It's been more than ten months since we heard that the classic horror anthology show Tales from the Crypt would be receiving a revival courtesy of M. Night Shyamalan and TNT, and over these ten months the news Shyamalan has shared has gotten better and better. At first, he was talking about doing season-long story arcs on the show, an idea I wasn't into – that's not my Crypt. Later he changed his mind and said he was thinking of doing individual episodes instead, like the old show. That's more like it.
Now, while a contest that would allow user-generated content to make its way onto the show seemed to indicate that at least some of the episodes would have original stories, Shyamalan has confirmed that, like its predecessor, his Tales from the Crypt will be drawing inspiration for its episodes from the EC Comics of the 1950s – everything in those EC horror comics is fair game to use.
From an interview with Crave:
So you’re not just going to do your own thing.
No, no, no.
You’re going back to the original stories.
These are the comics, yeah.
What’s your favorite one from the comics that hasn’t been done yet?
[Thinks.] There’s a bunch. I have a folder of my favorites, like my twenty or thirty favorites. I’m trying to remember them. I mean they’re so weird. There’s one where there’s a bewitching one, where an old lady bewitches and takes the wife, and the husband has to figure it out. He keeps the old lady in the closet but that’s really his wife now. They’ve swapped, you know? And he can’t kill this woman but she’s now a beautiful woman.
This is great news as far as I'm concerned, I am very glad to hear that they will be sticking with the source material for this show.
To read more of what Shyamalan had to say about Tales from the Crypt, including his thoughts on the Crypt Keeper as the cataloguer of men's sins, head over to Crave for the full interview.