The Crypt Keeper Himself, John Kassir, Gives Update On "TALES FROM THE CRYPT" Rights Issues
To millions, the only person who gave EC Comics classic character of The Crypt Keeper to life is undoubtly John Kassir. Kassir voiced the Crypt Keeper for every season for the hit HBO TV series of the 90s and now has chimed in on what the hold up is on new TALES FROM THE CRYPT content.
During his panel at last weekend’s Terror Con in Marlborough, MA, John Kassir shared his perspective on Tales from the Crypt‘s complicated rights issues that halted TNT and M. Night Shyamalan’s reboot attempt in 2016 and continue to prohibit new iterations of the beloved horror anthology series.
“Obviously, Tales from the Crypt was a comic book, and those rights were granted to the producers of the show back in the late ’80s,” he explained. “So then they started producing the show, and it was very big producers. We’re talking about Joel Silver, who did all the Lethal Weapons, the Die Hard movies, the Matrix movies. He’s a very big producer, and he also has a reputation of being one of the biggest assholes in the business. You didn’t hear me say that, but you did!” The audience laughed.
“And Dick Donner, who’s one of the nicest people in the business and one of the best directors, David Giler, who produced Alien, Walter Hill, amazing director of 48 Hrs and The Warriors, and Bob Zemeckis, who brought in a bunch of his ideas for effects that we could do in the show.
“These are the producers on the show, so they had a lot of hopes for it. They started making the show and were able to call in a lot of favors, get a lot of stars, get a lot of directors. Some of your favorite horror directors directed episodes of these, as well as stars. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael J. Fox, Tom Hanks, they all came in and wanted to direct. They’d give them a week to direct a Tales from the Crypt episode.
“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.”
Kassir continued, “So those producers own this Crypt Keeper but can’t create new material with it without the rights. All the old stuff we created belongs to them. For them to do more, they would have to get the rights back, which they haven’t been able to get EC Comics to grant.
“[EC] did grant them to TNT, who were going to do a whole block of horror with M. Night Shyamalan, and the Crypt Keeper was going to be the host. Well, they couldn’t get that Crypt Keeper, so that went down the tube. I think they were even trying to sell the rights off to more than one person, which nobody wanted.
“This happens in our business all the time with popular franchises from the past that people want to revive. It’s a hard thing to get done. It hasn’t happened in many years. Some people who were involved at the top don’t believe that it will ever happen, but who knows? Nobody would be happier than me,” he chuckles.
“Because I’m both a fan and an actor — not that I ever got paid that much from Tales from the Crypt. It was an expensive show to produce. I don’t even know if they could afford to make that show nowadays. It took five puppeteers to make the Crypt Keeper work. They always complained about what they had to pay them, and I was like, ‘Dude, it’s the character! What do you want?’
“Maybe they’d want to use CGI. Well, nobody wants to see that. A CGI Crypt Keeper would probably be pretty cool, but not if you already know what he could look like as an animatronic puppet, which is probably why kids were getting hooked on it. There’s something so endearing about that, you know?” He concludes, “That’s really what the problem was in that situation.”
Shyamlan last commented on the aborted revival in 2018: “We tried everything that we could. That was so mired in people that had rights to it, constantly mired from the original comic books to the people that did the original show, and that was a very contentious era for that show and who was involved and all the stuff that had nothing to do with me, a generation before me. I begged them, ‘Please just give me the rights, we’ll do it this way, you’re going to be really happy.’ But it didn’t work out that way.”
We own every season of the series on DVD but we and many fans are eager for a Blu ray set but by the sounds of things above, we might be holding our breath for a loooong time.
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