Directed by Tom Holland and written by Steven Dodd and Michael McDowell (Beetlejuice, Thinner), “Lover Come Hack to Me” is based on the story “Lover, Come Hack to Me!” Haunt of Fear #19. That was written by Bill Gaines and Al Feldstein with art by George Evans, colors by Marie Severin and lettering by Jim Wroten.

“It’s good to have you back, you horror-hungry humans. You know by now who’s here to feed your fear. It’s me, the Crypt Keeper with another flesh-creeping scream story for your shivering pleasure. I’m calling this bite of bitter bile: Lover Come Hack to Me. So plump up that coffin pillow and settle back your bones. We’re going to take a little ride to honeymoon hell!”

Peggy (Amanda Plummer) has married her fiancee Charles (Stephen Shellen), who informs her aunt Edith (Lisa Figus), who worries about her rich niece that she’s out of a place to live after the honeymoon. On the way to that vacation, their car breaks down and they end up in an abandoned house where they make love and notice a gigantic axe on the wall. Charles actually falls for her, overcome by a woman he was never attracted to. That night, Charles has a nightmare where he watches Peggy kill another lover. It’s actually her mother and he tells her about what he saw when he wakes up. It was all not a dream and he pulls out a gun. There are no bullets and she kills him, secure that he has given her the gift of a daughter and that she won’t need a man ever again.

Amanda Plummer would play a killer again — spoiler — in So I Married an Axe Murderer.

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall… who’s the fearest of them all? Looks like I just bought 7 years’ bad luck! Speaking of bad luck, it’s time for another nasty little terror tale from my crawly collection… and this one’s got a message, too. It’s a story about greed, death and a girl, who learned that beauty… is Only Sin Deep!”

This story originally appeared in Haunt of Fear #24. It was written by Otto Binder and drawn by Jack Kamen.

Sylvia (Lea Thompson) is a call girl who sells her beauty to a pawn shop operator named Joe (Britt Leach) so that she can get the money she needs to lure Ronnie Price (Brett Cullen) into marrying her. Joe uses a plaster cast of her face to bring his dead wife back and tells her in a few months, if she doesn’t pay him back, her face will start to lose its looks. The problem is, she forgets when the money is due and suddenly needs a hundred thousand to get her face back. By this point, no one recognizes her, not even her rich new husband, who she shoots to get the cash. But alas — it’s way too late to fix anything.

Thompson’s husband Howard Deutch (Pretty In Pink, Some Kind of Wonderful, The Great Outdoors) directed her in this story and she was friends with Cullen for a long time, which made the love scenes somewhat hard to film. This episode was written by Fred Dekker and Steven Dodd.

I have to confess, I’ve had a crush on Lea Thompson forever and seeing her be a cruel woman who kills a pimp and uses a rich man, well, that adoration is not leaving me any time soon.

“Poor Sylvia, eh, kiddies? Guess she heard the old saying, “if looks could kill”… so she did! Haha! Just goes to show ya, if you wanna sell yourself, take a look in the mirror, first. Eurgh! Well, see you next time, boys and ghouls!”

“Good evening, fiend fans, and welcome to my crawly crypt. This little drama is about one of life’s unexpected pleasures: dying, that is. Most of us only get to do it once, and it’s all over before you can really enjoy it. But one man did get to die again. And he liked it so much, he started doing it for a living. This is the story of Ulric the Undying, a sideshow performer who found death not only fun, but profitable. In fact, he’s dying to put on a show for you… right now!”

Originally appearing in Haunt of Fear #21 in a story written by William Gaines and Al Feldstein and drawn by Jack Davis, this is the tale of Ulric the Undying (Joe Pantoliano), who has been given the nine lives of a cat by Dr. Emil Manfred (Gustav Vintas). Or eight, as the cat had to die to get its gland.

Working in a sideshow, Ulric dies for money over and over, assisted by a barker (Robert Wuhl) and Coralee (Kathleen York). He’s not to be trusted, as he kills Manfred and instead of being about research, these shows are now just for cash. Money that Coralee steals after stabbing him, but he has a few lives left. How many? You’ll find out soon.

Directed by Richard Donner and written by Terry Black and Steven Dodd, the show creator, this is an episode in my head when I think of this show. It gets everything that makes it work — bad behavior is rewarded with a horrible ending for the villain — and is pretty funny, too.

It’s hard for me to be objective about this episode as this story — which originally appeared in Vault of Horror #35 — is also my favorite part of Amicus’ Tales from the Crypt movie. No matter how good this is, I mean, I wrote a song once called “What Are Those Purple Bruises On the Throat of Joan Collins”?

“Ho, ho, ho, kiddies! Just your old pal the Crypt Keeper having a little holiday fun. Why else would I be in this getup…unless there was a Claus in my contract? In fact, I’ve got some Christmas goose for you…goose bumps, that is. Yes, indeedy. A little terror tale, chock-full of holiday fear…I mean cheer, of course. So get a gander of a Yuletide yelp-yarn that goes a little something like this ‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house.”

Elizabeth Cayman — not named Joanne Clayton from the original movie version, while the comic story’s protagonist is unnamed — is played by Mary Ellen Trainor, the mom from The Goonies and the kidnapped woman who sets Romancing the Stone in action) has just killed her husband (Marshall Bell) and is keeping it from her daughter (Lindsey Whitney Barry). What she doesn’t know is that a killer (Larry Drake) has escaped the mental home and is considered extremely dangerous. She’s pretty rough herself, much more capable than the other two versions of the character even if they share the same fate.

Directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Fred Dekker and Steven Dodd, this episode is actually closer to the comic — Elizabeth is blonde — than Amicus was. There’s even a reference to EC publisher Willam Gaines — it takes place in Gaines County — and the cop’s name is Feldstein, which is for Al Feldstein, the reason for so many EC Comics stories.

Perhaps the best part of this episode is the Crypt Keeper dressed as Santa, which is something that has gotten me through so many holidays.

If you’re wondering why it looks so good, just look to who did the cinematography. Dean Cundey.

From June 10, 1989, to July 19, 1996, HBO aired Tales from the Crypt, which was based on the EC Comics series. Ah, Tales from the Crypt, the scourge of parents in the 50s, which somehow ran for only 27 issues and yet we’re still discussing it today.

EC publisher William Gaines and editor Al Feldstein loved horror, so they published a story called “Return from the Grave!” in the comic Crime Patrol #15. This was the first appearance of the Crypt-Keeper and a few issues later, the title became The Crypt of Terror — in my high school art club, this is what we named our haunted house and yes, it totally was an EC Comics reference, I was the hugest nerd — and then took on its real title a few issues afterward.

Drawn by Johnny Craig, Feldstein, Wallace Wood, Al Davis, George Evans, Jack Kamen, “Ghastly” Graham Ingels, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, Reed Crandall, Bernard Krigstein, Will Elder, Fred Peters and Howard Larsen, the look of Tales from the Crypt — and its sister comics The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear — may have the greatest line-up of artists ever.

Gaines often was inspired by — outright ripped off — other stories and movies for the tales inside the comic. Those include the works of H.P. Lovecraft as well as the films The Man in Half Moon Street, Vampyr, The Beast with Five Fingers and several Ray Bradbury b0oks. Unlike nearly everyone else, Bradbury actually read EC Comics and wrote to them: ““You have not as of yet sent on the check for $50.00 to cover the use of secondary rights on my two stories THE ROCKET MAN and KALEIDOSCOPE which appeared in your WEIRD-FANTASY May-June ’52, #13, with the cover-all title of HOME TO STAY,” he wrote to EC. “I feel this was probably overlooked in the general confusion of office-work, and look forward to your payment in the near future.”

EC did more than thirty Bradbury stories and yes, paid him. They appear in the Fantagraphics collection Home to Stay!: The Complete Ray Bradbury EC Stories.

But it was not to last.

Dr. Fredric Wertham had already written an article in Collier’s entitled “Horror in the Nursery” and for the American Journal of Psychotherapy he turned in “The Psychopathology of Comic Books.” In 1954, the next book by Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent, and a highly publicized Congressional hearing on juvenile delinquency made comics look so bad — not to mention a government breakup of the monopoly that distributed magazines — ruined the industry.

Gaines wanted the surviving companies fight outside censorship and repair the industry’s damaged reputation with the Comics Magazine Association of America and its Comics Code Authority. There had to be a comics code on every cover of every comic published, which isn’t what Gaines wanted. He also learned that other companies pushed for the words horror, weird and terror to not be allowed on the covers. This basically was everything he published.

All three horror books and the SuspenStory comics were canceled in 1954.

Incredible Science Fiction #33 was the last EC comic book to be published and a reprint of the story “Judgement Day” was nearly censored because at the end, the hero is revealed to be black. Gaines went nuclear.

By the 1960s, EC was sold — MAD Magazine was all they published — and became part of Warner Communications. You may know the two Amicus movies that were licensed — Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror. And because Warner also owned HBO, that brings us to this show.

Thanks to an incredible group of producers — David Filer, Walter Hill, Richard Donner, Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver — and aired on HBO. This meant that hardly anything got censored.

With A-listers in the casts, great special effects and an original Danny Elfman song, Tales from the Crypt was a big deal.

A lot of credit goes to the Cryptkeeper, who was performed by a team of puppeteers — Van Snowden, David Arthur Nelson, Anton Rupprecht, Shaun Smith, Mike Elizalde, Frank Charles Lutkus, Patty Maloney, David Stinnent, Mike Trcic and Brock Winkless — and voiced by John Kassir. Even kids loved him, which led to toys and a cartoon based on this bloody horror show, making the children of the parents who lost their EC Comics upset that their kids were watching such a program.

On June 10, 1989, the first episode “The Man Who Was Death” aired. It was based on a story that originally appeared in The Crypt of Terror #17.

“Aww, poor little fellas. When I think of their childhood, all those cute little maggots. Hahahahaha. Our story is about a man with nobler ambitions. He likes to kill human pests and he does it in front of an audience. Now that’s entertainment! Hahahaha. So hang onto your hats kiddies, this one’s a real shocker.”

The Cryptkeeper was here and he was ready to share a story directed by Walter Hill, who wrote the script with Steven Dodd and Robert Reneau.

Niles Talbot (William Sadler) has been promoted to being the man who flips the switch on the electric chair. But when the death penalty is abolished, he becomes a vigilante who punishes criminals who get away with it. All until, well, he gets caught and the death penalty returns.

Biker Jimmy Flood (Robert Winley), Theodore Carne (Gerrit Graham) and Cynthia Baldwin (Cindi Minnick) are all executed until the idea of killing the guilty goes to Niles’ brain and he starts wiping out exotic dancers.

That’s the first episode! It aired the same evening as “All Through the House,” but let’s get to that one next week.