Television series

Tales from the Crypt

Other titles called Tales from the Crypt: the 1972 film.

HBO's ghoulish anthology series, hosted by a wisecracking rotting puppet who never met a pun he didn't murder. Each episode is a standalone morality tale — cheaters, con artists, and greedy husbands all get exactly the gruesome comeuppance they deserve. It's gleeful, gory, occasionally genuinely nasty, and never takes itself remotely seriously. Big-name directors slumming it for a paycheck and a laugh.

TVMaze rating4.0

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you enjoy gleefully grisly anthology horror where each self-contained story is a quick jolt and the host's terrible puns land as often as the scares.

Skip it if the tone swings between gore and goofy so hard that the scares rarely build, and at ninety-odd episodes of uneven quality, sampling a few will do.

What it asks of you: Each half-hour is a self-contained burst, so you can dip in at any point, but expect the pace to stay brisk and the cheesiness to stay constant throughout.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Creepshow1982

The George Romero/Stephen King film that basically invented this exact vibe — comic-book panel transitions, lurid colour, five stories of people getting what's coming to them.

But The practical effects and pacing are very much of their era; it's more quaint than shocking now.what modern audiences expect.

Creepshow poster

The Twilight Zone1959

The granddaddy of the twist-ending morality tale, minus the gore and puns. Rod Serling's ironic justice for cowards, bigots, and the greedy still lands hard.

But Black and white, slower-paced, and often more philosophical than scary — closer to a parable than a horror show.

The Twilight Zone poster

Inside No. 92014

British anthology perfection — each 30-minute episode is its own genre, its own tone, and usually ends with a gut-punch twist you didn't see coming.

But It's cleverer and quieter than Crypt Keeper mayhem — less splatter, more slow-dawning dread and pitch-black wit.

Inside No. 9 poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Tales from the Crypt

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Tales from the Crypt1972

This is literally the same source material and the same title, decades before HBO added a puppet and a wink — proof the moral-comeuppance engine works just as well played for straight horror as it does for splatstick comedy.

The actual missing link: a British Amicus horror anthology adapting the same EC Comics stories seventeen years earlier, with Peter Cushing and Joan Collins playing it dead straight — no host, no puns, just cold Gothic dread.

But It's slower, more formal, and genuinely eerie rather than fun — if you came for camp and gore, this restrained British take will feel like a different show entirely.

Tales from the Crypt poster

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Recommended by

The Twilight Zone, Dead of Night, Tales of the Unexpected, Creepshow, Goosebumps, R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour, Producers' Showcase, Robert Montgomery Presents, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Creepshow, The Outer Limits, Night Gallery, Ghost Stories, The Hitchhiker, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Doctor Who: The Tenth Planet, Fear Itself, Nash Bridges