Reverend Farley Bright is dead. Or, at the very least, he’s finished with his earthly tenure of shaking down the elderly for seed money in the name of the Lord to his Church of a Better Tomorrow. He’s the kind of larger-than-life charlatan that would make Jimmy Swaggart look like a wallflower.

His family — a collection of archetypes that feel like they wandered off a Tennessee Williams set and took a wrong turn into a George Romero production, which is exactly what they are — has gathered for the reading of the will. They’re all expecting a piece of the golden pie, but Grady isn’t done performing. He returns via a séance (or perhaps just some high-end spiritual stagecraft) to run one last long-con from the Great Beyond.

Between Connie Stevens (playing the sister), Carolyn Ann Clark (as the niece who exposed the con), Richard Kuhlman (as the heir to the Electronic Church) and Peter Miller (as Farley), everyone in this episode understands the assignment. It’s loud and gloriously over-the-top. The Reverend Grady is a masterpiece of grotesque charm, a man who treated faith like a financial instrument and continues to cook the books even when he doesn’t have a pulse. He was a man who spent his life selling tickets to a Heaven he didn’t believe in and warning against a Hell he didn’t fear. The twist, that neither side wants his paperwork processed, leaving him stuck in a metaphysical limbo in his own church, is the kind of justice that would make the Crypt Keeper cackle.

This was directed by Dusty Nelson, who brought us one of the best movies ever made on making movies, Effects. It was written by Edithe Swensen, a TV vet who wrote episodes for this show and Monsters. I love this episode, because it uses the short format of Tales to tell a moral story, not simply a scary one.