Tales from the Crypt #4 (1992)

A coroner constantly dreams of being attacked by the corpses he encounters. Then, just when he begins to shed the fear, a "corpse" really does come to life. It's actually an escape artist who feigned his death to perpetrate a murder.

A tale with a classic switch. A game show challenges people to guess the occupation of their special guest. We're slowly led to believe he's a vampire, but he only manufactures red ink! Too bad for him that the contestants ARE vampires.

When a woman witnesses a doctor murdering his wife, the shock causes the loss of her voice. The doctor has her committed as insane, but later plans to murder her, as well. Luckily, she doesn't need her voice to get revenge.

Harry's wife Edith is missing so he hires his old friend, private eye Gregg, to find her. Gregg stumbles upon a book that depicts the very same situation, with the book's private eye being murdered by the man who hired him. With a chill, Gregg realizes he's being set up the same way and readies to defend himself from Harry. When a shadowy figure approaches him, Gregg shoots to kill, only to discover it was Edith that he shot. You see, it WAS a set-up. Harry wanted Edith out of the way, so he ensured Gregg would find the book and react the way he did.

A man living high on the hog by embezzling from his boss realizes he is close to getting caught. So, he surreptitiously gives his boss a suitcase of explosives to take with him on his upcoming flight, with a timer set to detonate over the desert. To confirm the explosion occurs, the crook drives out to the desert to watch. Fittingly, the crashing plane lands right on top of him.

A man murders his wife to be with his mistress. He buries her in the desert, but a prospector accidentally finds the body with a Geiger counter. It turns out her watch had a radium dial!

A cab driver has a dream that he is pursued by a Dr. Mueller into a basement filled with vampire-occupied caskets. When he wakes, and Dr. Mueller actually shows up at his cab, he recognizes the dream as a subconscious warning the doctor may be dangerous to him, so he takes the doctor to the basement he dreamed of and then drains his blood. Afterwards, the vampire cabbie returns to the earthen sod in his trunk to pass the coming day.

A woman is convinced that her friend down the hall has been murdered by her husband and that he is disposing of her remains bit by bit via carrier pigeon to a local kennel. It turns out that her husband is in on the deal too, and he comes for her sooner than he anticipated since she has found out.

A bigamist is decapitated by his two athletic wives when they find they've been deceived. The golfer putts with his eyes and the bowler uses his severed head.

A mortician avenges himself against perceived slights upon the closed-casket victims of his parlor by violating their bodies until a corpse who isn't quite dead yet overhears his gruesome doings and begs the dead to rise from their graves and stop this horrid man. This they do, and bury parts of Mr. Benedict under a dozen gravestones.

A doctor rigs up an elaborate hoax to convince his heart specialist friend that his theory of awareness immediately after death could be true by pretending to poison him but really only administering an anesthetic. When the heart specialist fails to come out from it, they realize he truly is dead, and since the story is told in first person, it confirms the doctor's theory of awareness beyond death since the end of the story reveals that the heart specialist died of a heart attack upon ingesting the supposed poisoned brandy and subsequently relates everything he perceives.

A high school teacher narrates his experiences as the main character in the dream of a sadistic student. When he realizes the child is waking up, he is terrified at the true end of his existence.

When Clem retires as Fire Chief, that leaves old Dan Harper on the job.....until the Mayor appoints a younger man as Chief, and, from the beginning, Dan and Chief Miller never see eye-to-eye about anything. One night, a fire breaks out at Dan's home, and the new Chief purposely delays his response to that call, hoping that Dan will die in it.....which he does. Soon after, Chief Miller gets a ghostly call that his own house is on fire, and he rushes to the descent pole, which, somehow, has been replaced with a steel strip, sharpened to a keen razor-edge!

A doctor gets his revenge on the five members of the medical board who revoked his license to practice medicine by transferring their brains into the bodies of dogs, and using their reasoning abilities to make money as a novelty act. However, they get their revenge upon him by transferring his brain into the body of a horse and chasing him around the town streets.

This story is narrated by a trunk and concerns the murder of a woman the trunk is fond of. When the murderer attempts to hide in the trunk, he panics and shoots holes through it, whereupon the trunk contracts itself turning the killer into flesh spaghetti and concentrated bone.

A man marries a woman at Mardi Gras who wears a hag mask. She continually puts off his requests to remove her mask until he becomes agitated enough to bodily pull the mask off of her head, whereupon he realizes she wasn't wearing a mask.

An obese practical joker with a stomach problem visits a doctor and relates a practical joke involving getting old clothes and bloody butchered chunks of horse flesh to take down to the trainyard near where some children regularly play. When the train rolls through, he lets out a scream after dropping the gory mess on the rails, and finds the ensuing panic tearfully funny. Unfortunately, the doctor's son died from that prank, so gets his revenge by giving him some capsules that contained fish hooks and he straps the obese man to a table and tickles him so that he will literally 'die laughing'.

The Grateful Hoboes, Outcasts, and Unwanteds' Layaways Society is run by a man who read 'Midnight Mess' in Tales from the Crypt #35, and offers a pleasant burial for the penniless. A local reporter thinks their setup odd, and when his boss later tells him that they have buried their 1000th derelict, he is sure something stinks because their cemetery does not have enough area for 1000 graves. He discovers the truth: that the 20-30 members of the society are ghouls!

Some boys peeping through an undertaker's basement window overhear a plot between the town druggist and undertaker to poison citizens to profit from their funeral costs. When Percy's father becomes a victim, they resolve to take matters into their own hands!

This story is told by a grave. It speaks of spending lonely years of being laughed at by the other graves, because they have children (corpses) while the narrator remains barren. Finally a casket is brought to the craving grave, but the body of Cynthia does not rest in peace. Her no-good nephew, who once robbed her, returns with his wife and begs forgiveness. Cynthia takes the two of them in, only to be murdered for her money.

In this grim fairy tale, the REAL reason sleeping beauty spends all that time sleeping during the daytime hours turns out to be...aw, you guessed it.

The shadow of a corner newspaper dealer detaches itself from his body one evening and seizes the shadow of an axe in order to assault an unscrupulous competitor who is attempting to ruin him. When they find the corpse of his victim, they are astounded that the corpse casts no shadow.

A woman plots to run away with the circus animal trainer because her husband, even though he can project his thoughts to her which they use as their act, does not love her. The husband tumbles to the plot and forces the animal trainer at gunpoint into the lion's cage where he is torn apart. The wife suspects him but has no proof and so when the husband is accidentally paralyzed when a beam lands upon him while the circus packs up, she ignores his thoughts for help and coldly advises them not to embalm him so that he is buried alive.

Two Navy divers discover a pearl bed while placing demo charges and make plans to go back for them after the war ends. One gets greedy and murders the other one, whose corpse then surprises him while he is attempting to acquire the pearls.

A story about a madman who converts a house into a ship in the middle of a prairie.

A man who enjoys tormenting lobster ends up in a car crash where the steering column disembowels him and the flames that erupt broil him alive.