Tales from the Crypt: The Best Midnight Horror Show You've Never Seen

Before streaming reshaped television, midnight horror slots introduced viewers to the genre’s offbeat corners. In the late 1980s William Gaines and Steven Dodd helped revive that tradition for modern audiences with Tales from the Crypt, a TV anthology that adapted stories from the EC Comics catalog, including The Vault of Horror.

Each episode unfolded under the watch of the puppet Cryptkeeper, whose snarky introductions and HBO’s loose content limits let the series range from playful to brutal. The show opened with one of television’s most memorable sequences, set to a Danny Elfman score and leading into a haunted mansion where John Kassir’s Cryptkeeper cackled his way through the night.

Tales from the Crypt gathered a remarkable roster of filmmakers — Tobe Hooper, William Friedkin, John Frankenheimer, Tom Holland, Mary Lambert and others — and attracted big-name actors such as Demi Moore, Brad Pitt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael J. Fox, John Lithgow and Tim Curry.

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