So this is just me going to be talking about an episode from a show I particularly like called Tales from the Crypt. It was a rather crude, raunchy anthology series in the late 1980s and early 1990s that was also a send up to pulp horror comics from the 50s, specifically of a magazine originally called The Vault of Horror which later was retitled – you guessed it – Tales From the Crypt. You’ll see why I bring up this bit of background knowledge later. As for the tv show, like I said it’s an anthology so the stories follow no continuity, but the one element that links them all together is that they are hosted by a Gollum looking fella with an appetite for horror related puns called the Crypt Keeper. What is interesting is that there is an episode called Lower Berth in which two circus attractions (a boy with literally two faces and an undead mummy) give birth to a child at the end and that child is the Crypt Keeper. This I can’t figure out which type but I do believe is some form of narrative complexity but by breaking the standards of the show’s own narrative, rather than the show’s general narrative breaking standards of television. You see, this is the only episode where the Crypt Keeper’s existence is acknowledge within the stories he presents to us. And at first I was going to say isn’t it crazy that they had this kind of narrative complexity from a comic book back in the 50s? But then it hit me. Wait a minute, the original comics did not have a host. But the Crypt Keeper shows the cover of the corresponding comic just like always at the beginning of Lower Berth, so this is based on an existing comic, but how random would it be for the writers of the comic to make up some character called the Crypt Keeper for this one issue and have that, a character no one’s ever heard of before, be the big twist at the end. So I did a little research and what I found was 1) No, the original comics had no host, let alone the Crypt Keeper 2) Yes, the original comic did end with baby Crypt Keeper (my new baby yoda btw) as the big twist HOWEVER 3) The Crypt Keeper was in fact around before this issue so die hard fans would have known who he was. Apparently he was not as strongly associated with the Tales from the Crypt comic series, but he did make occasional appearances and his first appearance was in a eerily similar named issue of a comic series called Crime Patrol: The Crypt of Terror. It’s interesting isn’t it how such a little change in an adaptation, an otherwise faithful one no less, of some preexisting work can lead to such drastic shifts in the nature of something like the narrative?
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