1973's The Vault of Horror is a Worthy Follow-up to 1972's Tales From the Crypt
One of the things that I love about the many show business comedies from the 1930s that I watched for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book on American movies about the film industry, is how short they often are.
In the 1930s it wasn’t unusual for a comedy, even of the star-studded variety, to last sixty two minutes. I’m not sure when or why studios began thinking that a movie had to last at least eighty minutes to qualify as feature length but it was a regrettable development that I deeply resent.
There is nothing wrong with a comedy that lasts just over an hour. That’s actually a fine length for a movie. If you dislike a movie like that you can take comfort in knowing that it’s almost over not long after it starts. If you do dig it then it leaves you hungry for more, which is seldom a bad thing.
I’m similarly of the mindset that horror anthologies should be shorter, faster and more economical. That’s why I have been digging the films British anthology specialist Amicus put out in the early 1970s based on the beloved EC horror comics Tales From the Crypt, Vault of Horror and The Haunt of Fear.
1972’s Tales From the Crypt fits five terrific terror tales into just over ninety minutes. The following year’s frightful follow-up, The Vault of Horror tops it for brevity and speed by cramming five tales of suspense and horror into just eighty three minutes.
The Vault of Horror sticks with Tales From the Crypt’s winning formula with some minor variations. The framing device eschews the comic book’s trio of horror hosts—The Crypt-Keeper, the Vault-Keeper and the Old Witch—in favor of its quintet of strangers gathering in a mysterious gentleman’s club to discuss nightmares that have been haunting them.
First up the ruthless Harold Rogers (Daniel Massey) kills a private detective he hired to track down his sister. He then murders the sister in question in order to claim her inheritance.
In true Tales From the Crypt fashion this sociopathic predator unhappily finds himself helpless prey once he learns the sinister secret of the town’s inhabitants. Here’s a hint: they don't like going out during the day, cast no reflection and do not care for garlic and crucifixes. They really do not like crucifixes made out of garlic.
The EC Comic books that inspired Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror were morality tales in which nearly everyone is amoral. It’s not a world of innocents and monsters; it’s a world of monsters and even worse monsters.
Harold represents the monstrousness of human nature in its greed, avariciousness and dearth of compassion. The town that Harold finds himself trapped in represents a more conventional form of horror.
This opening sequence is sabotaged ever so slightly by some egregiously silly special effects but it nevertheless gets things off to a crackling start.
The great character actor Terry-Thomas takes center stage in the next terror tale as Arthur Critchit, a deeply tedious man of means who has made it deep into middle age without getting married or having children for reasons that soon become apparent.
Arthur considers himself easy to get along with and a real catch when he’s obviously neither. He expects his new wife to look after his home in the manner he sees fit but unfortunately for her, he seems to have a terrible case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that seems to have gone undiagnosed and untreated.
STOP! Hammer time!
Terry-Thomas savvily plays this milquetoast monster as an infernal fussbudget who sees his mania for order above all else as the ultimate form of sanity and cannot understand why everyone else does not think the same way that he does.
Mary Poppins’ Glynis Johns is all too relatable as Eleanor, the woman cursed to put up with her new husband’s impossible demands. Arthur keeps pushing and pushing until his wife finally snaps and answers his enraged query, "Can't you do anything neatly? Can't you?” by very neatly separating his organs after murdering him in a fit of rage.
In a wonderfully morbid flourish we see the trademark gap in Terry-Thomas’ teeth after they have been removed from his face post-murder.
It’s a testament to the purposeful obnoxiousness of Terry-Thomas’ performance that his character’s big transgression is being annoyingly anal and his wife’s sin, legal, moral and otherwise, is murdering her spouse yet she emerges as the more sympathetic character all the same.
The next sinner to get punished is Sebastian (Curd Jürgens), a magician of questionable ethics who travels to India on a working holiday to look for tricks that he can buy, borrow or steal.
He is amazed to see an exotic beauty charm a seemingly sentient rope out of a basket. When he asks how the trick is done she replies that it’s entirely the rope’s doing. So he and his wife decide to separate the woman from her pet rope permanently by killing her, then stealing a trick so magical that it’s not really a trick at all.
They learn, however, that a rope that has a mind of its own might also have a will of its own and a sense of loyalty to its previous, rightful owner. Lets just say that they messed with the wrong living rope.
There’s an implicit critique in colonialism in the way the Brits callously, instantly take what they want from people in former colonies without even thinking of the possible consequences.
They think that they can own the rope by killing the competition, only to learn that some things cannot be bought, and you end up paying a terrible place for thinking otherwise.
The final two fright fables are a little more stock, to put things in Metallica: Some Kind of Monster terms.
In "Bargain in Death” a plan to secure an insurance payday by faking a young man’s death and placing him in a coffin underground goes predictably awry thanks to human nature and some bad luck for everyone involved.
The final terror tale casts Dr. Who’s Tom Baker as a starving artist who discovers that oily opportunists are making off him through various criminal schemes.
The angry painter enacts revenge, voodoo style, but this turns out to be the one time that a voodoo spell does not turn out as intended.
The Vault of Horror lasts a mere eighty-three minutes so even the weaker segments fly by. It’s not as strong as Tales From the Crypt, which benefited from having Freddie Francis, a veteran horror filmmaker who was also a two time Oscar-winning cinematographer with credits like The Elephant Man to his name, but it is solid.
EC Comics and Amicus Productions proved a natural fit. There was definitely more life left in that partnership but there’s certainly something to be said for quitting while you’re ahead.
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