Nightmarish ‘Tales’ Turns Into a Director’s Dream

It’s the kind of playground you dreamed of as a kid. A dark menagerie of graveyard tombstones, a mist-shrouded bog, a padded white-walled insane asylum, a dank stony dungeon oozing moss, dripping razor-sharp stalactites. All lurking inside the brick bowels of a faded spaghetti factory somewhere in Culver City.

They call it the Crypt. But it’s really an amusement park, an E-ticket chill ride that’s attracting a funeral procession of big Hollywood names. In between feature films, they head for the Crypt with a squeal on their lips and a tong in their heart. They’re given about $900,000 by Home Box Office and allowed a week to roam the grounds and scare up some fun. All they have to do, in return, is direct a half-hour episode of “Tales From the Crypt,” HBO’s horror anthology series that airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m.

Steven Spielberg, Penny Marshall, Tim Burton, Blake Edwards, Kathryn Bigelow, John McTiernan, Joe Dante--film directors who make powerful executives stand in line for their services--have all expressed interest in a “Crypt” excursion if the series gets picked up for 40 new episodes next season.

Screenwriters and superstar actors also are getting in on the act. Arnold Schwarzenegger already made his directorial debut in one of this season’s 18 episodes, and Mel Gibson, Bruce Willis, Burt Reynolds and Peter Weller have said they want to follow in his over-sized footsteps.

The cable TV freak show, now in mid-season stride, is hosted with an animatronic grimace by the rotting Crypt-Keeper. The series is based on the old E.C. Comics that were yanked from newsstands in the squeaky-clean 1950s after a U.S. Senate subcommittee essentially banned them for leading to the decline of American youth.

Today, however, “Crypt’s” twisted tales are a hit with cable audiences.

“The horror and suspense genre is a place where directors can have fun,” explained co-producer William Teitler, who produced the popular syndicated TV series “Tales From the Darkside” from 1984-88. “But a lot of top directors at this point in their career wouldn’t choose to do a horror film. This gives them a chance to work in that genre.”

“Your typical film takes two years, where this story will air in two months,” said first-time film director James Simpson, a New York stage director. He was inside the Crypt recently shooting an episode starring Richard Thomas as a mad, murderous doctor.

“Once this is finished, I don’t have to worry about distributors or anything else,” Simpson said. “It’s just a great gig.”

The directors involved are not being lured into the shadowy world of horror by big-buck offers. They, along with the actors and everyone on the crew, draw scale wages.

Joel Silver, who regularly produces theatrical blockbusters such as the “Lethal Weapon” films and “Die Hard,” reopened E.C.’s dusty horror vaults several years ago when he bought screen rights to all 530 devilish tales.

After aborted feature-film attempts with directors Walter Hill, Robert Zemeckis and Richard Donner at the helm, Silver finally took the property to HBO with the three directors as executive producers. If the producer couldn’t make one big theatrical film, he figured he would make a bunch of small ones that showcased Hollywood’s finest directing talent. He would subsidize the unusually high budgets by selling the series in overseas markets and packaging them as feature films.

Because “Crypt” is on cable TV and not subject to network standards and practices, the directors have a regular monster mash on the set, where they express their humor in a jugular vein.

“It is a really free experience,” said Howard Deutch, who has directed two “Crypt” episodes. “I mean, having done three (feature) films, I can tell you that this is totally no holds barred. There’s a big support system. They’ve arranged it so there’s a net there, and they let you fly out as far as you can go. It’s some pretty weird, sick stuff.”

“I just did an episode with Don Rickles and Bobcat Goldthwait,” Donner said, “and I got to tell you, I hated when it ended. It was something I never could have done as a motion picture, and never could have done on network television. They cut each other’s heads off; body parts fly. It was a charming show.”

William Gaines is the impish man who made creepy comics a staple in 1950, when he unleashed his E.C. Comic horror series--Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear. He reluctantly laid his horror yarns to rest in 1955, however, over public outcry. “It’s hard to believe what was going on then,” he said. “It was like a witch hunt. The federal government was trying to tie comic books to juvenile delinquency. Comics in general were the target, but I was the bull’s-eye.

“It was very painful to close down the magazines. I loved all my titles. But I figured that was the end of them.”

Gaines, now 68, lives in Manhattan where he works on another of his irreverent creations, Mad magazine, which also started as an E.C. Comic.

Gaines never planned on a comic-book life. His father created the children’s comics Tiny Tot, Animal Fables and Moon Girl in the ‘30s. They were published under the E.C. banner, which stood for Educational Comics. At the time, Gaines was studying to be a chemistry teacher.

In 1947, his father died and Gaines took over the business. “I had no interest in children’s comics,” he said. “So I decided to publish comics along the lines of the stuff I loved as a kid, which were pulp magazines.”

Gaines and his editor, Al Feldstein, started cranking out horror, crime, suspense, adventure and science-fiction stories. With titles such as Weird Science, Frontline Combat and Crime Suspenstories and the horror comics, Gaines quickly renamed E.C. from Educational Comics to Entertaining Comics.

E.C. Comics disappeared for about 20 years before Russ Cochran, a former college professor living in West Plains, Mo., started reprinting them in 1975.

In addition to the HBO series, Silver is adapting the E.C. Comic Two-Fisted Tales into a new action-adventure series for Fox Television. Like a proud father surveying his grown children, Gaines sits back in his Mad magazine offices and, sometimes, longs for the days when his comic creations were still infants.

“Those were the good days for me,” he said. “Here at Mad I’m just a businessman. I have a whole editorial staff 100 times funnier than I am, so I’m reduced to being a businessman. But in those days, I was right in the thick of it.”