If you had to pinpoint the moment HBO changed television forever, you'd probably land on Jan. 10, 1999 — the day The Sopranos premiered. Sex and the City had arrived just months earlier, to massive ratings and a near-total command of the zeitgeist. The Sopranos, an out-of-the-box commercial and critical hit from the very beginning, confirmed HBO as the place for serious people to find serious television.
But as much as I love the channel HBO has become, I'm increasingly nostalgic for the weirder, woolier channel it used to be. A full decade before The Sopranos graced the airwaves, HBO premiered its first truly great original series: Tales from the Crypt.
Every episode of Tales from the Crypt begins the same way. The camera passes through a creaky gate, zooming toward a foreboding mansion as lightning strikes on the horizon. Going up the stairs and opening the front door, it passes through a cobweb-strewn foyer, then a secret passage, down a long flight of stone stairs. Moving into a candlelit, skull-littered crypt, the camera settles on a casket — which suddenly pops open, revealing the hideous, cackling face of the Crypt Keeper: a rotting corpse with a screechy voice, prone to sudden bursts of horrific violence and ghoulishly terrible puns.
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In the tradition of anthology shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, each Tales from the Crypt episode tells an entirely self-contained horror story, with a brand-new director and cast every time. Drawing on narratives from classic comic books like Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and Shock SuspenStories — but piling on even more sex and gore than in the originals — Tales from the Crypt told 93 horror stories over seven grisly seasons. One episode documents the stand-off between a murderess and a maniac dressed as Santa Claus; another follows a sleazy door-to-door salesman who messed with the wrong family. One episode follows an escaped criminal, who is stranded in the middle of the desert and handcuffed to the corpse of the cop who caught him; another follows a down-on-his-luck restaurateur who finds profit when he adds human meat to the menu. Some episodes were creepy, and some were funny, and the best were both — and if not every episode was great, each was, at the very least, memorable.
Throughout the 1990s, Tales from the Crypt was a genuine pop-culture phenomenon. In addition to its seven seasons, the series spawned three films, a short-lived science fiction-themed spin-off, a children's cartoon, a game show hosted by the Crypt Keeper, and — as was the inexplicable custom of the time — a god-awful novelty rap single:
The Crypt Keeper even came close to appearing on The Daily Show. "One thing that I don’t think we ever got to air, was getting the Crypt Keeper to be a pundit on the show," recalled Daily Show writer Allison Silverman. "This was Bush v. Gore, and the idea was to just have Jon throw to our very special correspondent, the Crypt Keeper, and he would say 'I LIKE GORE!' in his classic Crypt Keeper voice. I think we tried, but the Crypt Keeper was very expensive."
But despite its ubiquity at the time, Tales from the Crypt seems to have faded from the minds of everyone but a devoted cult audience. The Crypt-branded movies Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood just received a fresh Blu-Ray upgrade courtesy of Shout! Factory, but the TV show that spawned them has endured much shabbier treatment. It's not available on HBO Go, and the DVD box sets collecting the series were released nearly a decade ago. Individual streaming episodes can be purchased from Warner Brothers Television, but it's incredibly easy to find pretty much any full-length episode on YouTube. They've all been there for months, hosted by unofficial accounts. Apparently no one cares enough to have them taken down for copyright infringement.
It's sad to see the corpse of the franchise rotting away, because at heart, Tales from the Crypt could hardly be more modern. TV shows like True Detective, American Horror Story, and Fargo have reintroduced audiences to series that conclude within a single season, and an episode-to-episode anthology is the next logical step. At the time it aired, Tales from the Crypt's sex-and-blood approach to storytelling made it an outlier; now, it would fit right in with shows like The Walking Dead or Game of Thrones or Hannibal.
But the best thing about Tales from the Crypt — and the thing that's sorely lacking on television today — is the wide-open canvas it offered to talented, creative people who wanted to screw around and have some fun. The list of big names who actually starred in episodes is staggering. There are episodes directed by established Hollywood legends like Robert Zemeckis, Richard Donner, Walter Hill, William Friedkin, Tobe Hooper, and John Frankenheimer, as well as episodes helmed by stars who clearly jumped at the chance to see what it was like on the other side of the camera: Tom Hanks, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael J. Fox, and Kyle MacLachlan, to name a few.
After almost 20 years, it's time to throw open the casket and let the Crypt Keeper out again. This should not be a hard sell. Find a network that's willing to embrace Tales from the Crypt in all its gory, goofy glory. Reach out to Cary Fukunaga and Edgar Wright and Lena Dunham and David Robert Mitchell and Ava DuVernay and every other talented filmmaker you can dream up. Make overtures to Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt and John Boyega and Emma Stone and Daniel Radcliffe and every other talented actor that jumps to mind. Give them all the same pitch: not much money, not much time, and total creative freedom.
Who wouldn't want to be a part of that —and who wouldn't watch it?
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