Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by J †Johnson, Staff Writer

Ghouls play everybody. They know we are united in our inability to look away from horror, and our love of cheap thrills and cheaper puns. Groan or laugh: the ghoul has you right where they want you. Whether we’re watching Creepshow (dir. George A. Romero, 1982), Tales from the Crypt (1989-1996), or Body Bags (dir. John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, 1993), what happens between the intro and outro of the ghoul’s picture show hardly matters—we’re here for the ghoulishness. Our own. Come one, come all! Step inside and see what there is to see.

We’re familiar with the intermedia setup of cartoonish horror hosts like The Crypt Keeper, The Creep, and The Coroner, as they introduce spine-tingling, salacious, spectacular tales of terror. They hook us with a grin and reel us into their bony clutches. Of course, it’s a trap. And how does the ghoul draw us in? They bait us with candy. They give us a little show and make cute with direct address, puppetry, cosplay, and comic book flourishes. First we are addressed as fun-loving children. Hello, kiddies! squeals The Crypt Keeper. But the ghoul’s show is not kid stuff in the least. We are treated to all the delicious things the censors warn us about, everything we sneak out of bed to find on late-night TV: language, nudity, blood, gore, adult themes. And we aren’t made to wait—no convoluted plot setup to forestall the good stuff. We get right to the killing, immediately wallow in appalling, avaricious, sleazy human behavior. Everyone gets what’s coming to them. It ain’t pretty, but we eat it up. A tight, little package full of technicolor rot. Who could resist?

We even get a lesson at the end: It just goes to show you… Best of all, it’s a tease. There’s no moral instruction here, just the setup for a few more sticky puns. The Crypt Keeper is ever insinuating our desire for the inevitable decay of flesh, the corruption of our sappy good intentions. We want to see what’s really under the surface, and The Crypt Keeper is the embodiment of that: a decomposing ghoul who shows us the dark heart of capitalist realism. 

Oh yes, we’re going there, because that implied critique is part of the ghoul’s trick or treat. The world of Tales from the Crypt, whose stories are sourced from ’50s EC Comics, takes a grim view of humanity that is both reactionary and satirical. And that’s where the implied critique of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism comes into the picture show. Not only is the story capitalism tells about itself premised on its own inevitability, but it leads inevitably toward consumption and exploitation. There’s always another sucker, always another need, always another dollar to be made. This is also the story the ghoul tells us: We are stuck here in the fucked up world that eats itself and fucks itself into the ground, and we might as well get off on it. 

This exaggerated cynicism appeals to outcast punk and goth aesthetics at the same time it presses reactionary buttons and keeps the normies titillated. It’s a formula that worked for EC comics, and it worked just as well in Tales from the Crypt’s TV revival from 1989-96. Like any ghoul worth their shredded garments, it plays both sides (whatever they be) off the middle and the middle off both sides, and leaves the nuance to us. It doesn’t matter that the world doesn’t align so neatly into good and bad, rich and poor, left and right, black and white, men and women, etc. The ghoul gives us a caricature we can read any way we like. We can also not read it, and just enjoy the nasty candy. So for example even the most crass They Had It Coming story could uphold a reactionary politics or critique capitalist brutality. It’s always Halloween—good, spooky fun without consequences. Unless of course we actually observe the historical and material conditions that produce culture and preserve blood ritual. One of the ghoul’s best tricks is to hide truth behind gore and puns—that way we don’t have to think about what truths are being revealed. Meanwhile, those truths gnaw away at us. We experience that decomposition as the thrill of fear or the queasiness of having gorged on too much pizza, soda, and ultraviolence. Look where the ghoul is looking, though: We’re getting a little gamey over here. The ghoul becomes our mirror as we feast our eyes on our own decay.

Lest we give the impression that we are condemning any of this, let’s be clear: If we recognize the nature of horror, we can better enjoy it. Blood ritual is foundational to culture, even if we don’t need to be so literal about it. That’s the key to ritual, as we have come to understand it. We don’t need to sacrifice a virgin: We can symbolically kill our innocence to see the world as it is and as it could be. If we look at horror in a critical way, we don’t ruin the fun, we add dimensions to our enjoyment. Horror is a response—a comment on reality.

The ghoul feeds on our corruption while showing us endless examples of our corruptibility. We know better than to fall into the traps the ghoul shows us: all the petty mistakes these characters can’t help making. The stories and bodies pile up. What’s a tale from the crypt but a story about how someone ate shit and died. There may not be a tidy lesson in that, but the pleasure we get from watching flesh succumb to inevitable decay—now, not in some unpredictable future—relieves us for a moment from all manner of simmering anxiety. Maybe we don’t notice that the trap the ghoul shows us is contained within another trap: the framing narrative that forms the ghoul’s come-on. And maybe we don’t always see that the ghoul gestures toward the frame around that: the idiot box or movie screen. Sure, the ghoul’s unhinged laughter is aimed at us. We can laugh at ourselves, too. The basic truth the ghoul taunts us with is that we might as well step into their trap, and the trap within that trap, because we’re already in a trap: the couch, the bedroom, the movie theater, the world as it is. It ain’t pretty, but we can at least get off on it. And here’s the thing the ghoul won’t tell us but will always imply: It doesn’t have to be this way. Worse: It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is this way.

So eat that nasty candy, suffer through the mild stomach discomfort, and return to the world with a more penetrating stare. Please forgive all this ableist visual orientation, but our object of discussion is a visual medium. Or let’s rephrase this as insight to be had from these eye-popping tales. Here’s all the awful things people do to each other to hasten our doom. Isn’t it ridiculous? Does it really have to be this way? What do we have to gain from being less of a sucker? We all feed the Crypt Keeper one day, but we don’t have to feed Amazon every day. We can get off without sacrificing any virgins.

Like the hopeless capitalists they parody, the ghoul promises All this can be yours! which is also to say Have at it, kiddies! The ghoul is a salesperson giving out free samples, and if we can recognize their schtick maybe we won’t buy into the routine they gleefully lampoon.

And look, there are other, related pleasures to be had here. The Crypt Keeper is a prototypical ghoul host, and as such is not only a showperson and salesperson, but a curator. At decades removed from the series, we find a gallery of horror, a crypt full of notable raconteurs to rival the Crypt Keeper themselves. In just the first couple episodes we get a story from Robert Zemeckis, music from Ry Cooder and Danny Elfman, photography from Dean Cundey (who shot Halloween, The Thing, and other John Carpenter gems). The star turns and classic character actor appearances are as endless and astonishing as the ghoul’s supply of horrors. And of course, we get retellings of classic gruesome tales that rely less on surprise than entirely predictable, delightful shock and schlock. It’s a good time, even as we can tear it apart looking for the banal darkness beneath the veneer of popular culture.

Come one, come all! Step inside and see what there is to see. The ghoul addresses us, cracks their jokes, puts us at dis-ease, and turns toward what they have to show us. We don’t so much step into the picture as we step into the frame: not the screen, but the decomposing body of the ghoul. That’s the frame that traps us. It’s an exaggerated experience of this mortal coil, but it’s also the deathless death of the ghoul that they offer us, like the TV image that is already degraded but lives forever on the internet. As of this writing you can watch the whole Tales from the Crypt series on Youtube at no additional cost—you already paid at the portal. All you have to spend is your time, and we have plenty of time to kill, right kiddies?