Ryan B does Horror We? How's Bayou?

The Crypt-Keeper kept The Crypt of Terror, The Vault-Keeper kept The Vault of Horror, how come the Haunt of Fear wasn't kept by The Haunt-Keeper?

Food for thought.

Anyway, today's story is brought to us by my second favorite of EC's GhouLunatics after The Crypt-Keeper, the actual keeper of The Haunt of Fear, The Old Witch. It's a soggy, swampland tale you'll always dismember called...

Horror We? How's Bayou?


It begins with a man named Max Forman driving down a dark, cypress lined, dirt road deep in the bayous of Louisiana. He's somehow wandered off the main road and is now hopelessly lost in the swamps. He comes to a stop in front of an old crumbling mansion with a light on in a window. He wonders who could live in this creepy rat infested country, but decides to knock on the door and ask for directions out of the swamp. A small middle aged man answers the door and Forman introduces himself and says he must have accidentally gotten turned around. The man says that he'd almost given up on getting anyone for the night, which confuses Mr. Forman. The man explains that he switched the street signs to lead people off the main road and to his house on purpose. His brother, Everett, is a homicidal maniac and he must be given victims or else he'll become "difficult".

Mr. Forman doesn't believe what he hears until he turns around suddenly and is confronted by a huge lumbering psychopath.

Everett comes at Mr. Forman, who tries to run, but is caught by the maniac and strangled to death by his giant hands. Everett's brother, Sidney, tells him to take the body down into the cellar so he doesn't have to see him dismember it. While Everett does that, Sidney goes outside to get rid of Forman's car. He gets in and drives it to a quicksand pool in the swamps. He releases the emergency brake and watches as the vehicle sinks into the murky pit in a scene reminiscent of Hitchcock's Psycho, but one decade earlier. "Poor Everett," Sidney says, "Perhaps this will satisfy him... for a while, at least." When he gets back to the mansion, Everett is waiting there with blood on his hands. He tells Sidney that the man was a doctor, he found his card. Sidney just tells him to put what's left of the man in "the sack" and dump it in the quicksand with the others. At the mention of "the others" Everett starts to reminisce.

Sidney doesn't want to hear it and sends Everett to do the dirty work, but can't help remember himself. We then see flashbacks to the previous victims. The first one was a woman who came to the house by accident sometime ago. Sidney offered her a room for the night and she took it. Suddenly he was woken up by a scream in the middle of the night and ran to her room to see Everett murdering her. After that Sidney altered the street sign to bring victims to his insatiable brother. The second was a fat traveling salesman. Like the woman, he too wound up in the quicksand pool. What was left of him.

In the present, Everett comes back from his grizzly task and the two turn in for the night. As the lights of the mansion go out something weird begins to happen in the bubbling quicksand. Below the surface, body parts start swirling and moving and connecting with each other. Eventually three heads surface.

Inside the house, Sidney hears noises and looks towards his bedroom door.

In walk three slimy, rotting creatures. The body parts rejoined, but they did it all... wrong. Forman's head is on the woman's body, with her head on the fat guy. Arms and legs are all a jumble and one of them is holding the doctors little black bag full of surgical instruments. The three freaky Mr. Potatoheads lurch forward and attack Sidney in his bed.

Locked in his room next door, Everett hears screaming and sawing and other nasty noises coming from his brother's room. Then he hears sounds leaving the house and looks out the window to see three figures heading into the swamps and slipping back into the quicksand. Just then his door is unlocked and he turns to see Sidney there, or rather, this thing...

Gasp! Choke!

Well, that's what you get when you're the crazy backwater versions of George and Lenny I suppose and according to The Old Witch's wrap up they're both still out there in the swamps, although, I imagine hurricane Katrina probably flushed them out by now.

This story is wonderfully "twisted" and yes that pun is intended. It's a perfect example of "Ghastly" Graham Ingels drippy, waxy, artwork that earned him his nickname in the first place. It's only a shame that they never adapted this tale for the HBO Tales from the Crypt series the way they did with other Haunt and Vault stories. It would have been great to see the surgically altered Sidney creature in living color years before the Human Centipede. Ha ha

I give this one 9 out of 10 Werthams for being a cut above the rest.