Sunday, June 23, 2013
Tank of Corpses
Posted this one here at THOIA back in 2007, and here it is again, encore presentation style, where it will hopefully find an audience-- it certainly deserves it, being one of the weirder / spookier Harvey precode horror tales (art by Joe Certa.) From the April 1952 issue of Witches Tales #9.
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9 comments:
That is one of Harvey's most memorable horror stories.
One of their most remarkable, too.
Somehow... haunting.
Cutting off a dead woman's hair for party favours... and they have the nerve to call Ol' Sam crazy! Kids these days, no respect...
Cadaver class seems like the perfect setting for a horror film... aside from one recentish horror film and an old Hitchcock episode, I'm surprised it hasn't been used as the diabolical backdrop more often!
"Corpse tank?" A heavy dose of deus ex machina to move the story along. Still, would've been nightmare fuel for a school kid! lol
I'm not too sure about deus ex machina, but I'm also hard-pressed to grant the central implausibility of the story. While I gather there are some nutjobs out there to whom fashioning place cards from wet corpse hair would seem perfectly natural (the writer of this story seems a pretty obvious candidate), it is difficult for me to imagine the pranksters would find themselves at a dinner party full of the kind of friends who would go on to cherish the disturbing items, take them home, prop them on the nightstand, etc. I find that kind of inspired lunacy to be really, really charming, though.
Against my better judgment, I also kind of dig the lunatic "yellow peril" cover on this issue of Witches Tales. Rampant orientalism aside, at least someone seemed to be a fan of actual Asian artifacts.
Ah, Tank of Corpses, my favorite Danish death metal band.
This is all shades of goofy, from the swimming pool corpse tank to the transformed and flying corpses ... and it works. No element of this makes sense, and that's a good thing. You can get absorbed into the story when everything is outlandish. When there are only bits and pieces that are outlandish, it's easy to get drawn out.
I like the monsters, but the artist has some very distorted female faces.
A fun read!
I had to laugh at Mr' Cavin's parenthetical insertion.
Formaldehyde is closely related to a chemical in cilantro that about 15% to 20% of the population can smell, which makes cilantro taste vile to them. I think that there really ought to be a horror story about cilantro.
If most of the Harvey tales were of this quality, we'd be seeing Witch's Tales movies and TV series just like Tales From the Crypt.
What a terrific, original, and haunting story! Thanks for the repost!
I love this tale! So much awesomeness.
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