One Of Streaming’s Most Elusive Holy Grails Is Now On Shudder
Amazing BOOS, kiddies! Tales from the Crypt is finally coming to SCREAMING!
For years, Tales from the Crypt has been a streaming Holy Grail. The HBO horror anthology series and its host, The Crypt Keeper — a punny puppeteered character who looked like a mummified corpse and talked like a Borscht Belt comedian — had an outsized influence on pop culture in the ‘90s, producing multiple big-screen spin-offs, loads of merchandise, and even a Crypt Keeper Christmas album in 1994. But after the final episode aired in 1996, the crypt was closed. And it stayed that way.
Even though the show aired on HBO, Tales from the Crypt has never been available for streaming on HBO Max, not even when it was still called HBO Go. All seven seasons of the show were released on DVD in the ‘00s, and a few were reissued in the format in the early 2010s, but no Blu-ray upgrade has emerged — yet.
This is a real thing that actually happened.
M. Night Shyamalan also attempted to revive Tales from the Crypt as a 10-episode premium-cable limited series in 2016, but that deal fell apart amid what then-TNT president Kevin Reilly called “a very complicated underlying rights structure” in 2017. (The details are unclear, but it’s got something to do with the fact that the episodes were all based on stories from the original EC Comics version of Tales from the Crypt, each of which has its own rights holders.) Since then, the conventional wisdom has been that this iconic series is DOA.
So imagine our surprise when streaming service Shudder announced a few weeks back that it had secured the exclusive streaming rights to all seven seasons of Tales from the Crypt. Untangling the rights to all of these episodes must have taken years, and the deal is a testament to the dedication of Shudder’s now-former SVP of acquisitions, Sam Zimmerman, who secured streaming rights to the series as a sort of parting gift to the service before beginning a new job in development at Blumhouse-Atomic Monster.
All of this was revealed at the similarly horror-centric Overlook Film Festival, where voice actor John Kassir participated in a panel on the show’s history and lore. (Among the fun facts shared on stage: Kassir says that he/the Crypt Keeper, came up with the tagline, “it’s not TV, it’s HBO.”) You can watch the whole thing above, if you’re so inclined.
Even if it’s not a nostalgic favorite, Tales from the Crypt is a classic series that’s well worth your time. Along with the Creepshow movies, it’s a classic example of the “EC Comics” style seen in horror films like Late Night with the Devil or Trick ‘r Treat, combining grisly twists and campy dark humor to create twisted morality tales where the wicked get what’s coming to them.
A decade before Masters of Horror, and long before “prestige TV” knocked down the barriers between film and television, Tales from the Crypt also attracted big-name actors and directors: Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), Richard Donner (Superman), Tom Holland (Fright Night), and Walter Hill (The Warriors) all directed multiple episodes of the series, while Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin, Tom Hanks (!), Kyle MacLachlan (!!), and Arnold Schwarzenegger (!!!) each helmed one. Meanwhile, everyone from Demi Moore and Brad Pitt to Dan Aykroyd and Meat Loaf appeared as guest stars.
Season one of Tales from the Crypt debuts on Shudder May 1, with new seasons premiering weekly after that. Every episode of season one is excellent, but if you’re looking for a starting point into the series, check out “And All Through the House,” a truly creepy and surprisingly violent Christmas horror story about a housewife defending her son against an escaped psychopath who thinks he’s Santa Claus.
As the Crypt Keeper would say: It’ll open up a whole BOO world of SCREAMING terror tales! AHHHHhahahahahaHAHA!
