Tales from the Crypt

Tales from the Crypt has one of the best revenge arcs in television: it's the banned comic that came back. The source material was William Gaines's 1950s EC Comics horror line, the books at the center of the 1954 moral panic — psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, Congressional hearings on juvenile delinquency, and the resulting Comics Code Authority, whose rules (no "horror" or "terror" in a title, for a start) made the books undistributable. Gaines shut down Tales from the Crypt and its sister titles in September 1954. Thirty-five years later, HBO resurrected the property with a murderers' row of executive producers — Richard Donner, David Giler, Walter Hill, Joel Silver, and Robert Zemeckis — and because it was premium cable, no censor could touch it this time. The show ran seven seasons and 93 episodes from June 1989 to July 1996, with the gore, nudity, and language the Code had died to prevent.

The undisputed star was the host. The Cryptkeeper — an animatronic corpse-puppet built by Kevin Yagher (creator of Chucky, who even reused Chucky's clear blue eyes), operated by a six-person puppet team and voiced in a delighted cackle by John Kassir — opened every episode from his crypt with pun-riddled greetings ("hello, boils and ghouls") after Danny Elfman's theme carried the camera through the storm-lashed mansion and down to his door. Episodes were morality plays in the EC tradition: greedy, lustful, murderous people meeting ironic ends, staged by A-list talent (Arnold Schwarzenegger directed one episode; guests ranged from Kirk Douglas to a young Ewan McGregor).

The franchise sprawled exactly the way 90s kids remember, at both ends of the age spectrum. Too young for HBO? There was Tales from the Cryptkeeper, a sanitized ABC Saturday-morning cartoon from 1993, plus a CBS kids' game show, and in 1994 Fox began airing defanged reruns of the real thing. Old enough? The theatrical spin-offs arrived: Demon Knight (January 1995, with Billy Zane's magnificent Collector) turned a modest profit, while Bordello of Blood (1996, Dennis Miller) flopped and ended the theatrical run. The series ended that same year, but the Cryptkeeper endures as one of horror's great hosts — proof, as he'd surely put it, that you can't keep a good corpse down.