Tales from the Crypt, Season 2, Episode 18: The Secret

“The Secret”, the eighteenth and final episode of the second season of Tales from the Crypt is about the secret wickedness of the ostensibly innocent. That’s a theme pervasive enough in horror to make it a sub-genre all its own. In movies about the wickedness of the ostensibly innocent we’re led to identify with and root for a seemingly powerless or vulnerable character in a dangerous situation. The vulnerable character can be a child or someone in a wheelchair or someone very old and frail who appears to be easy pickings for a calculating predator but who proves to be more cunning, ruthless and sometimes even monstrous and evil than anticipated. 

In the handsomely mounted, gorgeously filmed (by Eliot Davis, who would go on to shoot, among other films, Out of Sight) season two finale "The Secret” the not so innocent innocent is a Coonskin cap-wearing twelve year old orphan named Theodore whose past and family history are both shrouded in secrecy by orphanage workers who fear they’ll never be rid of him. 

Theodore is simply too old and too weirdly ominous to be attractive to adoptive parents until one day the wealthy, elegant and clearly evil Colberts (William Frankfather and Grace Zabriskie) single him out from his younger, cuter, less sinister peers and promise to transform his life of deprivation and want into one of wealth and privilege when they take him home to their opulent mansion and invite him to live as their endlessly pampered son.

But something is off from the beginning. Actually it’d be more accurate to say that EVERYthing is off from the start. Part of that is casting. Cast the great, spooky Grace Zabriskie in TV show or movie and audiences are going to assume that she is playing an evil villainess. They’ll usually be right.

When Zabriskie strides into an orphanage with a big, phony smile you immediately think, “She’s going to eat one of those poor orfinks.” The same goes with Larry Drake, aTales from the Crypt All-Star who returns as the Colberts’ elegant, sad, strangely sinister butler, who develops an emotional connection to Theodore that complicates his allegiances. 

The Colberts give Theodore a quality of life on par with Richie Rich or the kid Ricky Shroeder played in Silver Spoons. He even has his own massive model railroad. Theodore has everything a lonely, strange boy could want and nothing that he needs, like parents who let him outside and treat him like a son and not a goose they are fattening in anticipation of a merry feast. 

It’s obvious that the Colberts are very bad news. It’s equally obvious, however, that Theodore is not at all what he first appears to be either. That coonskin cap is just one not so subtle sign of his violently animalistic true nature, the one his orphanage is clearly terrified of, and want to keep a secret from him and the world. 

It's clear that both the Colberts and Theodore are repping major monster families, and not the same one. Sure enough, when the Colberts decide Theodore is plump and sweet enough to be feasted upon Theodore reveals a "secret" of his own; let's just say that in a few years this young man will be able to relate to the movie Teen Wolf on a deeply personal level. 

"The Secret" opens with the Crypt-Keeper reading Oliver Twist and bemoaning the lack of a twist in Dickens’ masterpiece about a very different, less lupine orphan. He quips that he had such great expectations for the book only for it to come up short. That’s a great/terrible dead dad joke to make but it only made me mourn the aborted Tales from the Crypt reboot to be masterminded by no less a Frightmaster than M. Night Shyamalan. 

Can you even imagine the kind of sick Tales from the Crypt twists the twisted mind of M. Night Shyamalan would be able to dream up? I’m getting chills just thinking about that combination. But no, we flew too close to the sun with that one and our wings got charred. We had a paradise and we lost it. 

Good job, world. I guess we just don't deserve truth and beauty like that. We don’t deserve those twists, or those puns. 

In its first two acts, “The Secret" is sometimes shot from Theodore’s perspective to emphasize his helplessness and youth, as well as his alienation and distance from both the orphanage and his sinister adopted parents, the way he has no parent to protect him or look after him and is consequently  vulnerable to the whims and wishes of icy strangers who have been given complete power over him. 

We see the world through Theodore’s eyes. It is a cold and heartless place full of sinister grown-ups with impure motives. Late in the film, post-twist, we once again see things from Theodore’s perspective only now the sense of powerlessness and vulnerability has been replaced by the power and aggression of being able to tear people, and monsters, apart, limb by limb. 

For an episode fueled by a pair of twists, “The Secret" is ultimately not terribly surprising, let alone shocking. I could see where it was headed from the very beginning but I nevertheless took abundant pleasure along the way in its craft and artistry, in the cinematic production design and wonderful character work by the heavyweight likes of Drake and Zabriskie, actors made for Tales from the Crypt. 

"The Secret” closes things out for Tales from the Crypt’s second season on a solid if less than transcendent note. It's an elegant, well-made exercise in hyper-traditional horror that doesn’t need its twist to be terribly surprising in order to be effective. 

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