Lights! Camera! Scream! : HOW HBO’S NIGHTMARISH ‘TALES FROM THE CRYPT’ HAS TURNED 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 HBO 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 airing 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 midseason 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. What’s more, they’re turning heads in Hollywood faster than Linda Blair in “The Exorcist.”

“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 to 1988. “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, one of New York’s stage directors. 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. For his summer film “Total Recall,” Schwarzenegger’s salary was reported at $10 million; for “Crypt,” he was paid $15,000.

Nonetheless, “It was, I would say, the greatest joy I’ve had in the whole movie business,” Schwarzenegger said.

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. “It was an unusual time, because there had been a bunch of anthology shows and films that had all just gone in the toilet,” Silver said.

After aborted feature film attempts with directors Walter Hill, Bob Zemeckis and Richard Donner at the helm, Silver finally brought 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, 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. And it’s some pretty weird, sick stuff.”

“I just did an episode with Don Rickles and Bobcat Goldthwait,” Donner said, Rand 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.”

Some critics have done their own hatchet job on “Crypt,” calling the tongue-in-cheek series exploitative for its blood-and-thunder violence and occasional nudity. Others praise the series for its stylistic flair. HBO audiences apparently hunger for a little gristle in their TV diet. “Crypt” made its debut in April as a 90-minute trilogy and beat out the networks in HBO’s 17 million homes, according to A.C. Nielsen figures, with a 24% share of the audience.

“HBO still shows primarily uncut feature-length films,” said Chris Albrecht, the HBO programming executive who green-lighted the series. “So if you put TTales From the Crypt’ in between ‘Lethal Weapon’ and ‘Die Hard,’ (the violence) is not really that shocking. I think what was shocking was that the television critics don’t often get to see this kind of material come across their desk.”

Silver, who competes against his own blockbuster films on HBO with “Crypt,” put it more simply. “This is real pay television.”