In the 1960s, Amicus Films emerged as a challenger to Hammer Films in the production of low-budget but profitable English horror pictures. Whereas Hammer are known for their vivid Technicolour gothics, Amicus' trademark was the horror anthology film, which featured four to five short shockers held together by a wraparound story that usually involved the protagonists of the various stories being doomed in some fashion. Amicus' first anthology, Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965) was a hit, and the studio followed with multi-story chillers Torture Garden (1967) and The House that Dripped Blood (1970), both of which were scripted by famed author Robert Bloch, writer of the original Psycho novel that Hitchcock immortalized on the big screen. In 1972, for their fourth anthology movie, Amicus producers Max J. Rosenberg and Milton Subotsky turned to the American horror comics published by William Gaines and EC Comics for inspiration and the result was Tales from the Crypt, scripted by Subotsky from stories in the titular comic and Vault of Horror (itself destined to be the title of another Amicus anthology pic).A gruesomely fun affair, Tales from the Crypt involves five people strangely drawn to a ruined crypt becoming seperated from a guided tour and stumbling upon a secret chamber presided over by the Crypt Keeper (deadpan ham Ralph Richardson), who tells them their fate, visualized as short stories within the narrative. The best of the lot, Poetic Justice, stars genre great Peter Cushing as Arthur Grimsdyke, a lonely widower adored by children, who is persecuted by snobbish neighbour James Elliott (Robin Phillips) because he feels the old man lowers the tone of the neighbourhood, the heartless smear campaign reaching its nadir with a bundle of insulting Valentine's cards that Grimsdyke fears were written by the villagers but were in fact the work of Elliott, a cold-hearted bastard like all EC Comic villains. This being a horror picture, Grimsdyke returns from the grave to exact Hallmark-inspired revenge upon his callous neighbour, who gets his just desserts in the same way as all the other selfish assholes do in this film and in the weirdly moralistic universe of Gaines' horror comics.
Cushing expertly and effortlessley garners our sympathy, sitting by himself to supper while talking to a portrait of his dead wife, a photograph that is actually of Cushing's beloved wife Helen, who died prior to the production of the film. Cushing adored his wife, and if you read his autobiography Past Forgetting, the actor reveals that he contemplated suicide after her death, so deep was his grief at her passing. The inclusion of her photograph in the film undoubtedly helped Cushing in his performance, and adds a deeper layer of melancholy for those who know the subtext. Grimsdyke's awful dismantaling by heartless Elliott is beautifully captured by Cushing, proving once more that the actor was worth his weight in gold to any horror film, as director Freddie Francis has noted. It's a wonderful performance, one for which Peter Cushing was awarded The Licorne d’Or Award for Best Actor at the 2nd French Convention of Fantasy Cinema, and it elevates the Poetic Justice segment to heights the other stories can't quite reach.
That's not to say there's not lots of fun to be gained from the other segments. In All through the House, for instance, Joanne Clayton (Joan Collins) murders her husband on Christmas Eve, while her little girl sleeps upstairs waiting for Santa, while a psychopath dressed in a Father Christmas outfit pays her house a visit. It's fun to watch Collins portray the kind of bitch she became famous for, this time in a low-budget horror film. The best of the rest is the last story, where another genre vet, Patrick Magee, stars as a blind person who leads his fellow sightless inmates of a home for the blind in taking sadistic revenge against the heartless new head of the institution. In all of the stories, the awful bastards responsible for awful deeds receive a comeuppance that is an order of magnitude worse than those they perpetrated in the first place. A gruesome collection of horror stories is an odd place to get such a conservative message, but here it is, in all its 'eye for an eye' glory.Famed cinematographer Freddie Francis directs with a colourful if undistinguished sense of style. Francis got his start in helming several films for Hammer, but achieved his real fame as an outstanding director of photography for movies like Glory, The Elephant Man, and The Innocents. His directing career was less stellar, being confined mostly to low-budget British horror films, and he is not the horror auteur that Hammer's Terence Fisher was, but he did make a substantial contribution to genre films in the 60s and early 70s. Films like The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968), the aforementioned Dr. Terror's House of Horrors, The Creeping Flesh (1973) and The Ghoul (1975) represent pulpy but beautifully-shot highlights of British horror from its (arguably) golden age.
Tales from the Crypt is available on a DVD double-bill on the Midnite Movies line with its sort-of sequel, Vault of Horror (1973). Note for the cinephiles: on this DVD Tales is uncut, but Vault is a censored TV version.
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Directed by Freddie Francis
Written by Milton Subotsky, based on stories published by William Gaines
Starring: Peter Cushing, Joan Collins, Ian Hendry, Patrick Magee, Robin Phillips, and Ralph Richardson
