#cryptkeeper kassir

[artistgem]

Roger Rabbit and Jessica Rabbit looking asses

[classichorrorblog]

Tales From The Crypt - "Half-Way Horrible" - (1993)

[brokehorrorfan]

Fright-Rags has restocked retro-style tees for each of three EC Comics’ classic horror series: Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Fear. Designed by Kyle Crawford, they're $33 each.

[duranduratulsa]

Now showing on DuranDuranTulsa's Horror Show...Tales From The Crypt Presents Demon Knight (1995) on glorious vintage VHS 📼! #movie #movies #horror #talesfromthecrypt #talesfromthecryptpresentsdemonknight #thecryptkeeper #williamsadler #BillyZane #dickmiller #ripdickmiller #cchpounder #jadapinkettsmith #ThomasHadenChurch #brendabakke #johnkassir #CharlesFleischer #ryanodonohue #JohnLarroquette #henryrollins #vintage #vhs #90s #durandurantulsa #durandurantulsashorrorshow

[bruceshideout]

“Make tonight a SHOCK-buster night! Hehehehe”

[oldtvlover]

And tonight a special episode from "Tales from the Crypt". It was a series from 1989 till 1996. And this was Came the Dawn (S5, E10 or Part 62). Cast: Brooke Shields - Norma Perry King - Roger Michael J. Pollard - Ed Valerie Wildman - Woman at the Restaurant John Kassir - Cryptkeeper

Story: In this episode, a woman on a date in a restaurant excuses herself to use the restroom only to be brutally murdered by an axe-wielding maniac moments later. Meanwhile, a wealthy man named Roger picks up a hitchhiker and thief named Norma and brings her back to his cabin where he tries to seduce her. Things heat up when Norma learns that Roger has a mysterious, jealous girlfriend and that there is a psychotic killer in the area. (taken from here) 

This episode was fun and it’s availabe on Youtube or dailymotion. Enjoy when you can.

[cassowariess]

I thought the voice they got to play The Cryptkeeper in the Solar Opposites Halloween Special was dead on (heh) and then I found out they actually got John Kassir from Tales from the Crypt to do it! The OG Cryptkeeper voice!

[leam1983]

Halloween for Adults

So, you're like me. You don't want Spooky Month to end just yet. Here's a few suggestions.

Full text below.

First, try digging out all those movies you keep telling yourself you'll watch, but never get around to doing so. Sprinkle them throughout November. My personal favourites are still Ryuhei Kitamura's adaptation of Clive Barker's Midnight Meat Train, along with Stuart Gordon's recent return to horror, in the form of 2021's The Color Out of Space. I'm a sucker for the golden oldies - put James Whale in the director's seat and I've watched it. Same goes with anything Ed Wood-related. I love my self-conscious schlock. An added mention goes to Tarantino and Rodriguez' Grindhouse collab, which has some fantastic gore.

You can also find yourself schlocky and pulpy books. I'd strongly recommend Andrew Pyper's Oracle, to put you in the mood. If you're into your classics, William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist is a hard one to beat. All respects to Bill Friedkin's work, but the novel is eons above it in terms of atmosphere. Note to the wise and to atheists out there, however - themes of guilt and of spiritual affects associated with said guilt are rampant in Blatty's post-Exorcist work in the same universe. If you're impatient in the face of someone waxing fire-and-brimstone as an excuse for their own moral failings, you might want to tune this one out. Barker features here, again, with his Books of Blood anthology being a favourite of mine. If you're looking for something that's hilariously campy and has the subtlety of a battering ram, just pick up one of Del Rey's H.P. Lovecraft compilations; they're far cheaper than academic editions, Miskatonic Press reprints or the Library of America omnibus.

For a more serious take on Cosmic Horror, I'll point you to Jeff Van Der Meer, whose Southern Reach series actually does wax existential, in opposition to Lovecraft's sometimes smarmy self-reflections. Van Der Meer does a great job at distilling Cosmic Horror down to its fundaments, and then builds his own Mythos, of a sort, on top of it. If the Master of Providence were still alive, I'd tell him to take notes - seriously.

As you'd expect, comics can also feature. Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead deserve no introduction, but his tone is so focused on the interpersonal that any fun gets quickly sapped out of the experience. If you want some drama to extend your Halloween, you can't go wrong with Rick Grimes' adventures. If, however, you're here for the Pulpy goodness of it all, I'd suggest Mike Mignola and Pat McEown's Champion of the Worms. It serves as the opening salvo for an abortive project titled ZombieWorld - basically The Walking Dead with more squick and less pathos - but what is there is absolutely striking.

Simply put, Champion of the Worms is what you get when an American illustrator overdoses on the works of European pencillers like Morris or Hergé, and pens a gruesomely clean Clear Line-esque aesthetic that flatters the withered features of a Hyperborean death priest-turned-mummy called Azzul Gotha, who seems hell-bent on bringing about the Terrestrial reign of his worm gods and the spreading of a plague of undeath. There's something amusing to the sight of a stylistic cousin to Tintin's Rascar Capac (see The 7 Crystal Balls) pacing about in a museum he's overrun with zombies, reanimated mummies and other shambling corpses, muttering as he obsesses over a means to bring his chosen bride back to him. Man's got the face of the Cryptkeeper and probably a close proxy for John Kassir's cackles, and McEown still draws little pink hearts around his dessicated head when he finally manages to land what's probably the grossest French kiss imaginable.

It's horror in the way haunted house attractions typically present it - it's actually quite colorful and vibrant, and it's hard to find zombies that both manage to fit the bill while also seemingly disturbingly, even cartoonishly alive. It's funny and hammy and tragic in equal parts - and a real shame that Mignola and Dark Horse found the Sales figures disappointing.

Speaking of the Cryptkeeper, both the main Tales from the Crypt series and Nelvana's Tales from the Cryptkeeper are both worthy tools to extend Spooky Month by a week or two. If you're familiar with William Gaines and his weird forays from Christian comics to twisted morality plays featuring lurid gore, the adaptations hardly need any introduction. Of note is the fact that HBO more or less used TftC as a free and open workshop for many actors who felt like trying their hand in the director's chair, and also featured many top-bill talents from the eighties and nineties. One episode in particular features an unreal Michael J. Fox cameo, and one storyline in the penultimate season was directed by Arnold Schwarzennegger. They even got him to reference Pumping Iron while lambasting the show's cadaverous host for having, well, the biceps of a half-dried mummy! Like Champion of the Worms, this is Halloween at its most campy, fun, unrestrained, and cheerfully graven.

A quick round-up of the honorable mentions that were skipped over precisely because of their ubiquity would have to include Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas, Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, Disney's Hocus Pocus and its recently-released sequel, along with Michael Dougherty's Trick R' Treat. Audiophiles see Midnight Syndicate's discography added to the pile.

For video games, I'll preface this by mentioning that a few of these picks suppose you're familiar with the handling of emulators, and that you can either work a Torrent tracker or source the needed files on your own.

If we're focusing on the fun side of things, Midway's CarnEvil is a favourite of mine, which runs easily on MAME with a few tweaks enabling you to use your mouse as a light gun analog. If you don't have the patience to get this fixed and money burning a hole in your pocket, you can snag a refurbed PSVR kit and give Until Dawn: Rush of Blood a whirl for the same basic effect. I'd also recommend an emulated cabinet of anything related to House of the Dead's arcade run. The Wii had its own off-kilter entry in the form of House of the Dead: Overkill, which ran hot off the tails of the then-recently-released Grindhouse duology. Creative Assembly's Alien Isolation deserves a special mention, along with EA Redwood Shores' Dead Space - particularly the first game in the series. Side note - the original 2009 release is a perfectly valid and cheaper alternative to the upcoming reboot.

Honestly, video games are the one area where I'm tempted to simply gesture broadly in the vague direction of your own, personal games collection and to just say Play the heck 'outta those you know. There's far too many to name, from anything that has Resident Evil's name or pedigree attached to it to super-niche titles like New Blood's Faith: The Unholy Trinity or Gloomwood. Indie horror games are extremely fertile, and not a week goes by where some other quirky goodie doesn't find its way to itch.io. Of them all, I'd particularly recommend Kitty Horrorshow's Anatomy, which is a moving - and gruesome - portrait of the Haunted House as a trope.

For other tone-setters, setting a good table always helps. These are the dying days of Summer, effectively, and nothing soothes more during the cold, damp days of November than a good bowl of soup. Onion soup layered with an au gratin biscotti is a House Gremlin staple from late September to shortly before Christmas, along with bog-standard non-perishables like pea soup. I also always keep a measure of crepe batter on hand, or at least have the essentials to whip one together on short notice. Once hailstorms become frequent, warm crepes with sausages, melted cheese or an abundance of maple syrup turn out to be useful and easy fixings to prepare.

Finally, keep a few spooky tidbits around. It's your house, your flat, your condo, whatever, so nobody gives a shit. Keep a few tiny pumpkin plushies, orange fairy lights or other reminders of the season that could more easily blend in with other décor elements. Seeing as you're prolonging Halloween, don't forget to sensibly stock up on either stock-clearance Halloween candy boxes, or on a handful of full-size options.

The fun honestly doesn't have to end just because everything media-based around you moved on to Christmas on the button, and for people like me who particularly resonate with certain holidays, it's prudent enough to give ourselves a week or two to safely come down from our favourite weeks in all the year...

[baronvonkrieger]

A history of Igors

You know him. The hunchbacked assistant of the mad scientist, who performs all those necessary tasks that allows the scientist to pervert normal science to his evil ends. Grave robbing, dusting cobwebs, pulling levers; the little things. We have long associated Igor with mad scientists for many years, but although the modern mad scientist has been with us since 1818, when Mary Shelley published her novel “Frankenstein  or, The Modern Prometheus “, the name Igor character wouldn’t become associated with the character until after World War 2

The hunchbacked mad scientist assistant was a product of the James Whale “Frankenstein”(1931). However, this hunchbacked assistant wasn’t called Igor, his name was Fritz. Played by actor Dwight Frye, the character he created became the iconic assistant to the mad scientist working at the lab at night, robbing graves and pulling levers to assist the madman in making his dreams of a perverted scientist to reality. The third film in the Frankenstein series didn’t give us a Igor, it gave us a Ygor, and Ygor was nobody’s stooge.

 Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi in what may have been his best screen performance, was a man bitter at a community that attempted to hang him him, and discovered the Monster, but alive and in a weakened state. Ygor wasn’t there to serve the mad scientist, he was there to force the scientist to make the Frankenstein monster full strength. That, is the power of friendship. Ygor would somehow survive “Son of Frankenstein”(1939), went on to be in “Ghost of Frankenstein” (1942) and would have played the part once more in “Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman”, with his brain now placed in the body of the monster. Unfortunately it was decided during the production, that the monster wouldn’t speak, which left Lugosi playing the big hulking brute that Lugosi had never wanted to play. With a different actor playing the Frankenstein Monster, all traces of Ygor were gone by “Ghost of Frankenstein”.(1944). With the end of WW2, the era of mad scientists carrying out their experiments in crumbling castles was drawing to a close on the big screen, but not on the small screen.

After WW2, TV sets exploded in popularity, and TV needed ready made material to fill broadcasting hours.Universal found it lucrative to provide their old films to the new media. One of the ways these old movies were to have them hosted by a chacter who would fit the Macabre theme of the movies they presented. One of the earliest, and most successful of these hosts was Zacherley portrayed by John Zacherle , starting in 1957. Being on a budget, if Zacherley needed co-stars, they had to be invisible. That meant his wife (who stayed in a closed casket) and an invisible lab assistant named Igor. Because of the popularity of the old films like the ones that Zacherley hosted, monsters became increasingly popular among young people. One of these, by Bobby Pickett called “Monster Mash” (1962), still popular 60 years later, has practically become the anthem for Halloween, and we have “Boris’ in the song calling his assistant Igor. Five years later, Bobby Picket decided to create a stage musical I'm Sorry the Bridge is Out, You'll Have to Spend the Night, that involved his playing the scientist Boris Frankenstein  and who had Igor as his assistant. This was finally made into a film in 1995 called “Monster Mash”. In the film John Kassir, who played the Cryptkeeper in the HBO series “Tales From the Crypt’, with Bobby Pickett playing Boris the mad scientists. I found the film likable, but it does play like a PG rated “Rocky Horror Picture Show”, and it is little known today.

The first live action filmed version of Igor as the mad scientist assistant could be from 1971′s “The Hilarious House of Frightenstein”. played by Fishka Rais. In “Mad Mad Mad Monsters” the 1972 Animated follow up to the stop action animated film “Mad Monster Party”(1969), Boris Frankenstein’s assistant Igor, was voiced by Allen swift, who seemed to be patterned after the look and way Lugosi portrayed Ygor. It’s as if the decided to blend Frye’s Fritz, with Lugosi’s Ygor, to give us the definite mad scientists helpmate.This would be further defined by a comedy released in 1974 called Young Frankenstein”.

Perhaps the greatest of Mel Brooks comedies, thanks to the brilliant creativity of the film’s star Gene Wilder, an important part of this film was how Marty Feldman’s brilliant performance of Igor. This film is essentially a remake of “Son of Frankenstein”, with Feldman playing the grandson of Fritz from 1931′s “Frankenstein. Of course, the rates have gone up from them. This film was a loving send-up of the first three Universal Frankenstein films. while giving the monster something he would never have in the original films, and that was a happy ending. It’s impossible to think of a mad scientist assistant with a name other then Igor since.

In 2008, Igor got a starring role inhis own film, named Igor. Except, he was one Igor among many. In the country of Malaria, and child born with a hunchback, is called Igor, and the only career option open to Igors, is as a mad scientist assistant, who’s duties include pulling levers, and saying “Yes Master” in a slurred voice. It is a death sentence for any Igor to actually attempt to do any science. However, thanks to the stupidity of the Scientist this Igor worked for destroying himself, he’s able to prove his worth, by the end of the film.

Tim Burton certainly associates the name with hunchbacks who use slurred speech. His stop motion films have given us a couple of Igors. There is the assistant to Dr. Finklestein in “NIghtmare before Christmas”(1993) who is rewarded with dog treats, for successfully completing tasks. Although not an assistant to the scientist in Frankenweenie (2012), the boy named Igor, is clearly based on the archetype.

Although not a hunchback, and not using slurred speach, Rob Zombie gives us the most recent Igor, in his film “The Munsters” released last September. There was an Igor in both the original series, but he was a pet bat. This Igor is the assistant to the Count, who doubles as a mad scientist and a Vampire. He assists the Count in his experiments, including trying to create a mate for his daughter Lily, to keep her from marrying Herman, who is the creation of a mad scientist Dr. Wolfgang. This is the latest Igor to assist a mad scientist, but I doubt this will be the last Igor who will help a mad scientist in his work.

[fictionz]

New Fiction 2023 - September

"Baruch" ed. Richard Challoner (1752)

A short interlude before another juggernaut of a chapter.

Creature Teacher by R.L. Stine (1998)

They really hold out on the monsters here in Series 2000, so this is a welcome entry.

Invasion of the Body Squeezers - Part 1 by R.L. Stine (1998)

An unnecessarily long red herring.

Invasion of the Body Squeezers - Part 2 by R.L. Stine (1998)

That's some way to prevent an extinction event.

I'm Your Evil Twin! by R.L. Stine (1998)

They always do the ol' switcharoo.

Revenge R Us by R.L. Stine (1998)

The Uncut Gems of Goosebumps.

Fright Camp by R.L. Stine (1998)

Fool me several dozen times, shame on us all.

Headless Halloween by R.L. Stine (1998)

Here we GOOOOO. A+ Goosebumps.

Attack of the Graveyard Ghouls by R.L. Stine (1998)

A bit weirder but still more welcome than kids being dicks and no actual spooky happenings.

Brain Juice by R.L. Stine (1998)

Just bizarre. Leaning a little too far into the weird science angle I've no interest for in these books.

The Deadly Experiments of Dr. Eeek by R.L. Stine (1996)

Nope. These gamebooks aren't good for reading one after another, and the ones that more or less stay in place are especially meh.

Night in Werewolf Woods by R.L. Stine (1996)

Another meh entry in spite of the werewolves running around.

Beware of the Purple Peanut Butter by R.L. Stine (1996)

More weird science and generally not scary stuff, less and less interesting.

"Hotline Miami" by KC Green (2023)

The speedrun.

"I was told by my doctor that this'll completely compensate my human meat diet" by scribblingchimp (2023)

Gotta find an alternate.

"Carl's Date" dir. Bob Peterson (2023)

Good to see the gang again.

The Equalizer 3 dir. Antoine Fuqua (2023)

Didn't need to do all that.

Bottoms dir. Emma Seligman (2023)

The kids are alright.

Elemental dir. Peter Sohn (2023)

A personal story.

They Live dir. John Carpenter (1988)

That's a long fight.

Jawan dir. Atlee (2023)

The Robin Hood we need.

Christine dir. John Carpenter (1983)

Somehow, a car is scary.

The LEGO Movie dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (2014)

Too familiar, but perhaps because it kicked off something we've seen a lot of since then.

Outlaw Johnny Black dir. Michael Jai White (2023)

A fun and shooty romp.

Satanic Hispanics dir. Alejandro Brugués , Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Eduardo Sánchez, Demián Rugna (2023)

The anthology offers much.

Prey dir. Dan Trachtenberg (2022)

Hell yes. If they made Predator movies that are just "a Predator fights someone at this point in history" I'd be all in.

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight dir. Ernest Dickerson (1995)

Definitely a feature-length version of an episode, but they pull it off.

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood dir. Gilbert Adler (1996)

Or do they? But this is still better than...

Tales from the Crypt Presents: Ritual dir. Avi Nesher (2002)

A very boring movie like this.

Vault of Horror dir. Freddie Francis (1973)

Ooh that second story is tops.

Tales from the Crypt dir. Freddie Francis (1972)

This first movie was just a tad too straight-faced. Where's the camp?!

The Origin of Evil dir. Sébastien Marnier (2023)

A-n-x-i-e-t-y.

The Expendables 4 dir. Scott Waugh (2023)

I know they can't all come back every time, but the concept seems to be slipping away from them.

The Creator dir. Gareth Edwards (2023)

Hm. Striving toward something I might've liked but somehow doesn't land.

Tales from the Crypt - Season 7 (1996)

I've been annoyed with many people writing off season 7 as not worth watching. It's fine! There's even a few episodes really worth watching.

Tales from the Cryptkeeper - Season 1 (1993)

Basically Goosebumps, so John Kassir recording wraparounds is what makes it special.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds - Season 2 (2023)

I like it, but 10 episodes is not enough. Bouncing from fun to deadly serious episodes too often makes it feel disjointed.

[classichorrorblog]

Tales From The Crypt - "The Reluctant Vampire" - (1991)

[brokehorrorfan]

Spirit Halloween has released a Crypt Keeper motion-activated animatronic for $400. Available online only, the Tales from the Crypt host is 2.5’ and speaks 11 phrases.

[artistgem]

More bat loafs

[bloochouli]

i promised myself i’d leave stoneborn/stone fiends/all those until next week i failed toe beans stone fiend inspired by @prunus-spinosa‘s beautiful stoneborn artworks 😳 i believe in giant and smol gargoyles with toe (and maybe even hand) beans also the fact i tend to draw even denathrius with hand beans comes to show i think im addicted send help

[da-zzi]

Cryptkeeper Kassir