First aired in 1989, Tales from the Crypt was one of HBO’s earliest original programming successes. Adapted from EC Comics’s iconoclastic early 1950s horror anthology series and its companion titles like The Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear, the project was originally conceived by producers Joel Silver, Walter Hill, David Giler, Richard Donner, and Robert Zemeckis as an omnibus film in the style of George A. Romero and Stephen King’s Creepshow, whose pulpy pop art style and mix of the macabre with grim, ironic humor was intended as a loving homage to the pre-code cartoons. Reconfigured as a weekly half-hour TV show with all the uncensored sex and gore that network shows like Tales from the Darkside (1984-1988) couldn’t afford, Tales from the Crypt made good on the A-list pedigree of its producers both behind and in front of the camera, including established and upcoming performers like Kirk Douglas, Isabella Rossellini, Steve Buscemi, Patricia Arquette, Whoopi Goldberg, and even—in a Zemeckis-directed episode with prescient technical innovations—a digitally resurrected Humphrey Bogart. But the biggest star was the one whose commentaries bookended each episode: The Cryptkeeper, an avuncular puppet with a curdled, decomposing smirk who riffed on the stories with grisly puns delivered in John Kassir’s iconic cackling shriek. To the chagrin of parents such as my own, he was, like the Joe Camel of carnage, a huge hit with children—I was 3-to-10-years-old during the original series run, and obsessed—and even got his own Saturday afternoon cartoon on ABC.
In 1995, the Cryptkeeper transitioned to the big screen with the standalone story Demon Knight. It’s framed like an episode of the show, beginning with the credit sequence's opening tracking shot through the Cryptkeeper’s mansion and Danny Elfman’s theme song. But the plot eschews the typical ironic reversals and twists of the comics and television episodes to portray a high-stakes battle between good and evil staged in a flea-bitten hotel in the fictional Wormwood, New Mexico.
A slimy creature feature sandwiched between the end of the original American slasher cycle and Scream’s postmodern revival, Demon Knight has been unfairly overshadowed in the 90s horror canon. The cast is dynamite, including Jada Pinkett, Billy Zane, William Sadler, Thomas Haden Church, Dick Miller (who does some of the best work of his storied career), and CCH Pounder, and director Ernest R. Dickerson—the cinematographer of many of Spike Lee's best films, as well as 90s indie horror gem Def By Temptation—gives the images a gravity that transcends television. (Like the Dickerson-lensed Do the Right Thing, Demon Knight also contains explicit references to Night of the Hunter.) It remains, curiously, one of the very few horror films starring a Black female protagonist, and, along with Ganja and Hess and Black Devil Doll from Hell, one of the few of that subset directed by a Black filmmaker. Although it is a thoroughly grand guignol and at times prurient affair, it holds a certain emotional integrity and interest in its characters that has aged well. And surely there’s something to be made of a story that pits a resourceful Black woman against a devil personified as a smooth-talking white salesman commanding a horde of demonic followers.
