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.

Dr. Philip Drawdy (Patrick Kilpatrick) is a surgeon driving through a remote rural area during a heavy storm. After a minor car accident leaves him stranded, he seeks help at a nearby, decaying mansion. He is greeted by Edmund Alcott (Harsh Nayyar), a formal and somewhat eccentric man who lives there with his wife, Marie (Marcia Cross). She has a deep wound on her leg that won’t seem to heal. As a doctor, Philip offers to help, but he quickly notices several unsettling things about the Alcotts: They are incredibly pale and sensitive to light, the wound on Marie’s leg doesn’t bleed normally, the house is filled with artifacts from a bygone era, and the duo speaks in a formal and out-of-date way.

As Philip treats Marie, he finds himself inexplicably drawn to her. Despite the eerie environment and Edmund’s protective, almost threatening demeanor, a romantic spark ignites between the doctor and his patient. Philip eventually realizes the truth: The Alcotts are vampires.

However, they aren’t the typical predatory monsters found in most horror films. They are weary, lonely immortals who have spent decades in isolation. Marie’s wound was caused by a silver-tipped cane, which is why her supernatural healing hasn’t kicked in. Edmund treats her badly, so Philip, consumed by his growing obsession and strange love for Anne, decides he doesn’t want to leave. He chooses to stay with her forever.

In the final moments, the cure for their loneliness is revealed to be a grim exchange. Philip allows Marie to bite him, fully aware that he is trading his mortal life and his career for an eternity in the shadows with her. The episode ends with the implication that Philip has now joined her secluded, nocturnal world, proving that love can indeed be a transformative—and terminal—experience.

This is another episode directed by Theodore Gershuny. It was written by Edithe Swensen, one of the ten episodes she wrote.

This time, we follow Jake Corelli (Abe Vigoda), a wealthy, ruthless and terminally ill mob boss. Faced with his imminent death, Corelli is not interested in traditional legacies or spiritual peace. Instead, he pays a massive sum to a high-end facility that offers a specialized form of cryogenic suspension.

The facility promises more than just a frozen body; they provide a dream program, which is a customized, computer-driven virtual reality that the patient’s brain will experience in a continuous loop while in stasis.

The facility’s director gives Corelli a choice: the peaceful path is a serene, idyllic dream world where he can live in comfort and tranquility forever; the Corelli path is a dream filled with power, women, expensive food and the thrill of the underworld.

Corelli passes away and is placed into the suspension tank. Initially, the dream begins exactly as he requested. He is in a luxury suite, surrounded by his favorite things. However, a glitch occurs or perhaps a manifestation of his own guilt-ridden subconscious. The dream begins to degrade as the NPCs in his dream start to transform into the victims he murdered or stepped on to get to the top. 

The most terrifying aspect of the episode is the technicality of the contract. Because Corelli is technically dead and his brain is in a closed-loop system, the facility cannot wake him or change the program once it has started. The episode ends with Corelli trapped in a perpetual nightmare. Because the computer is designed to keep its brain active for centuries, it is doomed to experience the same horrific, agonizing visions of its victims’ revenge over and over again, with no possibility of escape or true death.

This episode was directed by Gerald Cotts, who was the cinematographer for Dynamite Chicken and Putney Swope; he directed episodes of this show, Saturday Night Live and Monsters. It was written by James Houghton, who wrote thousands of episodes of The Young and the Restless and appeared in movies like Purple People Eater and Superstition. 

We open on a guy — let’s call him Chester Caruso (Paul Dooley) — whining into a rotary phone to his unseen wife, Marian. He’s stuck in a blizzard, definitely not cheating (wink, wink and his car is currently being hooked up to a tow truck. Chester leaves his room to wander into the lobby and immediately starts hitting on anything with a pulse. He tells a fellow guest he’s a lingerie salesman and decides to get a room, asking for cottage 7, a place where a murder happened just last week.

Chester walks into his room and finds a woman named Carol (Kathy McLain) waiting for him. She thinks he’s Harry. Instead of leaving or calling the cops, they start dancing. He tells her his ballroom-dancing skills are why he’s called Soft Shoes, and it’s all very surreal and artsy until Chester mentions his wife. Suddenly, the mood shifts from The Twilight Zone to Fatal Attraction.

The woman pulls a gun because Harry or Chester has broken her heart for the last time. Bang! Chester runs to the owner, screaming about being shot and dames with revolvers. The owner just sighs, looks at Chester’s breath and tells him to go sleep it off.

The woman comes back, rambling about the good old days while Chester realizes he’s stuck in a narrative loop he can’t escape. We wrap up with the manager (John Fiedler) and the law (Patrick Farrelly) standing outside, basically admitting the room is cursed. Their solution? Demolish the place.

This shows up in the direct-to-video release Stephen King’s Golden Years, which has five Tales from the Darkside stories with only one — “The Word Processor of the Gods” — written by King. It was directed by Richard Friedman, who also made Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge, Doom Asylum and Scared Stiff and written by Art Monterastelli.

Hey, remember when you went to college and your parents turned your bedroom into a sewing room? Well, Cecilia Matthews did one better. She turned it into a psychic freakout where a spectral brat who never grows up and never talks back finally makes her happy as a mother, unlike her real-life child. In this slice of 80s psychological weirdness (based on a Pamela Sargent short story), we meet Christine (Lorna Luft), who comes home for a warm hug only to get the cold shoulder from her mother, Cecilia (Coleen Gray), who is too busy listening to a ghostly child sing “Three Blind Mice” upstairs to hear her own flesh-and-blood daughter pounding on the door.

It’s been six years. Six years since Christine had a nervous breakdown, likely caused by the very woman now offering her tea while treating her like a trespasser. Cecilia has storage in Christine’s old room, a code word for a pink-hued time capsule filled with pom-poms, horse trophies and a literal ghost of Christine’s childhood.

Enter Chrissie (Virginia Keehne). She’s the girl Christine used to be, or at least, the girl Cecilia wanted her to stay. While Christine is trying to process her trauma and navigate a broken life, Cecilia is upstairs, tucked in with a poltergeist version of her daughter, feeding the thing pure nostalgia.

The second act turns into a battle for maternal territory. We get a visit from Toni (Janet Wood), the Avon lady, who drops the bomb that Cecilia spends an unhealthy amount of time talking to the walls. Then there’s brother Chuck (Lary Gilman), who tries to play peacemaker but mostly just serves as a reminder that Christine is the only one in this family actually living in the real world.

Christine confronts Chrissie, who is basically a sentient World’s Best Daughter trophy with a mean streak. There’s shouting, a shattered mirror, and a tug-of-war for Cecilia’s soul. In the end, the power of a grown-up’s grief beats out a phantom’s playground rhymes, as you’d imagine it would. Chrissie goes poof in a flash of light, Cecilia wakes up from her nostalgic trance, and we’re left with two women holding each other in the wreckage of a childhood bedroom.

Most of Christopher T. Welch’s directing work was on TV, while he has also done ADR and production work. This was written by Julie Selbo, who wrote for this series and Monsters, as well as animation.

Directed and written by John Harrison (Tales from the Darkside: The Movie) from a story by Ron Goulart, “Printer’s Devil” proves that if you own a small business in Tales from the Darkside, a supernatural entity is definitely going to show up to offer you a deal that ends with you screaming into the void.

Junior P. Harmon (Larry Manetti, taking a break from Magnum P.I.) is a hack writer whose career is deader than a Sunday matinee in a blizzard. He’s staring down the barrel of total failure until he meets Alex Kellaway (Charles Knapp), a creepy old man who looks like he smells of mothballs and brimstone. Kellaway offers him the ultimate ghostwriting deal: Junior gets the fame, the money, and the top of the bestseller list, provided he follows a very specific, very bloody set of instructions.

The catch? Kellaway’s muse doesn’t run on coffee; it runs on organic sacrifices. Junior starts small, knocking off pets to keep the hits coming, and soon he’s the toast of the town, moving in with his high-powered editor, Brenda Hardcastle (Nita Talbot). But the “Printer’s Devil” is a greedy editor, and soon the blood tax goes up. Before Junior can say Pulitzer, he realizes that when you sign a contract with a supernatural entity in a Darkside episode, the fine print is usually written in your own hemoglobin.

The episode even features a deep-cut Easter egg for the die-hards: the song playing on the radio is by Justine Bancroft, the character Lisa Bonet played in “The Satanic Piano.”

Archie Fenton (Robert Knepper, Cards of Death and T-Bag on Prison Break) thinks he’s scored the real estate deal of the century: a swanky, high-tech room in the St. George Apartments for $200 a month. The catch? The landlady, Madame Angler (Marie Windsor, who was in everything from Commando Squad and Salem’s Lot to Chamber of Horrors, Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy and Cat-Women of the Moon), has some weird house rules. No nails in the walls, no microwaves and most importantly, he has to provide organic garbage with no bags.

That’s because the building is alive. And it’s quite sensitive. When Archie nails a picture to the wall, the building bleeds. When he tries to feed the disposal unit a bag of chemicals and broken glass, his domicile gets a nasty case of indigestion.

Archie figures out that the previous tenant, Helen (Patricia Pelham), didn’t move out. She was the main course. Madame Angler and her dragon-jacket-wearing goons, Al and Mac (Ben Frank and Robert Sutton), explain that the building needs to be respected. Archie tries to fight back, but this ends with a giant reptilian tongue slithering out of the disposal chute to drag him into the building’s digestive tract.

This was directed by John Strysik (who also wrote several episodes) and written by Harvey Jacobs and Michael McDowell from a story by Adam K. Jacobs.

Get it? There’s a dragon in a building called the St. George.

Directed by Tinma Ranon, who wrote the script based on a story by Barbara Paul, this is about Andrea Caldwell (Carolyn Seymour), a high-strung theater director with a short fuse and zero patience for her lazy maintenance man, Otto (Lou Cutell, Amazing Larry!). After she berates the poor guy and tosses away his magazine, she and her missing lead actor Syd (John Cedar, who wrote and produced The Manitou!) are sucked into a surreal, low-budget dreamscape where Otto is the boss and they’re the help.

Andrea eventually figures that out and decides that the only way to beat a dreamer is to out-dream him. I mean, only a ninja can kill a ninja. She pops some reds to hijack the fantasy, but wakes up in the dream of Joe D’Amico (Dawson Mays), a stagehand Otto was also  keeping captive. The tragedy isn’t just that she fails to take over; it’s the layering of the dreams. In a precursor to films like Inception, she escapes one man’s nightmare only to fall into the subconscious of another person she mistreated.

Can someone get Ken Lauber on the phone? The score in this one sounds a lot like the music from A Nightmare on Elm Street.

What a weird episode.

Amateur astrologist Englebert Ames (Anthony Heald, Silence of the Lambs) can’t wait for Halley’s Comet, but his wife Charlene (Kate McGregor-Stewart) couldn’t care less. She’s more interested in going to a fancy event with her parents, but he knows this is the last chance he’ll have to see the famous space event. The tension between Englebert and Charlene serves as a satirical look at suburban misery. While Charlene is obsessed with the social status of her parents’ party, Englebert’s obsession is literal escapism.

Then, Lara Burns (Sarah Rush) comes into his room, right out of the telescope, and claims that she disappeared when she and her fiancé watched the comet in 1910. She’s been riding it with Sir Edmund Halley and, of course, she falls for Englebert. By the end, Charlene and Halley (Fritz Weaver) are back on the comet, and our hero has found his love.

Who knew Halley’s Comet wasn’t just a ball of ice and dust; it’s a cosmic cruise ship. The idea that Sir Edmund Halley is still alive, riding his own discovery through the vacuum of space, adds a charming, almost Victorian-sci-fi layer to the story. The ending of this one is rare: the protagonist isn’t punished but rewarded with a literal soulmate from another century, while his overbearing wife finds her own match in the stern historical figure of Halley.

This was directed by Warner Shook, who appears in Creepshow, Knightriders, and Dawn of the Dead; he also directed “Grandma’s Last Wish” in season 1 and “Deliver Us from Goodness” in season 3, as well as two episodes of Monsters. It was written by Harvey Jacobs and Jule Selbo.

While not the most frightening episode, this may be one of the weirder ones. Unlike the grim irony of most episodes, “Comet Watch” leans heavily into romantic screwball comedy and magical realism. It’s often cited alongside episodes like “The Geezenstacks” as examples of the show’s willingness to experiment with tone beyond pure horror.