Unlike episodes of the
HBO series, the story was not adapted from the pages of
EC Comics. The first draft of the script was written in 1987, two years prior to the HBO series' debut. It was first intended to be made into a film by director
Tom Holland, who planned to shoot it as a follow-up to ''
Child's Play (1988). Holland hired an FX team to do preliminary sketches, but he ultimately went on to direct the box-office bomb Fatal Beauty'' (1987). Next, the script wound up in the hands of
Pumpkinhead screenwriter Mark Carducci, who sat on it for several years before it was given to
Pet Sematary director
Mary Lambert. Lambert had some radical ideas for the script, including casting an
African American as Brayker to create a theme that the oppressed people of Earth were also its saviors. Once Lambert went on to direct
Pet Sematary Two, which was a theatrical bomb, she could not get people to invest in the film. The script later went to
Charles Band's
Full Moon Features, but budgetary constraints held up the production in limbo. When it finally made its way onto desks at
Joel Silver's
Silver Pictures, it was optioned to be the second in a trilogy of
Tales from the Crypt theatrical spin-offs.
Universal Pictures executives thought the script had more potential than the other two films (
Dead Easy and
Body Count, neither of which was ultimately produced), and the film was quickly sent into production with a tentative release date of Halloween 1994 (though the release was pushed back to January 1995). At this point, two versions of the script were created to solve budgetary problems: one
with demons and one
without. In the latter, the Collector was a Bible salesman who was using a legion of fellow salesman clad in black suits and sunglasses (later revealed to be demons) as his minions. A film called
Demon Knight with demons that looked like killer yuppies made everyone nervous, so Universal pitched in some additional money to get some demons on the screen. ==Release==