Horror legend John Carpenter turns 78 this Friday, and Halloween Night: John Carpenter Live from Los Angeles is now streaming on Screambox. Bloody Disgusting is celebrating with John Carpenter Week. Today brings a closer look at a forgotten Tales from the Crypt copycat from the ‘90s by Daniel Kurland. “Ah, body bags. You see, if it’s murder, suicide, or a nasty […]
Body Bags was conceived as an ongoing anthology TV series that was meant to be Showtime’s answer to HBO’s Tales from the Crypt. During production, Showtime’s confidence in the project as a full series started to waver. Instead, Showtime decided to take the three finished episodes and repackage them as a made-for-TV movie. This may have been deemed the safer approach, but it’s one that also seems to have doomed Body Bags to obscurity.
The early ’90s were an interesting time for anthology horror, where premium cable channels could draw big names in front of and behind the camera. Tales from the Crypt ran from 1989 to 1996, with Body Bags coming out right during the height of its popularity in ‘93. This wasn’t a situation where Showtime was striking the iron when it was no longer hot. This was technically the perfect time to launch a Tales from the Crypt horror anthology analogue, and yet, Showtime didn’t bite. Despite Tales from the Crypt’s success, the start of a potential backlash against the genre was beginning. 1992’s planned Tales from the Crypt spin-off, Two-Fisted Tales, was also retrofitted into a made-for-TV movie, which was then later edited into two Tales from the Crypt episodes, not unlike the approach that was taken with Body Bags.
Curiously, a few years later, Showtime would return to the anthology game with their Outer Limits revival in 1995, which did well enough to last for six seasons and 130 episodes on the network (and an extra season that followed on SyFy). It’s possible that Body Bags might have seemed like a better prospect to Showtime if it came around in 1995, and the two programs could have been paired together. The Outer Limits’ success, combined with Tales from the Crypt running on fumes during its final seasons, might have made Body Bags look like more of a sure thing.
Body Bags may not have caught on to the degree that Showtime was hoping for, but it’s through no fault of Carpenter. It feels like Carpenter has been given infinite freedom to make this house of horrors as twisted as he wants. Carpenter is clearly relishing the opportunity to ham it up on camera as the film’s Cryptkeeper-esque Coroner (an idea that was suggested to Carpenter by King, which initially excited him before he was subjected to the laborious makeup process). Body Bags even kicks off with its own parody of MGM’s Leo the Lion, where Carpenter’s Coroner brandishes a chainsaw, a nod to the film’s other director, Tobe Hooper.
Carpenter’s heightened schtick, which is almost more Beetlejuice than Cryptkeeper, is an acquired taste. However, the filmmaker is activated and alive in a way that becomes increasingly rare for ’90s-era Carpenter. It’s a shame that he couldn’t have bottled this energy and stayed in this mode for longer, rather than falling into the rut of The Village of the Damned, Vampires, and Ghosts of Mars. Body Bags captures many of Carpenter’s core sensibilities, but it also feels like a faithful representation of Hooper’s influences as a filmmaker. It certainly feels like Carpenter and Hooper would have been the creative forces that were leading Body Bags’ season of storytelling, much like how Robert Zemeckis, Walter Hill, and Richard Donner were for Tales from the Crypt.
Director Sam Raimi cameos in “The Gas Station” starring Alex Datcher in Body Bags (1993)
The three stories on display in Body Bags are perfectly entertaining and effectively showcase the types of terrors that audiences would get on a weekly basis in the series. The first entry, “The Gas Station,” functions as an especially solid urban legend that leans into the same serial killer tension that Carpenter perfected in Halloween. “The Gas Station” teases the audience and wants them to believe that the killer could, in fact, be Michael Myers. The story is even intentionally set near Haddonfield, Illinois. It’s the perfect red herring that allows Carpenter to get tongue-in-cheek reflexive with his own filmography. It’s a great opportunity for him to riff on a classic story in a post-modern manner.
The second story, “Hair,” is a lot of fun. It also might be one of the most forgettable things that Carpenter has directed, and it’s too bad that he doesn’t go further with the idea. Films like Exte: Hair Extensions and Bad Hair are both proof that there’s plenty that can be done with an evil hair graft versus host scenario, especially with Carpenter running the barbershop. It’s a segment that’s more interested in being silly than scary. While all three stories wouldn’t be out of place in Tales from the Crypt, “Hair” bears the closest resemblance to a classic EC Comics yarn.
Debbie Harry and Stacy Keach in “Hair.”
“Eye,” Body Bags’ third and final story, operates like a creative renaissance for its director, Tobe Hooper. It’s a fascinating meditation on faith, jealousy, and corruption that turns into something far more complex than a story about a serial killer eye transplant, where Mark Hamill gets to chew the scenery for a half hour. Hamill is the real highlight here, and his casting and performance are a precursor to what Mike Flanagan would tap into decades later with the actor.
There’s a lot to appreciate in “Eye,” all of which would work even better in an episodic series. The segment’s concept is a little too close to the previous story, “Hair,” in which an individual’s new hair, rather than his eye, begins to cause problems. The similarities between the two stand out more when these stories are played back-to-back-to-back in a movie. It’d be less noticeable within a full season of television, where “Hair” and “Eye” could be given more breathing room. Funnily enough, these two stories are ostensibly combined into one idea for The Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror IX” segment, “Hell Toupée.”
Mark Hamill in “Eye.”
The three stories in Body Bags offer a satisfying proof of concept, even if they just scratch the surface of what’s possible in an anthology series of this nature. The whole morgue and body bag premise is a loose enough concept that could easily fuel an entire anthology series that runs indefinitely and isn’t limited in what it covers. In some respects, it could function like a horror version of Six Feet Under, before Six Feet Under, so to speak. It’s a strong enough framing device with a weird enough host to pull people back for more.
Body Bags came and went as yet another disposable anthology movie, which in this case wasn’t even given the respect of a theatrical run. It’s exactly the fate that Carpenter wanted to avoid with a project of this nature. A little more trust on Showtime’s part could have helped put them on the map as a viable destination for horror, a full decade before they aired Masters of Horror, a horror anthology series that, ironically enough, featured installments that were directed by both John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper.
It’s possible that the failed Body Bags planted the seed for Masters of Horror, even if it wasn’t obvious back in the early ‘90s. A few seasons’ worth of Body Bags would have likely been a better use of Carpenter’s skills that decade (outside of In The Mouth of Madness). It could have even potentially prevented him from doing some of the more regrettable films from the later stage of his career. Body Bags remains an oddity from Carpenter’s career that’s cobbled together out of creativity and ambition, like some Frankenstein’s Monster of storytelling. The film might have been able to find more love if it had been allowed to exist as it was originally intended, yet more people continue to discover – and love – Carpenter’s eccentric take on an anthology series.
Follow along all week long as we salute John Carpenter.
