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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - June 10th

"TALES FROM THE CRYPT" premiered on TV in 1989 

"Hello Boils and Ghouls" was first spoken by the infamous narrator, the Cryptkeeper (voiced by John Kassir), as Tales from the Crypt, a horror anthology television series based on the 1950's EC Comics series of the same name, had its TV debut on HBO.

Like a hellish version of Alfred Hitchcock, the Cryptkeeper introduces the stories of the show's premiere episode - itself containing three self-contained episodes/segments. Each segement was directed by the one of the show's many producer's Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis and Richard Donner respectively. Joined by producer's Joel Silver and David Giler, was the original Tales from the Crypt creator William M. Gaines.

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In the first episode, The Man Who Was Death, William Sandler plays an unnamed prison Executioner who, due to the state's repeal on the death penalty, finds himself out of work and not exactly qualified to do anything else. The Executioner then begins administering his own justice to acquitted murder suspects, with results that the Executioner certainly didn't see coming. The second episode - and my personal favourite episode of the entire series - is Robert Zemeckis' And All Through the House. A scheming greedy wife (Mary Ellen Trainor) decides to finally murder her brute husband (Marshall Bell) on Christmas Eve, the same night that a crazed maniac has escaped from the nearby lunatic asylum dressed in a Santa Claus outfit with an axe; and he's looking for people who have been naughty!

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The last segment in the premiere episode is Dig That Cat… He's Real Gone. A carnival showman, Ulric (Joe Pantoliano), whose specialty act is being literally killed on stage in front of an audience, through flashback tells the viewers how he was formerly a homeless man who underwent a doctor's experiment to transfer a cat's nine lives to him. Let's hope that Ulric remembers to count correctly before his nine lives are up. Ironically, the first three segments weren't actually based on stories from Tales from the Crypt, but instead from its sister publications Crypt of Terror, Vault of Horror, and Haunt of Fear (an actual episode adapted from a Tales from the Crypt story wasn't until the second episode of the second season, The Switch - directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger).

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Because it was aired on HBO, a premium cable television channel, it was one of the few anthology series to be allowed to have full freedom from censorship. As a result the series contained content that had not appeared in most television series up to that time, such as graphic violence, profanity, sexual activity, and nudity, which might possibly give the series a TV-MA rating for today's standards. Then there was the wisecracking Crypt Keeper, who was voiced by John Kassir and performed by puppeteer Van Snowden, would then introduce the episode with intentionally hackneyed puns and bookend the episode with an outro sequence.

Airing for seven seasons on HBO, Tales from the Crypt episodes were either directed or starred a who's who of Hollywood celebrities of the 1990's (to see just how many, see here.) As the years past and the budgets of the episodes got even lower, the seventh and final season was moved to England, resulting in the huge appearance of British actors in an American series, including; Daniel Craig, Ewan McGregor, Stephen Coogan, Jane Horrocks, Paul Freeman and Eddie Izzard.

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The final episode, and the only Tales from the Crypt to be completely animated, The Third Pig was aired on July 19, 1996, ending the series. However, you can't keep a good Cryptkeeper down, and Tales from the Crypt returned for its feature film debut with Demon Knight (1995), starring Crypt-alumnus William Sandler with Billy Zane and Jada Pinkett-Smith. A second film Bordello of Blood (starring Denis Miller, Angie Everhart and Chris Sarandon) followed the following year, and a third movie, Ritual, went straight-to-DVD in 2006. At one time, Peter Jackson's The Frighteners was originally intended to be a Tales From the Crypt movie, but producer Robert Zemeckis released it as a stand alone film after being impressed by the script.


More recently Entertainment Weekly reported that M. Night Shyamalan will be helming a reboot of Tales from the Crypt as part of TNT's new two-hour horror block. The show is expected to keep the episodic anthology format of the original, with TNT ordering the first 10 episodes!

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