The EC Archives: The Vault of Horror #1

In "Portrait in Wax!", the Vault Keeper presents a chilling tale of artistic envy and grotesque transformation. When jealous friend Henry begins passing off his artist pal Robert’s etchings as his own, a violent confrontation leads to a shocking act of vengeance—only to spiral into a nightmare of preserved deceit. As a wax museum built on stolen talent begins to unravel, a severed hand and a mask reveal a truth far more disturbing than murder.

Walter Mallory is haunted by the belief that he’s a werewolf, driven by the dark legacy of his family’s cursed past. As he prepares to end his own life, Scotland Yard arrives with a shocking truth: the murders were orchestrated by Sir Gregory Mallory, who used hypnosis and disguise to frame Walter. The real monster was never a beast, but a man who weaponized fear and madness.

In the quiet dread of the Hawkin’s Tourist Colony, Tom Hawkins grips his bottle, haunted by a dream too vivid to ignore: a couple arrives seeking shelter, the woman terrified of a lurking death that drives her to kill a cat, only for her husband to murder her and then himself. When his friend Jim dismisses it as mere nightmare, Tom’s unease deepens—until a car pulls up and the very same couple from his dream stands before him, asking for a room.

In "Terror Train," Gloria flees her husband Ralph, desperate to escape what she believes is his deadly plan—only to find herself trapped on a train where every passenger lies dead in their berths. As she stumbles through a nightmarish sequence of visions and horrors, the line between reality and nightmare blurs, and Ralph’s presence becomes both a threat and a twisted salvation.

In "The Dead Will Return!", a chilling tale from The EC Archives: The Vault of Horror #1 (2021), Florence and Bert are haunted by the unsettling return of her husband’s body—first washed ashore, then dumped, only to reappear again and again, each time more impossible than the last. As the tide brings the corpse back to the lighthouse, a growing dread grips Florence, and Bert’s desperate attempts to bury the past only deepen the horror. When the light goes out and a trail of seawater leads up the lighthouse stairs, the true terror begins—unseen, unrelenting, and rising from the sea.

In the decaying halls of Harkley Heath, the last surviving members of the cursed Harkley family gather to claim their inheritance—only to learn the fortune goes to a cousin long thought dead. When the lawyer reveals Sybil Harkley is the rightful heir, her two living cousins, Charles and Edgar, plot to silence her with the same morphine that killed their uncle. But death isn’t the end for Sybil, and the house remembers every betrayal.

In "Doctor of Horror," the newly appointed Governor Dr. Finch arrives at the Hampshire Surgeon School, unaware that Professor Alfred LeMonet is already playing a deadly game of ambition and deception. As enrollment soars thanks to LeMonet’s macabre teaching methods, the professor’s plans grow bolder—until his own body becomes the ultimate casualty of his scheme.

In the eerie isolation of a storm-lashed island, Steve Crane and his partner Alec crash-land their plane, only to find themselves drawn toward a looming castle where Count Alvar Cabeza awaits—his hospitality as sharp as the knives in his trophy room. As Crane recovers from his ordeal, the Count reveals a chilling fascination with human cunning, setting the stage for a deadly game of wits that turns the survivor into the hunted.

In "Voodoo Vengeance!", a desperate husband confronts his wife’s betrayal in a chilling encounter at an eerie antique store. When Caleb Standish discovers his wife Sally with her lover, the tension erupts in a violent moment that ends with a voodoo doll—crafted in her likeness—shattered in the fireplace. But as the flames rise, the true horror begins to unfold, leaving Caleb frozen in dread.

In the shadowed peaks of Transylvania, a tense climbing expedition unfolds as Viktor Zorak, Reggie and Eric Smythe, Edna and John Farnum, and their guide Jan Bodzla make their way to a remote lodge. Bodzla’s growing unease about Zorak’s true nature turns to dread when the full moon rises, revealing a chilling transformation and unleashing a blood-curdling terror that leaves the group reeling. As fear takes hold and the mountain becomes a trap, the survivors must confront the horrifying truth behind the beast—and the chilling warning that may be too late.

Abner Tucker, the town’s self-proclaimed expert on everyone’s past, digs up a corpse for its buried jewels—only to face his greatest fear: a rat. Determined to avoid detection, he uncovers Revolutionary War tunnels beneath the graveyard, using them to steal from graves unseen. But when the rats begin stealing his loot and then breach his defenses, Abner finds himself trapped in a collapsing tunnel, cut off from his tools and his only way out.

In the storm-lashed darkness of a forgotten road, a stranded man stumbles upon a house ruled by a pair of unsettling neighbors—one claiming his wife is a ghoul, the other insisting his husband is a vampire. As their chilling stories of a dead dog blur with the man’s own unraveling sense of reality, he locks himself in a bedroom, only to wake to a panel opening and the couple approaching in the shadows. When he awakens back in his car, the nightmare seems to end—until the same house appears again, its lights familiar, its door opening to reveal the very same couple he thought he’d escaped.

Henry Davidson, a perpetually late writer, escapes city chaos for the isolation of Millford Manor—haunted house or peaceful retreat? His friends, Jean, Ted, and Roger, have other plans, dragging him into a spooky reunion that blurs the line between prank and peril. The Vault-Keeper warns: some houses don’t just haunt—they remember.

In "Terror in the Swamp!", two travelers heed a cryptic warning from a desperate man on the edge of the Okefenokee, only to uncover a chilling tale of ambition gone wrong. The story unfolds through the man’s harrowing account of Professor Carl Ward, his daughter Marie Ward, and Robert Colby, whose experiments to harness the "spark of life" unleashed a monstrous, ever-growing entity in the swamp. As the past bleeds into the present, the travelers push forward—ignoring the old man’s plea—only to confront the living horror that has been waiting in the dark.

In "Report from the Grave," the town’s undertaker, Fred Coombes, leads the Vault-Keeper’s Club in a chilling initiation ritual for new member Warren Lake. The test requires Warren to exhume a recently buried member and report back with the time from the corpse’s wristwatch—only to return baffled, claiming the coffin held nothing but old bones and rags. When the club returns to the cemetery, they find the corpse is decades out of date, and suspicion falls on Vardy, who once shared a room with the deceased. As tension mounts and the truth begins to unravel, a sudden explosion sends a gravestone crashing down—revealing the body of Willie Balm and forcing Vardy’s confession. The reason behind the blast? A simple, forgotten detail: the casket had no ventilation.

In a grimy carnival haze, a man known only as Sam—once called "Zobo, the Living Corpse"—is buried alive for entertainment, his shallow breaths barely keeping him from suffocating. When his lover Rita abandons him for Paul, she convinces Sam to repeat the act, not to perform, but to bury him forever—only to learn too late that Sam has a far more chilling plan of his own.

In a secluded Hungarian hotel where guests vanish one by one, the sinister owner Hubert Antone welcomes the famed pianist Madamoiselle Michelin as a guest, hoping to lure more visitors. But when a guest is found dead and a werewolf is whispered to be on the loose, the truth behind the murders begins to unravel—especially when the hotel’s host reveals a monstrous secret of his own.

In the quiet dread of a small town, young Stanley finds himself under the care of his uncle Ezra, the local undertaker—until he uncovers a gruesome secret buried beneath the town’s respect for the dead. When Ezra’s obsession with stolen valuables leads to a fatal betrayal, Stanley’s fate takes a chilling turn, and the coffin becomes a stage for a punishment far more fitting than any law could deliver.

In "The Grave Wager," Paul and Clyde make a dark bet: they wager $50 that Roger won’t spend the night in a room with a corpse. To up the stakes, they secretly enlist Pirro, the Wax Man, from a local freak show to play the part—his waxen form delivered to Roger’s apartment under the cover of night. When Roger wakes to find the corpse moving, the night takes a terrifying turn. The next morning, Paul and Clyde arrive to gloat—only to find Roger raving, and Pirro’s lifeless body, brutally beaten, lying in the room.

Pete Luger’s desperate plan to escape prison hinges on swapping places with a dead man—only to find himself locked in a coffin, buried beneath the earth, with no one to dig him out. As the prison’s new crematorium looms, the grave he was meant to vanish into becomes his final, horrifying prison.

In "Terror on the Moors!", a lone American tourist named Jim Ryan takes shelter in a remote estate shrouded in fog, where the reclusive Andrew Clymore and his silent servant Evers await. When Evers reveals Clymore is already dead and buried, he begs Ryan to build a funeral pyre—only to warn him of a monstrous creature locked away in a barred room. As flames rise and the moors echo with unseen horrors, Ryan must face what stirs in the dark.

In the frozen silence of a blinding snowstorm, Barton Gordon arrives at a decaying apartment building to answer a mysterious ad for superintendent. He soon learns the new landlord, Marcus Kingsley, keeps his apartment frozen in perpetual cold—until the air conditioner fails, and something far worse begins to seep from under the door.

In "The Beast of the Full Moon!", Tom Kellogg arrives at his brother Andrew’s isolated home, uneasy after finding strange footprints and learning of another werewolf killing. Determined to uncover the truth, he sets a trap with silver bullets, only to be saved at the last moment by a shot from above—just as the beast is caught. When Tom climbs out of the pit, he sees Andrew standing there… and then realizes June is gone. The horror deepens as he looks back into the pit, where her body lies.

In "Voodoo Horror!", George Barker’s curiosity leads him to a mysterious shop in Haiti, where he commissions a voodoo bust of himself—only to find the order impossible to cancel. Back home, the bust ages while he remains unchanged, a silent, creeping reminder of a bargain made in darkness. As years pass and his marriage to Jean becomes a gilded prison of unending youth, the line between the statue and its creator begins to blur in ways he never imagined.