Tales from the Darkside: The Movie

In a bright, orderly suburban kitchen, a witch named Betty is preparing a feast. Her main course is Timmy, a boy she has been keeping in a cage and fattening up. While Betty works, Timmy asks to read to her from a book he found — Tales from the Darkside. She agrees. He opens it and begins.

The first story is Lot 249. Graduate student Bellingham, played by a young Steve Buscemi, has been cheated out of a scholarship and framed for theft by his wealthy classmates Andy and Susan, with Andy's girlfriend Lee as a willing accomplice. Alone in his apartment crammed with antiquities, Bellingham unwraps a mummy he acquired at auction and reanimates it with an ancient papyrus scroll. He sends it out to settle his debts: the mummy murders his enemies one by one with grimly inventive efficiency — a lawnmower blade, a vacuum cleaner hose. Andy figures out what is happening and confronts Bellingham, forcing him to burn the scroll and reduce the mummy to dust. It looks like it is over. In the final shot, Bellingham retrieves a second scroll from a drawer. He was never finished.

The second story is Cat from Hell, written by Stephen King. Drogan, a wheelchair-bound pharmaceutical billionaire, sits alone in his mansion with only a black cat as company — a cat he is terrified of. He explains to a hired killer named Halston that the cat has already killed three people close to him: his housekeeper, his sister, and a friend, each in circumstances that defy easy explanation. Drogan's company once ran drug trials on five thousand cats. He believes this one survived and came for him personally. Halston takes his money and his contempt with him into the house. What follows is a long, darkly funny hunt through the mansion that stops being funny when the cat claws its way down Halston's throat and suffocates him from the inside. Drogan finds the body, the cat sitting on the floor beside it, clean and calm. No amount of money was ever going to matter.

The third story is Lover's Vow, and it is the one the film earns its keep on. Preston is a broke, struggling artist in New York who witnesses a gargoyle tear a man apart in a dark alley. The creature turns to Preston. It spares his life on a single condition: he must never tell anyone what he saw. Preston agrees. Stumbling from the alley, he meets a woman named Carola in a bar — she pulls him off the floor, takes him home, and something real begins between them. Over the years they marry, have two children, and Preston's art finds its audience. He is genuinely, unexpectedly happy, in a way he had stopped believing was possible. The night in the alley recedes into something he almost thinks he dreamed. On the anniversary of their meeting, with years of gratitude and love behind him, he tells Carola the whole story. The moment he finishes, she and their children transform: they were always the creature, or bound to it, and the vow was the only thing that held the shape of everything he had. They kill him. Carola and the children walk away into the dark, their true forms restored, his entire life unmade by the one moment of honesty he could not contain.