The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, Tales from the Darkside, The Twilight Zone again …all of these are horror anthology series, and all of them are either pretty good or great (even Tales from the Darkside with its obvious threadbare budgets). But outside Rod Serling’s original The Twilight Zone, they’re all definitely playing second fiddle to a major contender in the subgenre, HBO’s Tales from the Crypt. With the financial and content-related lenience provided by premium cable, it was a show that was really able to explore the darkest corners of imagination, usually with a grin, and look fairly good while doing so.
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There’s a problem however if you want to watch any of this grim-yet-hilarious adaptation of the 1950s EC Comics series, you’re going to need to either get the complete seven-season boxset on Amazon or peruse some secondhand home media shops for the individual seasons. A fair assumption would be that it’s streaming on Max, but like a cruel twist in the series itself, the answer is no. Another fair assumption would be that, like most other series, the individual seasons can be purchased digitally via retailers such as the aforementioned Amazon. Alas, still no dice. As of today, you simply cannot stream Tales from the Crypt.
Why Isn’t Tales from the Crypt on Max?
The simple answer as to why Tales from the Crypt isn’t streaming on Max, or anywhere else for that matter, can be boiled down to the single word “Rights.” For years the streaming rights to the series have been in a confusing limbo. The best source to understand the confusion is, unsurprisingly, the voice of the punny Cryptkeeper himself, John Kassir.
He shed some light on the topic during a spotlight panel a few years back. “This was all working out great for us, but after you do 93 episodes and movies and all that stuff over a period of time, the rights lapse. Sadly, [EC Comics] publisher William Gaines passed away. He did amazing things, and we loved him. He would grant us the rights tomorrow. But the rights reverted to the family, who probably gave them to a lawyer, who probably doesn’t work in the industry.”
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It’s an issue that has made not only streaming the ’80s and ’90s show nearly impossible, but crafting reboots very difficult as well. Even M. Night Shyamalan tried in the late 2010s and even with his star power it ultimately went nowhere.
Speaking of star power, Tales from the Crypt was a great way to see stars early in their careers. It even gave performers like Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger the opportunity to make their directorial debuts. Notable guest stars early in their careers included Wil Wheaton, Ewan McGregor, Tony Goldwyn, Tia Carrere, Teri Polo, Teri Hatcher, Steve Buscemi, Ke Huy Quan, Benicio del Toro, Daniel Craig, and Brad Pitt.
And, in a testament to the show’s quality, plenty of people who were very much at the top of their A-list game stopped in for an episode. Those names included then-current James Bond Timothy Dalton, John Lithgow, Joe Pesci, Isabella Rossellini, Demi Moore, Christopher Reeve, Cheech Marin, Bill Paxton, Michael J. Fox, Ted Danson, and Whoopi Goldberg. Even Guns N’ Roses’ Slash turned up.
It’s a shame, because while the show was certainly hit or miss (with the UK-based final season being one big letdown of a miss), when it hit, it really hit. Usually, this involved a seamless merger of comedy and horror. “What’s Cookin’,” which starred Christopher Reeve and Jaws 3-D‘s Bess Armstrong as a couple whose struggling restaurant switches gears to serving human meat, is such an example.
Then, sometimes, it nailed being straightforward horror. The definitive example here is “Television Terror,” starring Morton Downey Jr. (no relation to Robert) though “Forever Ambergris” with The Who’s Roger Daltry and the aforementioned Steve Buscemi, is no slouch. Impressively enough, the series showed itself capable of being truly frightening with just its second episode, the Robert Zemeckis-helmed “And All Through the House.”
Will Tales from the Crypt ever be available to stream? Probably so, it seems like too substantial a project to let collect cobwebs forever. But, as was seen with Friday the 13th, rights battles can be vicious. And while this isn’t currently a rights battle as much as a rights question mark, it seems a rights question mark is equally difficult to traverse.
