TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE (1990) - Scripts before Crypts

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

This week on our annotated deep dive, The Cultists Present 'Tales from the Darkside - The Movie' (1990). The year was 1983 when George Romero, inspired by the EC comics of the 1950s such as "The Vault" and "Tales from the Crypt", pitched a humble horror TV anthology that would harken back to the golden age of pulp fiction. Seven years, four seasons, and a major motion picture later, Tales has accrued its own fanbase throughout time, and yet this film remains relatively obscure considering its roster. With attached names like George Romero, Steven King, Donald Rubinstein, Christian Slater, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, Mathew Lawrence, Debbie Harry (aka Blondie), David Johnson (aka "Buster Poindexter"), Michael McDowell (the dude who wrote Beetlejuice), and even Arthur Conan Doyle, this film is a zany time capsule of 20th century horror. From Debbie Harry's chipper and casual cannibalism, to Christian Slater's electric mummy carving mania, to cats on a vengeance spree from hell, "Tales" is above all else simply a whole lot of fun.

Deep Dives include: the production’s major players (from Romero, to Slater, to King); the film’s source materials, including: Arthur Conan Doyle’s "Lot 249," Steven King’s "Cat from Hell," Lafcadio Hearn's "Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things," and "Tales From the Darkside" (1983) (the TV show); The British “Egyptomania” of the late 1800s; the origin of the monstrous mummy in Mummy fiction; the three kingdoms of Ancient Egypt and the process of mummification; Zuni fetishes and the semantic evolution of “Fetish/Fetishism”; the editing techniques of 1940s action-adventures; the glory of theatrical scrims; the Japanese folklore of ghostly ice women; the mathematics of cannibalism; and whether champagne is really what you want to pair with cooked children.