Heh, heh… good evening, Kiddies! I see it’s time for me to
give you another spine-tingling post
here on Psychobabble, and today’s chiller
is no less than ten of the most horrid hunks of horror to appear in
Entertaining Comics’ Tales from the Crypt magazine! And
when I say Tales from the Crypt, I
mean Tales from the Crypt, and not The Haunt of Fear or The Vault of Horror, because…well… I
haven’t read all of those comics yet! So while favorites like “…And All Through
the House…” and “A Grim Fairy Tale!” may be missing from this list, I’m sure
you’ll agree the following stories earn the terrible title… Psychobabble’s
Ten Most Terrifying Tales from the Crypt
Comics!
1. The Living Corpse
(Tales from the Crypt #18; artist:
Wally Wood)
Its first tale to really nail both story and art reared its
hideous head in just the second issue of Tales
from the Crypt (never mind the kooky numbering system…issue 18 is really
issue 2). Despite its unimaginative title, “The Living Corpse” establishes a
strong mystery (why do these damn corpses keep coming to life and sprinting
from the local morgue?) and resolves it with a clever series of twists. Though
“The Living Corpse” isn’t a supernatural tale in the end, Wally Wood’s
hallucinatory depictions of the morgue attendant’s fears are as nightmarish as
anything in any zombie story.
2. Reflection of
Death! (Tales from the Crypt #23;
artist: Al Feldstein)
E.C.’s crypt keepers loved to pull the gimmick of placing
you in the story with second-person narration. This gimmick was never used to
more purposeful effect than in “Reflection of Death!”, in which you walk away from a car crash only to
have everyone who sees you completely freak out? Why? Well, let’s just say that
the Return of the Living Dead makeup
crew must have drawn a lot of inspiration from Al Feldstein’s artwork when
creating the Tar Man. Plus, the title panel monster mash illustration is fab!
3. Drawn and
Quartered! (Tales from the Crypt
#26; artist: Jack Davis)
A dose of voodoo causes everything that happens to an
artist’s paintings to happen to the things his paintings depict. A horrible and
classically ironic revenge plot ensues as the artist works overtime painting
everyone who’s ever wronged him. What may be the cleverest of all E.C. horror
stories is matched with Jack Davis’s signature goopy artwork.
4. The
Ventriloquist’s Dummy! (Tales from
the Crypt #28; artist: Graham Ingles)
Although the evil dummy trope has been done to death by now,
it had only really been tackled once in the British portmanteau film Dead of Night before “The Ventriloquist’s
Dummy!” Maybe that’s why this story so avoids the clichés of this type of
story. Instead of the usual “dummy become outlet for ventriloquist’s madness”
tale, we get a crazy conjoined twin one. The classic “Tales from the Crypt”
episode this comic inspired diluted the horror with comedy. The comic is all
horrific, and “Ghastly” Graham Ingles’s art makes good on his nickname.
