Movies & TV / News
John Kassir Explains The Rights Issues Around Tales from the Crypt
Image Credit: HBO
Tales from the Crypt has had issues preventing a new iteration from coming to pass, and the actor behind the Cryptkeeper recently explained those issues. John Kassir spoke at Terror Con in Marlborough, Massachusetts last weekend and talked about the complicated rights entanglements surrounding the horror anthology series. You can check out some highlights below, per Bloody Disgusting:
On how the show’s rights worked: “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. 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!
“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.”
On the rights going back to William Gaines’ estate: “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.”
“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.”
On the prohibitive cost of the show: “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.”
