And All Through the House '72 vs. '89

Overview of this post: The EC Comics story "And All Through the House" was developed in the tv series and also in the '72 film called "Tales from The Crypt." I decided to compare and contrast the stories to see which film tells the story better. Here are my opinions about that. Sorry for the novel-length post, I concede that it is way too long, LOLOLOLOL! If you don't want to read this whole post, that's cool. Just read the parts that you want. To make that easier, I have included some headings and sub-headings.

Soundtrack: The '72 version owns the '89 version in terms of soundtrack. The '72 version plays hymn-style, bona fide Christmas carols (i.e. carols that are actually about Jesus Christ, not secular PC bull crap) from start to finish, pausing only a few times, once for the radio announcement of the maniac, once when the maniac arrives at the front porch, and once just before "Silent Night" plays (I'm not sure why they paused the soundtrack briefly at that point).

In contrast, the '89 version intermittently plays two fake Christmas carols (i.e. they have nothing to do with Jesus Christ), and one real Christmas carol (Joy to the World). Most of the time, however, the '89 version is playing no songs.

End result of the soundtrack differences: The '72 version's soundtrack gives the entire film a sharp irony, as songs about the holiness of the night of Jesus' birth, and of Jesus coming to save the world, is contrasted with the visual imagery of the murderess trying to cover up her crime and of her struggle to survive vs. the maniac.

On the other hand, since the '89 version cops-out by excluding most of the Christmas carols (I suspect they did that in order to pander to secular/PC sensibilities), the '89 film lacks that strong undercurrent of irony.

Unfortunately for the '72 version, the soundtrack is just about the only point over which it owns the '89 version.

Representation of the husband's Murder: In both films, the wife slashes a fire poker into the husband's head to murder him. Visually speaking, the '89 version is much more graphic yet simultaneously much more silly & cartoonish, whereas the '72 version is much less graphic yet much more serious & realistic.

The '89 version connects a joke to the murder: the husband in the '89 version says "Let me have it!" just before the wife slashes him.

The '72 version has somewhat of a similar joke insomuch as before the husband sits down and gets it, a voice-over narration of his thoughts reads the inscription he wrote on a present to his wife, in which he calls her "the best wife in the world."

The '89 version's joke is more clever and funny.

On the whole, I say the representation of the husband's murder is a tie between both films. Whereas the '89 version is superior in terms of the joke and graphicness, it nonetheless sets an inferior horror tone with its too-silly visuals. Conversely, '72 version loses impact by shying away from showing the blow (the husband's face/head is entirely blocked by the newspaper that he is reading when the poker strikes him), yet at the same time, the '72 version gains points for setting a superior horror tone by avoiding silliness.

Representations of the Motivation for Murder and the Cover-Up plan: The '89 version wins on the points of motivation and cover-up plan. The woman holds her husband's will, and also calls her other lover to tell him that she has pulled the crime off and that all of her husband's property will now be theirs. To cover up her crime, she first plans to hide the body in the well (albeit the film doesn't make clear what she plans to do with the body afterwards), and then she later changes her plan and tries to scapegoat the murder on the maniac (this is a highly plausible cover-up plan).

The '72 version gives the woman no other lover, and instead of a will, she is motivated by her husband's insurance policy. However, this point is problematic because the woman would not be able to collect the insurance - or escape being charged with murder - seeing as she put a hole in his head with a fire poker. The film tries to mitigate that point by having her later throw her husband's corpse down the stairs and then twist his neck, to indicate that she intended to say he died by falling. However, that explanation wouldn't fly, because he still has the fire poker hole in his head. So the '72 version loses credibility for never addressing that huge flaw in the woman's plan.

Also, the lack of another lover in the '72 version begs the question of why the woman decided to murder her husband on Christmas Eve (the '89 version makes more sense because that version's woman is eager to run away with her other lover).

Setting: The '89 version owns the '72 version in terms of setting. Except for one shot of the house's front porch when the maniac arrives at it, and one more random & pointless cut to a 2-second-long shot of that same front porch later on when no one is there, the '72 version takes place entirely inside of the brightly-lit house. Thus, the sense of night-time in the '72 version is greatly diminished. In contrast, the '89 version features many suspenseful outdoor scenes that make the dark night sky plainly visible. Likewise, the '89 version represents the inside of the house as dark too, thus creating a scary atmosphere. The '89 version's alterations between indoors and outdoors also allows for the '89 film to have more variety and elaborations of the action than the '72 version can do.

Representation of the woman & the overall terror, action & drama (or lack thereof) that follows (or is absent) therefrom: For the most part, the '89 version owns the '72 version on this point. Sometimes the '89 woman very actively engages in combat with the maniac. I.e. She fights him bare-handed when he comes at her with an axe, she stabs in the face with an icicle, she knees him in the testicles, she steals his axe from him, and then runs inside her house to escape. Similarly, later on, the '89 woman also hits the maniac with the flat side of his axe whilst he is strangling her.

These story elements imbue the '89 woman with the traits of intelligence and proficient fighting skills! And they also fill the episode with action, suspense, drama, and terror. But as we will see, those same traits also murder the '89 story, because the woman randomly loses them for no reason.

The '72 version's woman, in contrast, does not fight Santa at all. All she does is close the windows and lock the doors when she sees him outside of the house. At the end, Santa gets inside the house, runs behind the woman, and massages her shoulders while she screams (I assume the viewer is meant to think that he is strangling her...but instead, probably due to really bad choreography, he literally just massages her shoulders). What I have said in this paragraph describes the entirety of her confrontation with Santa (and the entirety of Santa's inclusion in the '72 film).

The '72 film spends the vast majority of its screen-time showing the woman trying to clean up her crime. Thus, the '72 film becomes boring because that is all it is about. The '89 version deals with the clean up of the body too, but far more briefly (so that it doesn't become the whole plot) --- and yet despite giving it way less screen-time, the '89 version still handles the body clean up issue in more creative ways.

Although the '89 version in many ways represents the woman a lot better [meaning, from a storytelling perspective], it unfortunately also represents her very stupidly on several key points:

Examples of Blatantly Stupid Storytelling Regarding the Main Character's Representation in the '89 Version

One, the woman knocks the maniac out cold by hitting him in the head with the dull side of the axe. While he is knocked out, she has the perfect opportunity to go and kill him while he is both unconscious and unarmed. Yet instead, she stays inside of her house. That's just idiotic storytelling.

Two, she goes outside and slashes her husband's corpse in the head with an axe, in order so that she can tell the police that Santa killed him. On the one hand, that motivation is good in terms how it both covers up her crime and adds drama by forcing her to go outside again. But on the other hand, her leaving the axe in his head makes no sense because it leaves her defenseless and because it potentially gives the maniac a chance to retrieve his axe and use it to kill her. To prevent that, she could have slashed the corpse with the axe, and then picked up the axe again and took it with her back into the house, and still claimed that Santa killed her husband and that she picked up the axe later, after the fact.

A much bigger storytelling issue on the point of her going out, however, is that, as noted in item One above, she refused to go out to finish the maniac off immediately after knocking him out. Yet contrarily, she is happy to go out - without any hesitation - to slash at her husband's corpse's head a few times while the maniac is at large and may-well have waken up by that point. This contradiction compounds the idiotic storytelling mentioned in item One.

Three, she forgets that her husband has a gun that she can use to protect herself with until a 911 dispatcher asks her if she has any weapons in the house. Again, that's just idiotic storytelling.

Four, at the very end, the woman resigns herself (and presumably her daughter too) to death just because Santa is inside of her house. She stands still and starts screaming on the staircase, then sits down on the staircase and waits for Santa to come murder her. That is the epitome of idiotic storytelling.

It is (as are the previous three points) also incongruent with how her character has been represented earlier in the film: as a strong, smart, resourceful, tough fighter. The final shots degrade her from that strong character, into a useless, damsel-in-distress moron. I know that Gaines himself told them to do that with her in the final scene. But Gaines was dead wrong. Instead of obeying Gaines' stupid, story-ruining idea, they should have had her fight to the death. The '89 version's ending, as it stands in the film, is asinine.

Representation of the Santa maniac: The '89 version owns the '72 version when it comes to how the Santa maniac is represented. As aforementioned, the Santa maniac is barely in the '72 film: all he does is look in the window a few times, reach at the door a few times, and then massage the woman's shoulders for a few seconds in the very last scene.

In the '89 film, the Santa maniac is given tons of screen-time and initiates plenty of action. He attacks the woman with an axe when she comes outside. He breaks into the house later by hurling a tire tied to a tree through the windows. After that, he starts climbing up the side of the house on a ladder. Whereas the '72 film treats the Santa maniac as somewhat of an afterthought, the '89 film fully includes him as a constant, extremely deadly threat.

Representation of the daughter and its effects (or lack thereof) on the storytelling: The daughter character is basically the same in both films: a young girl who wants to meet Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.

However, in the '72 version, the daughter receives much less screen-time. She is one scene at the start, in which her mother tells her go to to bed or else Santa will not come. The daughter agrees. In the middle of the film, one very brief shot shows the daughter still awake. After that, the daughter is absent from the film until the very end, when she randomly appears out of the blue and says that she let Santa into the house. As such, because the daughter letting Santa into the house in the '72 version is hardly motivated by what is shown on-screen, it comes across as a sloppy, deus ex machina style of ending.

The '89 version has the same exact plot point of the daughter letting Santa into the house, but the '89 version develops/motivates that point much more, by cutting to several shots of the daughter staying awake and waiting for Santa, and also by cutting to many shots of the daughter watching Santa climb up a ladder towards her window, as she calls out to invite him in and tries to help him reach her (the '72 version simply does not have any equivalent shots within it).

General dramatic flourishes in the '89 version and the '72 version's lack thereof: In addition to the dramatic flourishes discussed above, further embellishments also deserve attention:

Example one: In the '89 version, the woman misses the warning from the radio announcer, because as he reads it, she is already outside dragging her husband's corpse to the well. Thus, she doesn't know about the Santa maniac until he is suddenly right next to her and swinging an axe. Her missing the warning adds suspense, and also mocking irony which enhances the comeuppance angle by implying that she wasn't meant to hear to the warning because she is evil.

Example two: In the '89 version, the police call the woman and say they are sending a policeman to her house in 20 minutes to make sure she is safe. This adds drama because it forces the woman to deal with her husband's corpse fast despite the maniac being nearby. It also allows for the woman to display her intelligence again, by (as noted above) motivating her to change her cover-up plan on-the-fly.

Example three: In the '89 version, when the wife drags the husband's body out to the well, the supposedly-dead husband comes back to life temporarily in order to give the viewers a scare.

Example four: In the '89 version, the woman is too short to see over the shelf with the gun. She touches the shelf to feel for the gun, and her hands just barely miss it. Her touch-test leads her to conclude that the gun is not there, even though it is. Thus, this is yet another irony added to mock the woman and enhance the comeuppance angle: if only she had searched for a moment longer, the woman easily could have found the gun and shot the maniac with it. But since she is an evil murderess, she isn't allowed to do so: she has to miss the gun that is right in front of her face, just like she had to miss the radio warning of which she was only a little out of earshot.

Conclusion: Before I did this compare & contrast analysis, I used to think that the '89 version of "And All Through The House" was vastly overrated and not all that special. After doing this analysis, I have somewhat changed my mind...but I've also had my previous viewpoint bolstered.

Comparing and contrasting the '89 and '72 films has allowed me to notice for the first time all of the special storytelling nuances that the tv series' makers included so as to make their films entertaining, action-packed, suspense-filled, terror-filled, and packaged into [partially] well-developed stories.

On the other hand, this analysis has also opened my eyes to the many glaring flaws of the '89 version's story. I've always recognized why the ending fails epically. Now to that understanding I have added a recognition of why various other parts of the story likewise fail.

So, paradoxically, this analysis has both increased and decreased my respect for both the storytelling skills and the lack thereof as possessed by the writers/producers/editors/directors from the '89 version of TFTC.

This analysis has also made clear to me that the biggest ways to improve the '89 version of "And All Through the House" IMO would be to (as mentioned earlier): one, give it a hymnal-type of soundtrack throughout, comprised exclusively of songs about Jesus coming to save the world (as the '72 version has); and two, fix the many instances of idiotic storytelling, most especially the absurd ending that inexplicably kills (in a bad way) the story by incongruently degrading the strong, intelligent, tough fighter of a protagonist into a helpless damsel-in-distress imbecile who sits idle for no reason while waiting to be murdered.

Overall, the '89 version's story is much fuller and more complex than is the '72 version's, but the '89 version also has a higher amount of blatant story problems.

I now rate the '89 version as 7.5/10.

I rate the '72 version as 6/10.