Tales From the Crypt, Season 3, Episode 4: "Abra Cadaver"

“Abra Cadaver” belongs to the sub-genre of medical and Voodoo horror devoted to the unspeakable torment of death without death. Death without death movies and TV shows and short stories and whatnot explore what happens when the body dies an unmistakable death but the mind remains alive and autonomous and all too capable of processing and feeling what the body is experiencing, whether that’s burial or cremation or just being left alone to rot in a mortician’s slab for eternity. 

In “Abra Cadaver”, the unique, unspeakable torment of death without death is accomplished through a combination of VERY experimental medicine and old fashioned voodoo. It’s a form of supernatural vengeance from Martin Fairbanks (the eternally reliable Beau Bridges) an older brother driven more than a bit mad with jealousy and anger at Carl (Tony Goldwyn), a younger brother who robbed him of his destiny to be a great surgeon when he played a prank on him that gave him a heart attack.

The episode opens in black and white in a flashback to the 1970s featuring Martin and Carl in medical school. Martin is the responsible grown-up of the pair, a brilliant medical mind with a blindingly bright future who continually has to put out the fires and clean up the messes of his irresponsible, asshole younger sibling. 

One spooky night in medical school Carl decides to “celebrate” his brother’s birthday by pulling the old “corpses come alive” gag with the help of some buddies. It works so well that a freaked out Martin has a heart accident that costs him control of his hands. 

His dreams of medical glory shattered, Martin embraces the grand gestalt of giving up. When we catch up with the brothers decades later their dynamic had been reversed. Carl is now the successful, responsible one, a slick, heartless, cold-blooded yuppie achiever while Martin is now the fuck up. 

Martin’s hair is shaggy and unkempt. He keeps bottles of hard liquor at the ready and doesn’t seem shy about drinking greedily from them on a regular basis. Martin seems to take great, malevolent delight in purposefully and deliberately squandering the opportunities his younger brother provides him as an inherently, eternally insufficient apology for ruining his life. 

When Martin cheerfully volunteers that he’s been exploring the dark arts of voodoo via trips to the islands Carl doesn’t realize he’s subsidizing Carl is concerned but not quite concerned enough. As tardy but deeply satisfying payback for the prank that cost him his professional future, Martin has given his brother a substance that replicates the symptoms of death with the exception of brain death and losing sensitivity. 

Martin gives his awful younger brother death without death, essentially. Goldwyn’s facial expressions do not change, although the actor is good at expressing profound existential dread without using words or movement, but on the soundtrack we can hear his still-functioning, still-cognizant mind’s thoughts and the ever-mounting horror as he realizes just how fucked he really is. 

The wonderful Bridges takes joy in making the bane of his existence and the cause of all of his pain and duress suffer like he has suffered, and then some. At one point “Abra Cadaver” takes an unexpected turn into Weekend at Bernie’s II territory when the seemingly dead but actually sentient stiff ends up in the questionable care of a Rastafarian who hot-boxes the ostensible corpse, speaks in cartoonish patois and of course rocks the requisite dreadlocks. 

This character is such a retro racist stereotype of a Rude Boy from the islands that if this episode were to be remade today only one actor would have the authenticity and history to play him the right way: Adrien Brody.

In a nifty meta commentary on racism and stereotyping both within genre fiction like this and society as a whole, Carl’s island tormentor turns out to be a non-dreadlocked American who does not speak in a cartoon accent but adopted those affectations because he knew they would scare someone like Carl more than if he was an American without dreadlocks or a Bob Marley-level weed habit. 

That’s because the twist in “Abra Cadaver” is that the sadistic and deadly revenge is supposed to be nothing more than another elaborate prank, a goof, a cruel hoax played by Martin and a whole lot of collaborators as a “fuck you” big enough and dramatic enough to be commensurate with the burning rage Martin still obviously feels towards a brother who took everything from him. 

Carl is supposed to be wake up from his death-like paralysis, the victim of a prank beyond the demented imagination of even an infamous trickster like George Clooney. As with the long ago prank that begins the episode and serves as the catalyst for its plot, the prank does not quite turn out as planned.

It turns out that when you mess relentlessly with life and death sometimes VERY bad things happen. Also, when you have the hubris and gall to play God the results tend to be devilish. 

So the twist is and is not actually a twist because Carl really is just as screwed and as doomed as think he is. But that doesn’t really matter because “Abra Cadaver” is less dependent on twists than on dread and atmosphere and the simultaneously dream-like and nightmarish nature of death without death. 

It’s another killer episode where death is less a prank gone awry than an awful fate you cannot, and perhaps should not be able to escape. 

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