S3E36: How To Make A Crypt Keeper

The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast

Here’s a stone cold fact: it is really, really, REALLY hard to create an iconic character like Tales From The Crypt’s iconic Crypt Keeper.

For one thing, you can’t set out to create a character that will become iconic. That’s because it’s not up to the character’s creators, it’s up to you – the audience.

It’s your embrace – how warm it is – how long it lasts – that determines whether a character can even enter the “iconic” conversation.

With the Crypt Keeper, we ticked off all the boxes.

We created a character that a wide and widening audience still embraces – thirty some odd years after its creation.

But, HOW do characters like the Crypt Keeper GET created? Don’t they just spring fully formed – more or less – from one person’s fertile imagination?

Well, not really…

Every horror icon’s creation is complicated in its own way. And more than one person played a significant part.

Take The Frankenstein Monster.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly – Frankenstein’s author –

and her husband – the Romantic poet Percy Bysse Shelly –

were traveling with friends through Germany down the Rhine River in 1816.

At night, the travel party told each other ghost stories. Mary and her friends were all intrigued by the latest science: using electricity to spark dead limbs to life.

And, as they traveled down the Rhine through Germany, they heard local stories about a crazy local alchemist named Johann Konrad Dippel.

Dippel robbed graves and experimented on corpses at a very real place called Frankenstein Castle.

And then Mary Shelley – all of 21 – filled in the blanks – and published her book anonymously. She put her name on the second edition though.

In time, Mary Shelley’s character found a literary audience. But then a guy named James Whale directed the movie version of the book in 1931. And whatever the character had been on the page became the character in the movie.

And that’s the Frankenstein monster most people think of when they hear the name “Frankenstein”.

Remove any of those elements from the Frankenstein equation and there is no equation.

As you’ll hear – if you haven’t already heard this episode – it took puppeteer Kevin Yagher to create the Crypt Keeper puppet plus John Kassir to create the Crypt Keeper’s voice plus me to create the Crypt Keeper’s inner life plus Gil Adler – who directed and produced the Crypt Keeper segments.

Take any of us out of the Crypt Keeper equation – and this equation isn’t happening either.

When Kevin and John and Gil and I got together for that very first time, we had never had this conversation before – about the Crypt Keeper’s creation story.

None of us knew the whole story ourselves – until we shared it with ourselves.

And you’ll get to share that discovery with us.

How do you make a Crypt Keeper? Well… it’s complicated – but quite fascinating.

And by the way – the young guy sitting in the dentist’s chair during our teaser?

That was me.