The Vault of Horror Volume 1

The Vault of Horror was one of three main horror comic titles put out by EC in the 1950s before they got shut down by the government. The others were Tales from the Crypt and The Haunt of Fear, and as I said in my review of The Haunt of Fear Volume 1 the three were basically interchangeable, with the same writers and artists and no difference in the kinds of stories included. They even did crossovers, so that the Old Witch (host of The Haunt of Fear) and the Crypt-Keeper (from Tales from the Crypt) will sometimes show up in these pages to introduce stories. The Vault-Keeper is the guiding force here, and he’s indistinguishable from the other two. To the point where I honestly thought he was an old woman, until he started shooting down rumours about his being romantically linked with the Old Witch.

OK, so what are you getting? Well, for starters it’s issues #12-17. Does that mean that Volume 1 is skipping anything? Not really. As with The Haunt of Fear, EC started publishing stories from The Vault of Horror in another comic called War against Crime. Then, when War against Crime became The Vault of Horror they didn’t change the numbering, for business reasons I don’t fully understand. So issue #12 is really the first issue of The Vault of Horror (something similar happened with The Haunt of Fear, which had started with issue #15 because previously it had been The Gunfighter, and Tales from the Crypt, which had been Crime Patrol).

The stories themselves don’t win any awards for originality. As I’ve previously noted, ripping off classic horror tales was an EC staple, so that’s on the menu again here. The first story is a version of The Wax Museum. “Doctor of Horror” is just the story of Burke and Hare. “Island of Death” is “The Most Dangerous Game.” “Voodoo Horror!” is The Picture of Dorian Gray. Throw in several werewolf stories (set, as always, somewhere on the English moors), a vampire, a couple of practical jokes that backfire, some premature burials, and you’ve got a pretty musty vault indeed.

Not that there’s much wrong with that. I always get a kick out of these comics even when they’re just playing the greatest hits. And there’s at least one story here, “Baby . . . It’s Cold Inside!” that I thought was quite original. Though if you showed me the source for it I wouldn’t be surprised. It was getting to the point where I was feeling that even the stories without an obvious inspiration had to be coming from somewhere. But in any event, I’d probably rate it the best.

Other features include short stories by editor Bill Gaines, some random chortlings by the Vault-Keeper, and a mail bag. With regard to this latter department, I always wonder how many of these letters were actually sent into EC’s (or Marvel’s, or DC’s) offices and how many were made up. Some of them are clearly fictional, but others might have been legit. It was a time when people actually did write letters. They sure don’t anymore.

There’s a sort of manic energy throughout, not just in the typical comic style of throwing exclamation marks at the end of every sentence (even something as banal as “They seat themselves on roughly hewn chairs!”), but in the crazy laughter on almost every other page. There are the “Heh-heh-heh”s of the Vault-Keeper, of course, but also some hee-hees, haw-haws, and lots and lots of “Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”s. In a Foreword to this volume by R. L. Stine he writes that “What attracted me to these comics was that they were so hilarious. Has anyone ever concocted such a mix of horror and humor before?” I don’t know about that. It’s not like the stories here are all that funny. But they do trade in a kind of dark humour and even in the most extreme situations it all seems like a lot of fun. Not that that helped them any when the censors came calling.

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