, advancing their careers, getting laid...The animals were there because they had been brought there. And they don’t do things unless they want to. I found that helps put things into perspective, especially when it’s late and you’re tired.”
Special effects for the segment were provided by veteran makeup man Tom Burman. Burman’s main task was to produce an appliance which provided Walsh with theappearance of having been stuffed taxidermically. “Managing the effects work quickly was no great problem,” said Lambert. “Because of PET SEMATARY I had already interviewed everybody in town.”
In the end, Lambert produced a segment for the series which she was wont to characterize as graphic, macabre, and comedic. “When | was told they wanted me for TALES FROM THE CRYPT,” she said, “I expected material that was plainly horrific, But this stuff doesn't always work ona realistic level. It’s a very specific genre we [directors] were all working in. My ownis really very light and funny. But weall had specific commitments to produce a piece that would work in this format. | think they do that very nicely.”
At a time when TV seems intent upon dishing out banal, weekly dramatic renderings of current diseases, social issues and personalities, scriptwriter Fred Dekker detects a value in TALES FROM THECRYPT. “The stories have a simplicity and elegance and effectiveness,” said Dekker. “You get a strong sense that there’s no veil of pretense. It’s a half hour every week where you get the bejesus scared out of you that’s really the only function the show has.”
And if the series falls somewhat short of that, Dekker said he has been promised an opportunity to direct an episode once the series gets established and he stands ready to bring out the ghouls and rotting zombies.
M. Emmet Walsh gets stuffed in director Mary Lambert’s “Collection Completed,” makeup by Tom Burman, an episode based on the July 1952 Graham Ingels strip from The Vault of Horror #25 (below).
Anita’s eyes bulged! Her face flushed crimson! The gleaming knife on Jonah’s work-table sparkled under the overhead light! “See! Now I have a complete collection! All of the animals found in the city! All stuffed!” “Not all...Jonah! You forgot one type of animal!”
The Comics
Publisher William M. Gaines on bringing his illustrated horror classics to TV.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
Tales From The Crypt comic book publisher Bill Gaines’ father, M.C. Gaines, died in a boating accident in 1947. M.C. Gaines had been a pioneer of the comics industry; he was the first to introduce the format of the monthly comic book, and was also reputed to : have urged DC Comicsto purchase the rights to Superman and feature the character regularly in Action Comics. Under the EC rubric, however, Gaines himself published such little-remembered titles as Tiny Tots Comics, Picture Stories From the Bible, and the not-entirely successful /nternational Comics.
William Gaines took over from his father and began to assemble a new stable of “star” writers and artists, an approach which, in a field noted for its sweatshop conditions and general disdain for those who labored within it, ultimately earned him the title of the “Louis B. Mayer of comics.”
Indeed, Gaines’ EC horror comics were sufficiently troubling to have inspired the pogrom waged against the comic industry during the mid ‘50s by an irate Congress and a buzzing swarm of PTAs. EC historian E.B. Boatner has attributed EC with having opened “new vistas of death from sources previously unimagined by the reader.”
Victims, continued Boatner, “were serial-sectioned by giant machines, eaten by ghouls, devoured by rats—from inside and out—pecked by pigeons, stuffed down disposals, skewered on swords, bur- ied alive, dismembered and used as baseball equipment, hungasliving clappers on huge bells, made into sausages and soap, dissolved, southern fried, hacked up by maniacs in Santa Claus suits and offed in unusually high percentages by their wives or husbands.”
Gaines, godtather of horror comics.
These legendary strips have long held an allure for filmmakers weaned on them as kids because the EC comics (the “E” initially for “Education,” later on, more appropriately, for “Entertainment”) were inherently filmic, or, at the least, theatrical. “We drew analogies, ” recalled Gaines, “between the comic page and the stage. We told our writers to think of the individual! panels as the proscenium arch, the writer as the playwright, the editor as the director and the publisher as the producer.
“We also insisted that our writers read the things aloud. And we'd make changes on the basis of what we heard. It had to look right, sound right, and read right, so in a sense we were very much aware that these were a kind of stage or movie production.”
Notable among Gaines’ stars were Al Feldstein and artists Johnny Craig, Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels, Wally Wood, Reed Crandall, Jack Davis, Bernard Krigstein, and Harvey Kurtzman (who refused to work in horror, and instead produced EC’s less profitable, but, in Gaines’ eyes, far more worthwhile and interesting science fiction comics), Gaines eventually added titles of his own to the line—namely Crime Patrol, Gunfighter, Modern Love and Saddle Justice. But it was his horror comics which endured.
Gaines had grown up with an abiding love for the horror genre nurtured largely by the Universal horror classics, pulp magazines and radio serial broadcasts of the ’30s. In 1950, relying mainly on Craig and Feldstein, he launched his most famous and enduring titles: The Haunt of Fear, Tales From the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror.
The EC line inspired hordes of imitators, each of which appeared bent upon exceeding the ghastly excesses found in the original template. There was, however, little truly original to the template or even the use of the anthology format as a vehicle for horror. Gaines himself freely acknowledges that he and his colleagues shamelessly ransacked every conceivable source for their material, lifting plots in their entirety from the horror pulps, the science fiction magazines, radio, and, of course, the movies.
He recalls, for instance, receiving a letter from Ray Bradbury, from whom he had unabashedly pilfered entire stories, informing him that he had likely “overlooked” paying Bradbury for the use of his material. Gaines paid the man gladly, if not a great deal, but he insists that combining two of Bradbury’s stories into one, as Gaines once felt impelled to do, actually improved them both.
The backlash that developed against EC and its brazen imitators reached a crescendo in 1954, when a Bellevue psychiatrist, Frederick Wertham, published a book called The Seduction of the Innocent, in which he implied that comics were a contributing factor to juvenile delinquency. Congress later convened a “Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency,” before which Gaines attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to convey the sense of the sublime contained in the horror genre.
The result of these hearings was a self-imposed bureau of standards within the industry called the Comics Code Authority, which had the immediate effect of putting an end—for a few decades, anyway—to horror as a distinct subgenre of comics. Gaines said that since then he hasn’t kept in touch with the genre as much as one might expect. “I don’t even bother looking at it,” he said of today’s horror film industry, which often makes EC’s excesses look tame. “I was so immersed in the stuff during the ’50s, but I’ve just had it, personally. What I do happen upon, though, scares the hell out of me.”
Lett Gaines’ unequaled horror comics, which inspired a whole generation of flimmakers who read them as kids betore they were banned In the mid-'50s. The highly cinematic strips festured graphic renderings by some of the top artists in the field like Al Feldstein (top), “Ghastly” Graham Ingets (center), and Johnny Craig (bottom).
PHOTO BY DAN SCAPPEROTTI
THE EFFECTS
Boss Film shot the show’s opening, dizzying plunge into the lair of the Crypt-Keeper.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
One of the ironies of Steven Spielberg's AMAZING STO- RIES was thatthe brief “Storyteller” sequence that began each show proved more memorable than the individual episodes themselves. That will not likely be the case with TALES FROM THE CRYPT—the writing is stronger and the show's attitude is more focused. But the hurly-burly jaunt through the Crypt-Keeper’s haunt that starts off each episode has more jolts in it than most of the episodes screened thus far.
The sequence, which has a camera barreling up a hill and into the inner recesses of a suitably creaky gothic castle in one apparently uninterrupted swoop, wascrafted by Richard Edlund’s Marina Del Reybased Boss Film effects shop for about $400,000—roughly half the cost of one of the first episodes.
“If we were doing a $30 million movie,” explained producer Bill Teitler, “we could not have made a more sophisticated or compelling opening. This has miniatures, blue screen, rotoscoped animation—every trick in the trade. And it’s exquisite.”
This is Boss Film's second foray into TV. Edlund’s company previously undertook effects work for Disney's illfated EARTH-STAR VOY- AGER. “Joel [Silver] wanted us,” said Edlund, “because we have only one quality level whether we're working on TV or features—our best. And we wanted to prove to ourselves we could work well within the limitations of TV.”
Edlund worked with Silver on DIE HARD—Boss Film was nominated for an Academy Award for its effects in that movie. It was Silver, said Edlund, who proposed shooting the miniature effects sequence as one unending shot, although the idea might have been Robert Zemeckis’ to begin with.
Of course, the sequence is nothing of the sort. Once through the front door, the sequence shifts to live-action—the interior set was erected at a sound stage in North Hollywood. In the library the wall panels open to reveal a hidden staircase which, again, is a miniature shot using a 65mm snorkel camera with motion control. At the end of the staircase there is a wood door with iron fittings that swings open to reveal the full-size crypt set.
The construction and shooting of the miniature haunted house on the hill was supervised by Boss Film’s Neil Krepela. The entire sequence, which took some eight weeks to shoot and involved every department in Edlund’s shop, is seamless. And it cost every cent, Edlund said, that he received from Silver. “The budget was very tight,” he noted, “so we deferred any profit in the hope that the series takes off.”
Edlund is looking forward to working on the effects of future episodes. “TALES FROM THE CRYPT has an inflection of the bizarre that is very much its own thing,” he reflected. “It is certainly better than most of the anthological shows that have been on TV, such as AMAZING STORIES or (the most recent) TWILIGHT ZONE. It is definitely a departure for TV, and it may, we hope, usher in a new era for cable programming.”
The miniature of the Crypt-Keeper's house for the series special effects teaser, built at Richard Edlund’s Boss Film. Below: readying the set for videotaping. Lett: The final effect, as the camera trucks-in amid a storm and lightning flashes.
ANIMATRONICS
Makeup effects expert Kevin Yagher pulls the strings on the show’s droll puppet host.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
Richard Donner believes Kevin Yagher may have done too good a job designing the Crypt-Keeper. “I think by the end of the third episode he's going to try to get his own series, the little rat,” quipped Donner. “Wait ‘til he finds out we own the batteries.”
Actually the man with the batteries is Yagher, the 26 yearold former Halloween mask retailer from Dayton, Ohio, who made his mark in this town as designer and creator of the makeup effects work for Freddy Krueger in three of the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels, and who designed and created the malevolent “Good Guy” doll Chucky, of CHILD'S PLAY fame. Other recent Yagher projects include THE HID- EN, BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, THE SEVENTH SIGN, 976- EVIL, Weird Al Yankovic’s music video FAT, and Michael Lehmann's forthcoming MEET THE APPLEGATES. Yagher's work for TV has appeared in segments of HBO’s THE HITCHHIKER, Witt/Thomas Productions’ BEAUTY AND THE BEAST (he applied the Beast makeup for the pilot series) and Amblin’ Entertainment’s AMAZINGSTORIES.
Yagher got into the business through correspondence with veteran makeup effects artist Dick (ALTERED STATES, THE EXORCIST, THE GOD- FATHER) Smith, who put him in touch with several West Coast artists. As an effects assistant at several Los Angeles shops, Yagher cut his tecth on such films as DREAMSCAPE, THE LAST STARFIGHTER, and COCOON.
Yagher lives in Burbank, but he has a 4,500 square-foot effects shop, Kevin Yagher Productions, in nearby Glendale, opposite an effects unit maintained by Joel Silver, the producer. Occasionally, recalled Yagher, Silver, seeing monsters in the open garage door, would drop by for a quick look-see. Last November Silver suggested he come onto TALES FROM THECRYPT to design a servomotor-laden animatronic puppet host for his series. Yagher demurred.
“| had been working straight through five years and was dead on my feet,” said Yagher on the set of the Crypt-Keeper’s inner-sanctum in North Hollywood. “I wanted totakea break and then try my hand at writing or directing. But Silver said I could not only build the Crypt-Keeper—I could direct the tags and the teasers. Bingo!”
In addition, Yagher pushed for and received royalty points for any subsequent merchandising of his Crypt-Keeper. He had been denied a percentage of the take for his work on the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET movies, but he did receive some points for CHILD'S PLAY’s Chucky. The deal he worked out forthe Crypt-Keeper was the sweetest he had worked out for any of his creations to date.
Yagher said Silver did not lock him into a faithful rendering of the Crypt-Keeper as envisioned by the comics. In his original guise—which he became familiar with through his brother, who was allegedly so obsessed with comics that their mother took him to a psychiatrist for evaluation— the Crypt-Keeper is merely a cowled figure with a jutting jaw and warts on his nose and chin. No big deal, and the alternatives available in the other EC comics—the Old Witch and the Vault-Keeperwere no improvement.
“The witch is the only creepy looking one—she had an eyeball hanging out of her skull and she'd hold it out from her. The other hosts were just guys with slime in their mouths, which was boring. I sketcheda series of both fleshier and emaciated-looking characters—at one time the Crypt-Keeper looked like aclown. Wedecided though, that what we really wanted was something so emaciated it couldn't possibly be a human being. In the end, though, I settled on the look of an insane, dead warlock.”
Once Yagher's sketches were approved by Silver, Yagher submitted a bid which was deemed too high. Eventually Yagher committed to designing a Crypt-Keeper suitable for the first spate of pilot episodes for $150,000, which was only a little more than a fifth of what he had spent on Chucky. Moreover, whereas Chucky had taken three months to design and build, Yagher received only 10 weeks to bring his creepy apparition up to snuff.
Yagher’s cash flow was not optimal at the time, and he said he went into the hole on this job—at least at first. But fora crack at directing, and with a shot at doing an episode a distinct possibility, Yagher decided this was money well spent.
Yagher built the Crypt- Keeper at his shop in Glendale and transported the creature to the set in April, when he began shooting the first series of bumpers. Yagher brought with him six puppeteers (his shop employs eight people in all): F. Charles Lutkus III, Patty Maloney, Tony Rupprecht, Van Snowden, Michael Trcic, and Brock Winkless. Three of these worked the electronically-controlled face while the others worked the body. Most of the facial expressions were directed via radio control: one puppeteer worked the eyes while another had the head mechanism hooked up to his jaw so that when he opened his the Crypt-Keeper would correspond with his own.
The puppet’s bodily movements were managed with muppet-type rods. Yagher maintained that this provided the puppet with a versatility he didn’t believe was possible with cable-control. In some instances, such as during the Santa Claus bumper, however, a midget was used for the closeup. Yagher wasn’t thrilled about having to do that, but the money wasn’t there to provide him with a choice.
For the Crypt-Keeper’s voice, Yagher wanted something distinctly witch-like. He had seven people read for the part, one of whom was Charles Fleischer, the voice of Roger Rabbit. “The trouble was we were only paying scale-plus-10, and I just couldn’t cut a deal with him.” Yagher also heard readings from Michael Winslow, the sound wizard who has appeared in the POLICE ACADEMY movies, and by Rick Overton, from the film WILLOW. In the end, however, Yagher cast John Caseer for the part.
Yagher recalled that Bob Zemeckis had designed the first bumper, and was slated to direct it—Yagher would then take over direction for the rest. The original shot Zemeckis planned had the camera panning around the Crypt-Keeper’s sanctum, which was quite an elaborate set. The camera would then creep up to the coffin, which would slowly open but reveal itself to be bare. The Crypt-Keeper would then pop up from elsewhere. The next shot was to show him sitting with his legs crossed, and there would be holes in his pants with rotting flesh and bone poking through.
But Zemeckis found himself forced to high-tail it back to the BACK TO THE FUTURE II shoot a tad prematurely, and Yagher was put in charge of the filming. “I have to admit that I was a little spooked when I started,” he said. But Yagher overcame his initial stage fright within moments and delivered his scenes as planned.
Yagher is only partially happy with the results—if the series gets picked up, he has plans to soup up his Crypt-Keeper, to “make him more like Chucky in the wider shots.” Yagher would like to cover him in slime in one episode, or have him pop up in a tank of water in another. The permutations, he assured me, remain legion.
Crypt-Keeper designer Kevin Yagher’s effects crew puppeteers the Crypt-Keeper on set, Tony Rupprecht (left), Van Snowden (hands-on) and Charles Lutkus III (above).
Yagher's cable and rod puppet Crypt-Keeper in his imaginatively appointed crypt set.
Yagher poses with the show's witty host, who invariably gets the show's best lines, during filming of the teaser for director Waiter Hill's “The Man who Was Death.”
Final cost: » bargain at just $200,000.
THE SERIES
Heh, heh, heh, kiddies! Nineteen more stories are set to emerge from the HBO crypt.
By Sheldon Teitelbaum
Although afforded an unusually cool reception by the critics, the first six segments of TALES FROM THECRYPT generated enough heat at HBO for the crusading cable company to give Joel Silver and Bill Teitler the go-ahead to produce an additional 19episodes. (HBO, it should be recalled, had in fact commissioned the writing of nine additional scripts to the first six actually shot.)
According to Teitler, production was to begin in North Hollywood on October 9, with Walter Hill slated to direct an episode he wrote called “Cutting Cards,” based on the October 1952 Fred Peters strip from Tales from the Crypt #32, about two gamblers obsessed with a game of “chop poker.” The shows will likely start airing, said Teitler, in early January, 1990, and negotiations are now underway with Warner Brothers, which will be releasing the last three segments abroad theatrically (Universal is releasing the first three), to market the first six of the 19 episodes.
Walter Hill's continued involvement came as no great surprise—there had been talk, in fact, of Hill, Robert Zemeckis, and Richard Donner directing three new episodes cach during the course of the year. As of now, however, it seems likely, or so believes Teitler, that they will each take on one episode apiece.
Teitler was loath to name all of the directors lined up for the series, but used epithets suchas “world class,” “gigantic,” and “tremendous” to describe them. He and Silver do seem to be holding out for the possibility that both Martin Scorsese and Stephen Spielberg will find the time to squeeze an episode into their cramped schedules. Writers and directors whose participation appears assured at this juncture include Fred Dekker, who is writing and directing “The Thing From the Grave,” based on the February 1951 Al Feldstein strip from Tales from ihe Crypt #22, about a murderer whois stalked by the rotting corpse of the man he has killed. Chris (THE FLY II) Walas, is set to direct Jeri Barchilion’s adaptation of “Till Death,” based on the December 1952 Johnny Craig strip from The Vault of Horror #28, about a Haitian plantation owner whose joy at the return of his dead wife as a zombie soon turns to disgust. Writers Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman (WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT), are set to both write and direct an as-yetunnamed segment. Frank Darabont has scripted “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy,” and Joe (AFTER HOURS, VAMPIRE’S KISS) Minion, who turned in a teleplay on “Loved to Death,” based on Jack Kamen’s August 1951 strip from Tales from the Crypt #25, about a man who employs a love potion with unexpected results. Scott Alexander has adapted “The Trap,” and Kevin Yagher is now negotiating to direct an episode in addition to keeping his responsibilities as the Crypt-Keeper’s puppet master.
Budgets for each of the episodes should remain in the half-million dollar range, depending, said Teitler, on the actual demands of each script. “We don’t call anyone a second-stringer, and we have never budgeted these things based upon the quality of the director,” he said. “Our decisions are based entirely on the physical requirements of each episode.”
Teitler does anticipate investing more money in improving the mechanics of Yagher’s creepmeister Crypt-Keeper, but does not share Yagher’s desire to stage more elaborate Crypt-Keeper scenes. “Our feeling was that the most successful segments were the simple ones, that the character and the dialogue are more important. If anything, I’d be inclined to simplify the shooting,” he said.
Apart from maintaining an overall fidelity to the original material (he intends to continue consulting with Bill Gaines in New York), Teitler refused to adopt any hard and fast house rules for the series. “I have no favorite episodes,” he said somewhat diplomatically. “The thing I like best about them is that they are all so different from each other.”
“The Thing From The Grave,” the February 1951 strip by Al Feldstein trom Tales From The Crypt #22 that Dekker believes is the archetypal EC Comics horror tale.
“Til Death,” the December 1952 strip by Johnny Craig about a Haitian zombie for The Vault of Horror #28, will be directed by Oscar-winning makeup artist Chris Walas.
“You stinkin’ slimy thing! I’ll kill you! Kill you!” Blam! Blam! Blam! “It’s no use! Bullets won’t stop her!” “Cut you to pieces! Cut! Cut! I’ll get rid of you!” “That won’t stop her, either! You only make her look worse!”