Tales from the Crypt was an American bi-monthly horror comic anthology series published by EC Comics from 1950 to 1955, producing 27 issues (the first issue with the title was #20, previously having been International Comics (#1–5);  International Crime Patrol (#6); Crime Patrol (#7–16) and The Crypt of Terror (#17–19) for a total of 46 issues in the series). Along with its sister titles, The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt was popular, but in the late 1940s and early 1950s comic books came under attack from parents, clergymen, schoolteachers and others who believed the books contributed to illiteracy and juvenile delinquency. In April and June 1954, highly publicized congressional subcommittee hearings on the effects of comic books upon children left the industry shaken. With the subsequent imposition of a highly restrictive Comics Code, EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines cancelled Tales from the Crypt and its two companion horror titles, along with the company's remaining crime and science fiction series in September 1954.
 Since their demise, all EC Comics titles have been reprinted at various times. Stories from the horror series have been adapted into other media, including a 1972 film and a television series that aired on HBO from 1989 to 1996. The latter spawned two films—Demon Knight (1995) and Bordello of Blood (1996)—as well as a children's animated series, a game show, and a radio series.
 In 1950, EC publisher Gaines and his editor Al Feldstein discovered they shared similar tastes in horror and began experimenting with horror tales in their crime titles. Tales from the Crypt traces its origin to a Feldstein story, "Return from the Grave!", in EC's Crime Patrol (#15, December 1949/January 1950) with the Crypt-Keeper making his debut as host. Issue #16 featured more horror tales than crime stories, and, with issue #17, the title changed from Crime Patrol to The Crypt of Terror. Due to an attempt to save money on second-class postage permits, the numbering did not change with the title and continued as The Crypt of Terror for the next two issues.
 Tales from the Crypt debuted with issue #20 (October/November 1950), producing a total of 27 issues (excluding the initial three issues, #17–19, published as The Crypt of Terror), before ceasing publication with its February/March 1955 issue (#46).
 Tales from the Crypt has been reprinted on numerous occasions. Ballantine Books reprinted selected Crypt stories in a series of paperback EC anthologies in 1964–66. The magazine was fully collected in a series of five black-and-white hardbacks by publisher Russ Cochran as part of The Complete EC Library in 1979.  Cochran (in association with Gladstone Publishing and solo) reprinted a handful of single color issues in 1990/91. Between September 1992 and December 1999, Cochran and Gemstone Publishing reprinted the full 30 individual issues. This complete run was later rebound, with covers included, in a series of six softcover EC Annuals. In 2007, Cochran and Gemstone began to publish hardcover, re-colored volumes of Tales from the Crypt as part of the EC Archives series. Three volumes (of a projected five) were published before Gemstone's financial troubles left the project in limbo. The project was then revived under a new publisher, Dark Horse Comics, which published Tales from the Crypt Volume 4 in October 2013 and Tales from the Crypt Volume 5 in November 2014.
 In 2007, Papercutz, an independent comics publisher managed by former Marvel Comics editor Jim Salicrup, began running a new series of original Tales from the Crypt comics.  The new version was announced at the year's New York Comic Con. The first issue was published in June 2007, with a cover drawn by Kyle Baker.  All three of EC Comics' horror hosts (The GhouLunatics) appear in the issue, drawn by Rick Parker (artist of Marvel/MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head Comic Book). Contributors to subsequent issues have included well-known horror talents Joe R. Lansdale and his brother John L. Lansdale, Don McGregor, husband and wife team James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook, Mort Todd, and Chris Noeth. The new version has a smaller digest size with a graphic novel style book binding. Controversy erupted in 2008 when vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was featured on a cover attacking the horror hosts with a hockey stick, published with a letter from William Gaines' daughter Cathy Gaines Mifsud commenting on censorship.
 As of today, there have been a total of 13 issues (9 graphic novels) published by Papercutz, with the last issue being published September 28, 2010.
 In 2016, Super Genius Comics would relaunch Tales from the Crypt  for two issues.
 Early front covers were created by Feldstein, Johnny Craig and Wally Wood, with the remaining covers (1952–55) by Jack Davis. The contributing interior artists were Craig, Feldstein, Wood, Davis, George Evans, Jack Kamen, Graham Ingels, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, Reed Crandall, Bernard Krigstein, Will Elder, Fred Peters and Howard Larsen. Jack Davis took over the art for the Crypt-Keeper stories with (#24, June/July, 1951), and continued as the title's lead artist for the rest of the run. Feldstein devised the Crypt-Keeper's origin story "Lower Berth!" (#33) which was illustrated by Davis. Issue #38 was one of two covers from EC's horror comics censored prior to publication. While The Vault of Horror cover for issue #32 was restored in Russ Cochran's EC Library reprints, the Tales from the Crypt cover remained censored. "Kamen's Kalamity" (#31) starred many members of the EC staff, including Gaines, Feldstein and the story's artist, Kamen. Ingels, Davis and Craig also made cameo appearances in the story in single panels which they drew themselves.
 As with the other EC comics edited by Feldstein, the stories in this comic were primarily based on Gaines using existing horror stories and films to develop "springboards" from which he and Feldstein could launch new stories. Specific story influences that have been identified include the following:
 Anecdotes from Bennett Cerf's Try and Stop Me were sources for stories, including "House of Horror" (issue 21), "Death Suited Him!" (issue 21) and "Death's Turn!" (issue 22).
 After their unauthorized adaptation of one of Ray Bradbury's stories in another magazine, Bradbury contacted EC about their plagiarism of his work. They reached an agreement for EC to do authorized versions of Bradbury's short fiction.  These official adaptations include:
 Although EC's horror stable consisted of three separate magazines, there was little beyond their titles to distinguish them.  Each magazine had its titular host, but the hosting duties for any one issue were typically shared with the hosts of the other two.  Thus, a single issue of Tales from the Crypt would contain two stories told by the Crypt-Keeper, one by the Vault-Keeper (of The Vault of Horror) and one by the Old Witch (of The Haunt of Fear). The professional rivalry among these three GhouLunatics was often played for comic effect.
 The Crypt-Keeper was the primary host of Tales from the Crypt.  He was introduced to the public in Crime Patrol #15, and he continued with that magazine through its changes in title and format.  He was a frightening presence in those early issues, a sinister hermit sitting framed in the lightless crypt's half-open door, his face all but hidden by the double curtain of his long white hair.  But he soon evolved into a more comedic horror host, delivering an irreverent and pun-filled commentary to lighten the horrific tone of the stories he introduced.
 The Crypt-Keeper's duties were not limited to hosting.  He would occasionally appear as a character as well, and these appearances give the reader a glimpse of his biography.  "The Lower Berth" (Tales from the Crypt #33) gives an account of the circumstances surrounding his birth.  "While the Cat's Away" (The Vault of Horror #34) conducts a tour of his house above and below ground.  "Horror beneath the Streets" (The Haunt of Fear #17) tells how he and his fellow GhouLunatics got their EC publishing contracts.
 The Crypt-Keeper also served as the host of EC's 3-D comic book, Three Dimensional Tales from the Crypt of Terror.
 The character is portrayed by Ralph Richardson in the 1972 film and by John Kassir in the 1989 television series.
 The 1972 film from Amicus Productions features five stories from various EC comics. "Reflection of Death" (#23) and "Blind Alleys" (#46) were adapted for the film, the others were adapted from The Haunt of Fear and The Vault of Horror. A second Amicus film, The Vault of Horror, also used stories from Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories (despite its title, it did not use any stories published in the Vault of Horror comic). An homage film entitled Creepshow followed, paying tribute to the tone, look, and feel of Tales from the Crypt and other EC comics, without directly adapting any of the stories.
 In 1989, the book was adapted into the HBO TV series Tales from the Crypt, which features John Kassir as the Cryptkeeper and included comic book covers designed to look like the original 1950s covers by Mike Vosburg with at least one drawn by Shawn McManus.
 The following tales were used in HBO's Tales from the Crypt television series: "The Man Who Was Death" (issue #17), "Mute Witness to Murder" (#18), "Fatal Caper" (#20), "The Thing From The Grave" (#22), "Last Respects" (#23), "Judy, You're Not Yourself Today" (#25), "Loved to Death" (#25), "Well Cooked Hams" (#27), "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" (#28), "Korman's Kalamity" (re-titling of "Kamen's Kalamity", issue #31), "Cutting Cards" (#32), "Lower Berth" (#33), "None But The Lonely Heart" (#33), "Oil's Well That Ends Well" (#34), "Curiosity Killed" (#36), "Only Skin Deep" (#38), "Mournin' Mess" (#38), "Undertaking Palor" (#39), "Food For Thought" (#40), "Operation Friendship" (#41), "Cold War" (#43), "Forever Ambergris" (#44), "The Switch" (#45) and "Blind Alleys" (#46). Other episodes were based on other entries in the EC Comics line: The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, Crime SuspenStories, Shock SuspenStories and Two-Fisted Tales.
 In 1993, Tales from the Crypt was adapted into a Saturday morning cartoon series entitled Tales from the Cryptkeeper, based on the series (albeit with none of the violence or other questionable content that was in the original series), with Kassir as the Cryptkeeper again; it ran from September 18, 1993 to December 4, 1999.
 In 1994, Ace Novelty released a board game based on Tales from the Cryptkeeper called Tales from the Cryptkeeper: Search for the Lost Tales.
 In late 1993, a pinball machine titled Tales from the Crypt was produced under license by Data East.
 In 1996, a Saturday morning game show called Secrets of the Cryptkeeper's Haunted House ran from September 14 to August 1997, with Kassir once again in the role of the Cryptkeeper as announcer.
 Two films by Universal Studios, Demon Knight (1995) and Bordello of Blood (1996), were based on the series, neither of which was particularly successful with critics. A third film, Ritual, was slated for theatrical release in 2001, but was only distributed internationally (without the Tales from the Crypt connection) until 2006 when it was released on DVD in the United States, with the Cryptkeeper segments restored. Unlike the 1970s-era Amicus films, these films were not based on stories from any of the EC comics. The Frighteners was intended to be another film in the series, but executive producer Robert Zemeckis decided to release it as a standalone film.
 In 2012 the Cryptkeeper hosted FEARnet's Tales from the Crypt New Years Shockin' Eve Marathon. Voice actor John Kassir continued to play him along with puppeteer and programmer Tim Lewis and Ian Murray.
 In early 2016, it was announced M. Night Shyamalan is producing a reboot of the 1989 TV series as part of TNT's new horror block. In June 2017, it was announced that the plans for the reboot have been shelved due to licensing issues.
 Freddy has managed to cheat death for many decades by having his old friend, a surgeon, perform transplants on him to replace his organs with those from a younger man. But he has to steal them from corpses, and now he's finding he has less and less time before he needs another operation.
 A public executioner decides to take the law into his own hands.
 A private detective finds himself with a new case to solve when he and his wife rent a hotel room and find an unidentifiable body hidden inside it.
 Convinced that he became a werewolf after a mysterious incident during a trip to Europe, Ralph goes to visit his old friend George for help. But with the full moon rising, he's closer to the truth than he knows.
 A surgeon, furious that his fiancee has left him to marry an artistically gifted man, decides to take his revenge by cutting off his love rival's hand. The artist commits suicide, but the severed hand appears to have taken on a life of its own.
 A morgue attendant begins having visions of death which he links to the "Living Corpse"-a performance artist who feigns death during his act.
 Marian Mander is convinced she is going insane when she begins to see and hear strange things after her son's death. Her husband is worried about her, but how deep is his own involvement?
 A woman becomes mute with shock after witnessing the local doctor murdering his wife. He commits the witness to an insane asylum, but then decides he must kill her before she regains her voice.
 A couple whose plane went down over the Bermuda Triangle are trapped on a lifeboat in the middle of the sea. They think they're in luck when they come across a ship; until they find a skeleton tied to the helm.
 Ida and Jim are plotting to murder Ida's stingy, drunken husband so they can be together. He proves a little harder to kill than they would like.
 The young sub-curator of a museum is angry that his own invention is being ignored in favour of a new exhibit: the body of a Neanderthal encased in ice. The enraged man decides to get even by thawing out the body and leaving it to decompose in the sun, but does not think to check that the "caveman" is really dead.
 Daniel Richards is staying in Haiti with his wealthy plantation-owning friend. He ignores instructions not to spy on a native voodoo ritual, but then notices something very interesting about the photo he took of the event.
 You are a man on a sea crossing, forced to take a cabin that is supposedly cursed: everyone who slept in it has either gone crazy or mysteriously left the ship.
 Four wealthy, arrogant college students come to bitterly regret playing around with a book of voodoo spells.
 Janet is worried that her workaholic brother is ruining his health, so she calls in the family doctor to give him a reviving tonic. When he begins going through a monstrous transformation, it's a race against time to find out what was in the tonic.
 Theodore Warren goes into a trance and draws the face of a terrified-looking man. He's shocked, but not as much as when he meets the man in real life – a man who's carving Warren's own name into a tombstone.
 A prisoner on death row is visited by a professor who claims to be able to revive him after his death. The prisoner is executed in the electric chair, and the professor brings him back to life. He shoots the professor and goes to take his revenge on the judge who sentenced him to death, but finds that maybe he should not have been quite so hasty.
 A couple on their honeymoon come across a deserted funfair. Only one ride is open, and as they discover, the owner is a little too obsessed with making sure that his "dummies" look perfectly real.
 A fraternity boy is determined to terrify the new pledges going through a hazing ritual, and makes them go to the top floor of an old house rumoured to be haunted. He gets his comeuppance when the boys disappear and he is sent to find them.
 Larry kills his love rival, John, and as a parting shot is determined to marry John's wife wearing the same tuxedo that John wore at the wedding. Unfortunately, this is what John was buried in, and now Larry has to dig up the body to retrieve it.
 Bill is in love with Laura, but Laura loves only Jim. Bill kills Jim and decides he must kill Laura because she knows about the murder. What Bill does not know is that when Jim promised to always protect Laura, he really meant it.
 Jean and her lover Freddie are involved in a car accident. Jean needs a blood transfusion but no one at the scene is a match, until a mysterious stranger appears and volunteers his help. Shortly afterwards, bodies begin turning up in town, drained of their blood.
 The owners of a failing amusement park find themselves in luck when a newcomer agrees to sell them the rights to an amazing new rollercoaster. They decide to save on further costs by not testing the ride for safety, but then when it opens, they're offered the first turn on the new attraction.
 Robert needs a fancy dress costume for a New Year party, and goes to the attic. He discovers there's a curse on his family which means that anyone who uses the old Arnold musket and powder-horn dies at New Year. Robert's confident that curses don't exist, until he takes the items to complete his costume.
 You and your friend Carl are on a long drive. Carl, the driver, falls asleep at the wheel and crashes the car. You wake up, glad to have survived. But why does everyone you meet run away from you?
 Tony decides to pay his "last respects" to his newly deceased wife, but finds himself trapped in the crypt with her body. He's forced to turn to a shocking method of survival.
 A man skeptical about the supernatural is talked into attending a seance. He's sure he can trick the medium into proving herself a fake by asking her to channel the spirit of his wife, who's still alive. Or is she?
 Jay and Bill, visitors to Haiti, are determined to witness a voodoo ritual. But when the locals catch them spying, it's not long before they start seeing strange dolls everywhere.
 Harry loses his hearing and with it his job and his wife. An old friend points him in the direction of a man who may be able to help by giving Harry a hearing transplant from a bat.
 Two old friends are doctors who can't agree whether illness is physical or just in the mind. When one of them is close to death, the other is convinced he can save his old friend through hypnosis – a technique so successful it keeps the patient's heart beating even after his death.
 Duncan falls asleep while reading a horror story about a ghoul, and when he wakes up, he finds he has a strange new taste in food.
 Ralph wants to give his fragile, sickly wife such a fright that it will cause her fatal heart failure, and he can inherit her money, the money she gained when they murdered her wealthy old uncle together. He decides that making her uncle "reappear" will be just the shock to kill her, not knowing that the corpse is already ahead of him.
 A man who loves to collect hunting "trophies" discovers that it's not just animals who can be hunted. 
 A housewife is terrorized by an evil old witch who switches their bodies, leaving the witch alone with the woman's husband.
 Eddie is madly in love with a woman who does not return his affections. He meets a mysterious stranger claiming to be an alchemist, who gives Eddie a potion to make the woman fall madly in love with him. The stranger says Eddie will soon be back for the antidote, and Eddie laughs, but soon finds out he should have listened.
 Henri Mataud is the proprietor of a wax museum devoted to figurines of famous murderers. He becomes fed up with his wife "ruining" the exhibits by relieving them of their heavy weapons and awkward poses, so he decides to stop her for good, without realizing just how much the figures appreciated her efforts.
 An artist who has been conned out of money goes to a voodoo practitioner in the hope of revenge.
 Sandra and her lover Fred arrange to kill Sandra's husband, but at the same time as she is murdering her husband, Fred is hit by a truck and dies. When Sandra's husband wakes up in Fred's body, he has only one thing on his mind.
 A man buys a farm which he plans to turn into a flying school, ignoring the old farmhand's instruction not to bulldoze the Native American burial plot on the site.
 A corrupt politician poisons his rival so he can become the town mayor. His actions quite literally come back to haunt him.
 Two entrepreneurs want to pay off a French stage magician to perform his wondrous magic tricks on stage in the USA. He refuses, so they kill him and steal his manuscript with the intention of staging his horrific "illusions" themselves. There's just one important detail he left out of the script.
 A woman whose husbands have all died in mysterious circumstances gets more than she bargained for when she goes to lay flowers at the grave sites.
 Myra is devastated after her husband takes off on an unexpected business trip and never comes back. His business partner returns without him, and Myra discovers that maybe her husband isn't quite who she thought he was.
 During the French Revolution, a corrupt duke makes money by taking bribes to save condemned aristocrats from the guillotine, and then turning them in to the authorities. But if a chicken can survive without its head, why can't a human?
 Two medical students who are planning to rob a grave so they can save on expenses for their dissection project cross paths with a pair of conmen trying to fake a death.
 A hypnotist's act includes reducing his wife to a near-death state by using his powers to slow her heart. He decides to use this to kill her so he can marry his new girlfriend; but forgets that there is also a command to revive her.
 Arnold takes over his father's business and fires a loyal employee for being too old. The man returns to his native Haiti and sends Arnold a present: a sapling from a magical tree that prevents old age. It works just a bit too well.
 A seaside resort owner tries to convince his old friend, a once-famous ventriloquist, to come out of retirement and perform there. The dummy is less keen to take part in the act.
 A child whose abusive stepfather keeps locking him in the closet appears to have found an imaginary "friend." He tells his mother that someone really lives inside the closet, someone who wants to punish his stepfather.
 Clint is on the run and asks an old "friend" to help him escape by boat – a friend whose lover he seduced, crippled in an accident, and then abandoned. The friend agrees to help Clint, but Clint didn't specify exactly where he wanted to be taken.
 Myrna has a phobia of being buried alive. Now, her worst fear has come true. Can she escape from the coffin before her oxygen runs out?
 A greedy businessman who loves spiders uses one of his pets to kill a business associate who was about to expose his embezzlement. On a trip abroad, he finds himself closer to his fanged friends than he could ever have imagined.
 A prospector returns from the dead to take revenge on a rival who murdered him to steal his gold.
 A film producer travels to the Arctic on location and falls in love with a beautiful young girl he meets there. He wants her to come to Hollywood with him and become a star. The girl's guardian angrily opposes this, and the producer convinces her to run away with him anyway. But once they arrive he discovers a very good reason why she should have stayed at home.
 Seven-year-old Toby lives with his abusive aunt, who beats him for stealing coal from the shed. She eventually decides to put a lock on the coal-bin to keep him out, which backfires when she becomes trapped there herself.
 Andrew goes to stay with his wealthy uncle Ambrose, whose other heirs have all mysteriously died after coming to live at Ambrose's mansion. Ambrose seems like a kindly old man but his wife warns Andrew that something far more sinister is afoot.
 The owners of a cargo vessel build a complicated rat trap to catch rodents on their ship, resulting in a device that traps the rats and forces them to kill each other for survival. Luckily, humans are more advanced than this – or so the men think, until their own boat begins to sink.
 A sheriff investigates a series of strange murders in the Everglades. The bodies have been completely ripped apart, but he knows the killings are the work of no ordinary creature.
 Jack Kamen gets his own taste of fear when he joins the staff at Tales From the Crypt and has to start illustrating horror stories instead of romances.
 Villagers take revenge on a greedy feudal duke who tortures his subjects to feed his love of jewels.
 During World War II, a butcher decides to make money on the black market by selling rotted horse meat as steak, with horrific consequences when townspeople start falling sick because of it.
 A group of men frame their business partner to cover their own misdeeds, but soon find themselves trapped in a "web" of more than just false evidence.
 Two obsessive gamblers face off in a "game" to the death.
 A circus elephant trainer decides to use his act as a cover to kill his wife so he can marry his new girlfriend. He's not counting on his wife, or the elephant, making a reappearance in the ring – even after they're dead.
 The Crypt Keeper recounts his own origins, born to a 4000-year-old Egyptian mummy and a dead sideshow freak with two heads.
 A greedy couple in India kill a young peasant girl who refuses to tell them the secret of her magic rope trick. They're sure they can work out how to perform it themselves and make their fortune, but didn't listen to her warnings that the rope will take orders from no one but her.
 A spoiled young prince loves his elderly nursemaid. When she dies suddenly, the king and queen promise to hold a splendid state funeral for her. The boy is looking forward to the event, until he discovers the old woman isn't dead at all, and decides to take matters into his own hands.
 A conman who seduces elderly women so he can kill them and inherit their money meets his match in a new conquest.
 You are the protagonist in a story where you take the place of Frankenstein's monster.
 Conmen try to scam a town into believing there is oil buried underneath an old cemetery.
 A selfish king forces his subjects to pay all kinds of exorbitant taxes to make him rich, until he demands that people lose body parts if they cannot pay. Then his subjects come to claim his own unpaid tax contribution.
 A mortician's elderly aunt is very particular about how she wants an embalming to be performed in her house. Namely, the embalming of her own body.
 In the early 1900s, a Hungarian immigrant family is blamed for a series of werewolf attacks in town.
 A man pays a visit to his sister in a deserted town besieged by vampires, but why does no one come out before dark and what does the local restaurant have to do with it?
 A playboy uses bride and groom voodoo dolls to make a rich, elderly woman marry him so he can get his hands on her money. When he meets a new girlfriend, he uses the dolls to kill his wife, unaware that the doll still holds power even after the death of the real bride.
 Explorers uncovering the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh do not believe in the reported curse of the mummy that lies inside the tomb, until they decide to steal the pharaoh's treasures for themselves.
 A you-are-the-protagonist story. As a taxi driver working in a town where a series of recent murders have been attributed to vampires, you become suspicious of a passenger who seems to know a few too many details about the deaths.
 A shrewish housewife investigates when, after her friend suddenly goes on a long trip without warning, the friend's husband takes up a new interest in carrier pigeons.
 A bigamist has been living with two separate wives, one of whom loves bowling and the other loves to play golf. They discover this ruse when they meet in a hotel where their respective tournaments are being held; and decide to take their revenge in a most sporting fashion.
 A vengeful old mortician loves to desecrate the corpses he buries. But one of them turns out to be not so dead, and calls on the others for help.
 A doctor goes to extreme lengths to convince a colleague of his medical theories about death.
 You are a man caught in an endless nightmare: attacked by werewolves, vampires and zombies, buried alive, and more. Can you work out why you're here and find a way out of this torment?
 An arrogant young man takes over a small-town fire department. He decides to kill the only other town fireman, an old man who refuses to retire. The old man isn't so eager to give up his job.
 A doctor swears vengeance when he is disbarred from practicing. He imprisons the committee members and transplants their brains into dogs, using the animals to make him rich as a sideshow performer. However, their survival instinct is stronger than he thought.
 A swindler marries a wealthy woman for her money and then kills her, disposing of her body in the faithful old trunk that she carries while travelling. The trunk is determined not to let him get away with the murder.
 A man falls in love with a woman he met at a masquerade ball, despite never having seen her real face. They agree to unmask each other on their wedding night but the groom may not be so keen on what he finds under the mask.
 A practical joker visits the doctor for aches and pains caused by constant laughing, little knowing that the doctor was the victim in a prank that went fatally wrong.
 A reporter investigates a series of deaths of homeless people, which he believes are linked to a mysterious charity in aid of street-dwellers.
 Children overhear a plot between the local doctor and undertaker to make money by poisoning the wealthiest people in town and then charging their families for elaborate funerals. When their latest victim turns out to be the father of one of the boys, the children devise a little scheme of their own.
 A lonely grave is filled with the body of an equally lonely woman who was murdered by her niece and nephew. She returns from the grave, which does not want to let her go, but she repays it by filling it with two new corpses.
 A macabre twist on the tale of Sleeping Beauty.
 An elderly, paraplegic newspaper seller loses his livelihood when a rival takes over his pitch. He is not able to physically do anything to stop this but his shadow has no such limitations.
 Carla is terrorized by her husband, a sadistic sideshow freak with the power of telepathy. He learns that she is having an affair and settles on a plan to kill her lover, using a series of local murders as a cover. But Carla finds a way to settle the score – and whoever or whatever committed the murders is still on the loose.
 A diver kills his rival in order to mine an area of abnormally large pearls for himself, but finds a surprise waiting for him down in the depths.
 Ezra, an old sea captain, moves in with his sister Mildred. He goes insane, having the house remodelled to look like the inside of his ship, and treating Mildred as a slave. But when the exertion gives her a fatal heart attack, Ezra finds himself all at sea.
 The proprietor of a seafood restaurant, who loves to torture the lobsters he serves, finds out what it's like to be in their place after he kills an associate he had ripped off.
 Geniuses Andrew and Philip have been best friends all their lives, until Philip marries an unscholarly woman and stops spending time with Andrew. Lucky for Andrew, he has devised a way to keep Philip with him forever.
 The corrupt director of an insane asylum decides to clean the place up before an inspection, but discovers to his own cost that one inmate may not be so crazy after all.
 A circus performer's daughter is seduced by a ruffian knife-thrower who is already married. The father hatches a plot to have the man sent away to jail by killing his wife during their act, but does not anticipate a last-minute change of circumstances.
 A German World War 1 soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome is relieved from his post and goes to live with a friend, a butcher whose shop is mysteriously full of meat despite wartime rationing.
 A violinist undertakes a dangerous journey to visit his old teacher, and becomes determined to kill the werewolves that inhabit the surrounding woods.
 Two friends suspect each other of being the vampire who killed their mutual third friend and many other people in the town.
 The servant to a plantation owner takes revenge for a family his master killed.
 A man whose greedy brother has made constant demands on him throughout their lives can take no more when his brother demands an expensive ornament for the hood of his car.
 Roy Dixon committed the perfect murder at Four Corners. All four connecting states have made a bid to send him to Death Row, but he walked free. So why are his nightmares of execution becoming all too real?
 Paul finds himself being threatened at gunpoint by his wife's lover, who does not seem to know there is a very special requirement for joining her family.
 A man takes part in a game show with a sinister twist.
 A struggling art dealer tries to take advantage of three old ladies who are able to create wonderful tapestries after they have witnessed a violent accidental death.
 A ship's captain who is in love with a crew member's wife kills her husband by deliberately exposing him to a flesh-eating virus.
 In a reader-as-narrator story, you attempt to steal a miser's treasure that he has been bringing up from a shipwreck. You kill him when he gets in your way, but when he said he was ready for you, he was dead right!
 Fortune hunter Pearl attempts to seduce a wealthy man and is delighted when he tells her he "wants her for his wife." But what exactly does he mean?
 An executioner in post-Revolution France is paid by a corrupt noble's brother to expose the man as a monarchist and have him sent to the guillotine. The executioner saves the man's head as a trophy, and finds it harder to dispose of than he expected.
 The survivor of a shipwreck becomes caught up in the "food chain" when he finds himself stranded on an island with nothing to eat but a single rat.
 A man serving time on a penal colony makes a plan to escape by killing the governor and taking the corpse's place in the coffin. If only he'd stayed around to hear the victim's last request.
 Howard has to leave his beloved wife to go on a business trip, but begins to suffer from a recurring dream of her being murdered.
 A man is trying to woo a much younger woman, who rejects him because of his age. He finds a doctor who can give him the body of a young man again – for a hidden price.
 Local men turn vigilante when the mayor won't help them rid the town of the werewolf that is killing people. The mayor, however, has his own reasons not to get involved.
 Inmates at a home for the blind turn the tables on the sadistic overseer and his dog by trapping them in a maze in the basement.
 Elmer's selfish wife and her freeloading parents have always criticized him for his failure to "get ahead" in life, not realizing how literally he would take their words.
 A conman marries a sick old woman for her money, but finds out she has a very strange relationship with the local "rag man".