The Sinister Incels of Tales from the Crypt

My wife and children were away for the weekend so I figured I would while aways the hours finishing revisions to the book on the video game and movie Postal that I am writing with my friend Brock Wilbur and binge-watching Tales from the Crypt for work and pleasure, as a preview of coming attractions for future entries in the Spookthology of Terror. 

When you watch a whole bunch of Tales From the Crypt episodes certain themes, characters and plots pop up over and over again, to the point that the beloved HBO horror anthology begins to feel like an elaborate exercise in self-cannibalization. 

Yet it’s precisely because the classy/trashy pop culture institution focuses so monomaniacally on the evergreen topics of greed, sex, murder, jealousy, power, class and control that Tales From the Crypt feels so timeless and enduring.

Tales from the Crypt is never afraid to repeat itself. Why tamper with a winning formula? Why mess with success? Why stop with the ghoulish puns? Ever?

It sure can feel like Tales from the Crypt tells the same damn story over and over again, with minor variations. Oftentimes that terror tale involves a love-struck romantic so all-consumingly obsessed with his dream girl that he’s willing to do anything and everything to possess her, even if that involves tampering with dark magic and bad juju. 

To cite an unusually pure example, the aptly named season three opener “Loved to Death” stars a more sniveling and weaselly than usual Andrew McCarthy as a groaningly over-familiar archetype, the big-dreaming kid from the sticks who comes to glamorous Hollywood California to write pictures. 

McCarthy plays Edward Foster, a talentless aspiring screenwriter who falls instantly in a deep state of lust with next door neighbor Miranda Singer (Mariel Hemingway), a ruthlessly ambitious, and just plain ruthless actress who makes no secret of her ferocious desire to fuck her way to the top.

She’s an Incel, MRA paranoid nightmare of predatory, cynically calculating and destructive sexuality.  She takes pity on Edward and makes a date with him, only to blow him off so she can screw another guy. 

There is no subtext to Tales from the Crypt, no ambiguity. We do not have to infer that perhaps the reason Miranda won’t give Edward the time of day is because he’s a broke, love-struck loser with no social currency beyond his uncanny resemblance to the guy from Mannequin and Weekend at Bernie’s 2 because she flat out tells him that she will totally go out with him just as soon as he is rich and famous and powerful and can do things for her career but otherwise can go fuck himself.

Edward, being a sucker, takes sad comfort in the mere possibility that the door has been left at least a sliver open as long as he can prove his value to her as a mate with money, success and power but being an entitled little prick he cannot handle the very real possibility that his shittiness as a writer and human will lead to him never making beaucoup bucks or joining the moneyed elites. Miranda will consequently forever remain decidedly outside his grasp. 

That is until Mr. Stronham (David Hemmings of Blow Up and Barbarella, oozing misogynist menace in the only good performance in the episode), his mysterious and malevolent landlord offers him a love potion that will transform Miranda from a block of ice in human form to his worshipful sex slave. 

Edward slips the unsuspecting, frequently naked object of his desire the potion and she instantly warps from angry, scheming opportunist to cooing, babydoll sexpot, a ditsy Marilyn Monroe figure with a libido so hellaciously demanding no man could satisfy it, let alone a little worm like Edward, who quickly comes to regret the Faustian bargain he made with a landlord even more evil than most. 

They have fun!

The problem is that the girl of his dreams wants to fuck constantly, which is great for Edward, initially but he quickly loses control of the situation. A wet dream becomes a waking nightmare when sex stops being pleasurable and becomes intensely painful, even unbearable.

The awful Incels of Tales from the Crypt only think that they are pure of heart and want love, true love, with the impossible girl of their dreams. But they don’t. They think that they want sex, glorious, glorious, never-ending, eternally orgasmic sex, which is true. But what they want more than love and more than romance is control. They want power. 

They want the unfortunate objects of their desire to desire them sexually, to have a healthy sexual hunger laser-focussed in their direction but they don’t want them to have TOO healthy of an appetite. 

To put things in Three Little Bears terms, these beggars/choosers don’t want a woman whose sexual hunger runs too hot or too cold; they angrily demand a woman whose sexual appetite perfectly matches their own, that’s just right. They want a human sex doll with a soul, who can console as well as sexually satisfy them. 

They want sex, but only on their own terms, for their own pleasure. Sex is not a spiritual exchange between equals but rather something the universe rewards them with for pining so nobly for their ostensible soulmate and being willing to do anything to have them except pursue them honestly and honorably. 

Edward can’t see Miranda for who she is, only the sleazy fantasies he has projected upon her, where she is a caricature of a hyper-feminine sexpot rather than an androgynous, coltish beauty whose good looks do nothing to mask a core of pure ice. 

That’s the thing. Miranda is, if anything, much too honest with herself and the world. She knows exactly who and what she is and does not feel the need to apologize to anyone for being an unabashed gold-digger. It’s Edward who is lying to himself when he says that he genuinely loves Miranda and that he’s a nice guy rather than a criminal and a sociopath who continually does horrible things for selfish reasons. 

Despite the awful, unforgivable crimes Edward commits over the course of the episode, I think there was a time when Edward’s obsessions with the literal door next door was supposed to be relatable even if his actions are unmistakably deplorable. We were supposed to see him as someone who did horrible things for a relatively noble reason: love, or at least lust. 

Talk about a lady killer!

These days, however, these horrible, weak men, obsessed with controlling woman and using supernatural means to assume more power in a relationship than they are remotely entitled to emerge as the real monsters in these rotten morality tales. In this harsh light there’s nothing remotely noble about their motivations; they’re not romantics interested in love; they’re predators happy to experiment with the devil’s own black arts if it means getting what they want and do not deserve. 

These are bad, weak men so they are punished appropriately as well as ironically in a way that does not ultimately seem disproportionate at all. In an utterly predictable Monkey’s Paw scenario, he is punished for wanting to make sweet passionate love to his dream girl for eternity with being bullied into exhausting, joyless, painful sex so awful it quickly becomes a torment. 

For the creepy incels of Tales from the Crypt if a woman’s sexual hunger grows too rapacious, exhausting and unyielding, invariably through some manner of supernatural shenanigans, then she’s beyond saving and the only antidote to her unforgivably intense sex drive is death. 

When the woman-hating, woman-hating landlord quips to his tenant, “Women. You can’t live with them but you can’t cut them up into tiny pieces and tell the neighbor she’s in Palm Springs either” he could be speaking for any number of awful, “lovestruck” male characters fatally unable to relate to women in a normal or healthy way, as human beings with emotions and needs rather than the human embodiment of all of their sexual fantasies. 

Edward tries to murder the woman he until recently saw as his soulmate but ends up accidentally killing himself instead. He’s inexplicably headed to the Good Place, all done up in white, when he spies a sort of familiar face in Miranda, who threw herself to her death in despair when he died and consequently is not only unbecomingly sexually obsessed with him, but disfigured as well. 

It’s a nasty switcheroo the show employed more than once: not only does the incel protagonist no longer have control over the woman he’s sexually obsessed with, but he’ll need to attend to her sexual needs for eternity despite looking more like a gargoyle than the world-class beauty she used to be. 

The bleak world of Tales from the Crypt is ruthlessly transactional. Its Incel villains lack the social currency, looks and money to compete for beautiful, mercenary women so they resort to supernatural extremes to control the women in their sweaty thrall and are punished for their transgressions.

Tales from the Crypt is purposefully timeless. Its elegant retro stylization is a huge part of its enduring appeal but its blunt, cynical take on toxic masculinity, delicate masculinity and the sad world and scheming machinations of lonely, sexless men who will do anything to not feel powerless around women they feverishly desire but can never hope to possess lends it eternal resonance, particularly in this cultural moment. 

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