Ryan B does The Roots Of Evil

So in 1951 when EC Comics launched their very first horror comics, thus giving birth TO the horror comic, and starting the "new trend", DC, like so many other publishers, decided to jumped on the horror bandwagon. The result was The House Of Mystery.

Unlike many of the other followers, however, DC actually knew what they were doing. After all, this is the company whose initials stand for Detective Comics, so they should at least know how to do a good mystery and suspense story, right? Unfortunately, when the comics code authority cropped up and started putting the kibosh on horror/suspense/crime comics, DC decided to yield to them rather than die a premature death like EC did.

Thus The House Of Mystery morphed from a classic horror book into a superhero book with moderately creepy undertones. Tales like the serialized, Dial H For Hero, became the regular in HOM's pages and it seemed like it was in a downward spiral. That is until old EC alumni, Joe Orlando, took over as editor in 1968. He decided to breath new death into the book and return it to it's sinister roots. He also introduced a host to The House (something that every self respecting horror anthology needs).

This mysterious figure was Cain, the proverbial "first killer" who layed his brother low. Cain took over as "able" caretaker (get it?) in issue 175, but it's the issue after that (176 for all you delinquents who flunked math) that we'll be looking at today. Remember I mentioned about The House Of Mystery being taken back to it's roots? Well that's exactly the same subject that today's story is about. It's a gnarled bit of deadwood Cain calls...

The Roots Of Evil.

The story starts with a nubile blond babe in a plaid jumpsuit (it was the late sixties) answering the door for a shadowy figure.

"Oh, it's YOU!" she says, so clearly she knows him.

She let's the man in and their conversation quickly establishes that her name is Cora and she was waiting for her husband David to come back home from town. She assumes her mystery guest is there to see him, but the man tells her he's actually come to see her. He says that she doesn't actually love David and asks why she's still with him, to which she replies that she'd rather be with a rich chemist who's a louse, than marry this man, who is only an ASSISTANT chemist and, oh, also hideously deformed. 

In a sentence packed with more exposition than a James Bond villain speech, the man recalls that he wasn't always deformed. He only became this way after Cora left him for David at which point he had a horrible lab accident. David then fired him for incompetency. Ha! But enough of the past...

The man stands by the roaring fire in the living room, his Moleman face illuminated in the flickering light. Cora says that f he's there to try and woo her back he better forget it. He says that isn't why he came. He asks if it's okay if he stands a while by the fire.

The hypnotism starts to wear off and Cora comes around, not realizing what she's said. She asks what just happened and the man gloats that she's given him all the information he needs.

"But I wouldn't mention it to poor David. He might not understand why you were so co-operative."

Cora slaps him, calls him a monster, and tells him to get out. She throws a vase at him as he slides out the door and just in case this scene wasn't already rapey enough, he says, "From this moment on, I shall be the one who finishes on top." as he leaves.

So this doctor, Dr. Long, wants to give plants the ability to move around and be sentient and stuff and this is somehow going to benefit mankind... how exactly? It's never explained, but then again neither is Lumpy's ability to hypnotize people with fire, so oh well.

 Dr. Long injects about half of his "move, tree, move" serum into the base of the tree, all while his disgruntled assistant looks on from the shadows like a true creep. A week goes by with the doctor checking on his tree regularly to see if it's doing anything, but it isn't. His assistant, too, checks on the tree every night and finally one night it is he who is the first to see it begin to sway and move of its own accord. 

He goes over to the tree and starts pouring his own serum into the funnel at the base, all while talking to the tree and telling it that Dr. Long is evil for altering it and that he intends to have the tree do his bidding and blah blah blah. Then he does the exact same thing by having the tree do HIS bidding. He goes into Long's lab end starts acting all coy. Long tells him to get out. Then there's suddenly a CRASH!. The two men go running out across the yard to the house where Cora is. Inside she's being attacked by the tree, whose branches have broken through a window and are trying to drag her out. Long grabs an axe and tries to fight it off.

There's a lot of  running, Cora screaming, and stuff being broken as the tree tries to break in and David tries to fight it off. All the while his former assistant stands by laughing evilly.

Eventually the young couple run outside thinking they can escape a creature who's natural habitat is THE GROUND. Ya know, this guy's a scientist. Anyway, this works about as well as you'd think and a big ass tree root shoots up out of the earth and grabs the two. Then it squeezes them until their backs break like... well... twigs.

His revenge gotten, Lumpy heads back into the lab to steal Long's notes, but he can't find them. As he searches around, suddenly the tree's branches come in and start to snatch at him. He tries to command it, but realizes that the tree ain't taking orders from him anymore.

In the malay, some chemicals get knocked over, starting a fire. Lumpy runs from the building thinking he can outrun the tree the way the others weren't able to. He's right actually, and manages not to get snared by the roots. The tree, undeterred, just grabs the pointy funnel from it's trunk and chucks it at him Buffy style, killing him and pinning him to another tree.

So now we have an outbreak of killer trees to look forward to, eh? Ya know, after this story, I welcome woody death.

The House Of Mystery, even at it's spookiest, is still never as scary as say Tales From The Crypt, CREEPY, or even Twisted Tales, but it can usually at least offer a good suspense story. This wasn't one of them, but trust me, it can. The Roots Of Evil has all the feel of a B-movie. Deformed former assistant to a mad scientist brainwashes his ex-wife into helping him learn the secret of the doctor's work, which happens to be giving sentient life to trees...? Then of course after using the very monster the doctor created to destroy him and his wife, it turns on the villain himself. It's cheesy, it's far fetched, and it's bizarre.

Good thing I like all those things.

Still, bad is bad.

I'm giving it a 4 out of 10 Werthams.


On a side note, am I the only one who can still feel a bit of a superhero vibe going on here? It seems to me that if the story had taken a different turn somewhere around the midpoint, that we might have gotten to see Tree-man or something instead of just a killer tree. Oh well, the ending saved it... a little.