TALES FROM THE CRYPT. Old-fashioned horror film

Tales from the Crypt, the anthology of five chilling novellas is the perfect watch for this time of year.

While touring an old cemetery in the English countryside, five strangers encounter the Crypt Keeper, who reveals to them how they ended up in the catacombs. Joanne murders her elderly husband for insurance money, but her plan to dispose of the body fails when a deranged killer shows up at her home; Carl leaves his wife and children to start a new life with his mistress, only to suffer a tragic car accident during his escape; James launches a campaign of hatred and slander against his neighbor Grimsdyke, who takes his own life but returns a year after his death to exact revenge; Ralph faces bankruptcy due to business ineptitude and an extravagant lifestyle fueled by his wife, who discovers a figurine in their home capable of granting three wishes; and William becomes the director of a home for the blind, but his policies bring misery to the patients, who ultimately take their revenge.

The British production company Amicus Productions specialized in horror anthologies. They created seven such films in total: Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) and Torture Garden (1967) by Freddie Francis, The House That Dripped Blood (1971) by Peter Duffell, Asylum (1972) and Vault of Horror (1973) by Roy Ward Baker, From Beyond the Grave (1974) by Kevin Connor, and Tales from the Crypt (1972) by Francis. Milton Subotsky, one of Amicus’s founders, was a fan of the Tales from the Crypt comic book series published between 1950 and 1955 (and revived twice in the 21st century). However, only two segments of Francis’s film (the second and fifth) are directly adapted from this series, while the remaining segments are based on stories from sister series The Vault of Horror (the first) and The Haunt of Fear (the third and fourth). The film had a budget of £170,000, shared between Amicus and American International Pictures, which distributed it in the United States.

The direction was entrusted to Freddie Francis, a respected British cinematographer known for his collaborations with John Huston and the Powell-Pressburger duo (he later shot films for David Lynch and Martin Scorsese). Francis chose not to read the comics, preferring to shape his own interpretation of the stories. The cast included Joan Collins, Richard Greene, Ian Hendry, Nigel Patrick, Patrick Magee, and Peter Cushing, who delivered one of his most poignant performances as Grimsdyke (notably, the actor was mourning his wife’s death at the time, mirroring his character). Ralph Richardson, a renowned Shakespearean actor also known for films by David Lean (Doctor Zhivago [1965]) and Lindsay Anderson (O Lucky Man! [1973]), played the Crypt Keeper. Tales from the Crypt was a box office success, earning over $3 million in the U.S. alone.

By today’s standards, Tales from the Crypt is a thoroughly old-fashioned horror film: reliant on unsettling atmosphere, stylish sets, and superb acting rather than buckets of blood, jump scares, or nonsensical plots. Modern horror cinema is often overly graphic, vulgar, and painfully literal; Francis’s film, though not devoid of violence, proves that horror can be intriguing and intelligent without resorting to gratuitous gore. The five stories in this anthology draw on the finest traditions of suspense literature (e.g., Edgar Allan Poe and M.R. James), where terror often comes with an ethical twist. All of Francis’s segments conclude with moral lessons, which, if they seem naive today, only underscore how cynical popular culture has become over the past half-century—and how deeply it has been impoverished.