The Howling EC Inspiration

 Many classic horror movies and creators have told of their love of EC comics in childhood and how it influenced and inspired them in their writing and directing of horror in adulthood. Steven King, George Romero and John Carpenter in particular. However EC's influence can be seen in many other films of the 80s era. The Howling for instance features a blink and you'll miss it reference to EC on the wall of Eddie Quists apartment. Amongst the art and magazine covers he has stuck to his wall is a comic cover with art work homaging issue 29 of Tales From The Crypt. Though strangely they chose to make the cover a vampire hunter staking a Vampire rather than using or homaging one of the many Werewolf covers EC published. 

Shiver Suspenstories 2 Oni Press EC

 Oni Press have been going full throttle with their EC revival titles over the last two years publishing constant new titles and issues. In December 2024 we had a one shot Christmas special titled Shiver Suspenstories, following from the legacy of EC's classic Shock Suspenstories and Crime Suspenstories. Now for Christmas 2025 Oni Press have published a second issue with one cover in particular homaging the classic Vault of Horror issue 35. Possibly the most well know issue of Vault as it has been adapted to the big and small screen. First in 1972 when Britains Amicus films adapted it along with four other EC stories for their Tales From The Crypt movie then again in 1989 for the first season of the HBO Tales From The Crypt TV series in one of it's most beloved episodes. 

H.P Lovecraft Cool Air Comic Adaptations

Cool Air is a short story written by H.P Lovecraft in 1926, originally published in the March 1928 issue of Tales of Magic and Mystery. It tells the tale of a man who moves into a New York apartment block and meets a fellow tenant who is obsessed with defying death and preserves himself though increasingly low temperatures. Though his efforts come gruesomely unstuck when the power goes out....

                                      

Berni Wrightson adapted H.P Lovecraft's Cool Air into a comic strip eventually collected by Pacific Comics in issue 2 of Berni Wrightson, Master of the Macabre. Wrightsons art work brings the story to beautiful and gruesome life. Invoking the style of Ghastly Graham Ingels of EC fame.

EC had themselves adapted the story in Vault of Horror issue 17, renaming it Baby It's Cold Inside and giving it a more contemporary setting.

 

Tales From The Crypt British Edition

In 1954 the UK saw it's own short lived run of EC comic reprints. Two issues of Tales From The Crypt, one issue of The Haunt of Fear and supposedly one issue of The Vault of Horror though I have yet to find any images of Vault. Much like in american, horror comics in the UK were used as an easy target to blame for children behaving badly so that parents didn't have to face any hard truths about their own parenting ability. As always the government were quick to jump on the bandwagon so that they could appear to be fixing a complex problem but not having to actually do anything other than censoring harmless comic books with no evidence to back up any of the accusations against such material. EC comics were quickly banned in the UK and the few issues that were produced have become rather rare and almost forgotten.

Tales From The Crypt ...And All Through The House

The Vault of Horror issue 24, published by EC comics in 1950 featured two christmas horror stories. Shoe Button Eyes and ...And All Through The House. The latter of which has been adapted into a movie and tv episode.

 

The issue itself was reprinted in Tales From The Crypt Presents The Vault Of Horror issue 4 in 1992 by Russ Cochran.

The first live action adaptation was Amicus films Tales From The Crypt movie in 1972 starring Joan Collins and set in England rather than America.

 

Then in 1989 the HBO TV series of Tales From The Crypt again adapted the story to the screen, this time setting it in America as it is in the comic.