How Can You Watch ‘Tales From the Crypt’?

29 years ago, on July 19, 2025, the Cryptkeeper cackled on the small screen for the last time, when the final episode of acclaimed HBO horror-comedy anthology Tales from the Crypt aired. A creepy showcase for the era’s top-tier Hollywood talent, Tales recruited stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Demi Moore and Tom Hanks to anchor the show’s ironic stories of death and depravity — usually with a twist ending thrown in to teach a heavy-handed (and gory) moral message.

The show was a bonafide pop culture sensation, yielding a spinoff animated children’s show, two feature films and multiple Emmy nominations over the course of its seven seasons. But while the series was once available for purchase on platforms like Amazon Prime and Vudu, as of right now, it’s impossible to legally stream the show.

So why can’t you watch Tales from the Crypt streaming? And where can you watch the complete series?

Where can you find Tales from the Crypt online now?

If you’ve recently googled “Tales from the Crypt streaming,” you might have had a moment of hope — it seems to be available for free on platforms like Roku and Tubi.

Unfortunately, that is the 1972 film version starring Joan Collins as part of a group of hapless sinners who get trapped in a crypt with the Cryptkeeper, who reveals how each of the group will die. Though some of the film’s segments will be familiar to fans of the HBO series or the original 1950s comics — for example, Collins stars in a version of the psychotic Santa story “…And All Through the House,” which later became the second episode of the series — it doesn’t quite scratch the itch of those looking to relive the campy ’90s show.

One would imagine that, since it was an HBO original series, it would naturally be available on the channel’s app, Max. However, according to a 2013 article in the AV Club, Tales is actually just one of several HBO-produced shows that the channel has chosen to not make available for streaming, including the early David Simon series The Corner, Steven Soderbergh’s K Street, and the 2001 series Mind of the Married Man, which was pitched as a male Sex and the City. However, those three shows were one-and-done experiments, not blockbusters like Tales.

A terrifying tales of … rights issues

TALES FROM THE CRYPT, 1989-94, Tom Hanks hosted episode titled "None But the Lonely Heart", 1992

Everett Collection

The real reason Tales is not currently streaming likely comes down to rights issues. The show was created by multiple production companies, including Geffen Television and Tales from the Crypt Holdings. In 2017, The Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamlan’s attempt to revive the series for TNT was thwarted by rights issues; TNT president Kevin Reilly told Deadline at the time, “That one got really caught up in a complete legal mess unfortunately with a very complicated underlying rights structure. We lost so much time, so I said, ‘Look, I’m not waiting around four years for this thing’.”

For his part, Shyamlan explained, “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.”

Similarly, in 2023, John Kassir, who voiced the Cryptkeeper, told the crowd at Massachusetts’ TerrorCon that, per Bloody Disgusting, “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.” However, after the show’s 93 episodes were created, “the rights lapse. Sadly, [EC Comics publisher] William Gaines passed away [in 1992]. 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.”

TALES FROM THE CRYPT, 1989-94, Cryptkeeper, Arnold Schwarzenegger, "The Switch", 4/1990

Everett Collection

Additionally, Kassir noted, while Gaines’ family owns the rights to Tales from the Crypt, a different group of producers own the rights to the Cryptkeeper as he appeared on the HBO show — so both groups would need to be in agreement for any Tales from the Crypt product to go forward. “So those producers own this Crypt Keeper but can’t create new material with it without the rights [from EC Comics, owned by the Gaines family]. 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.”

So there you have it, boys and ghouls: though you can stream the original film for free, and the ’90s films Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight and Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood are available on the Starz app, I wouldn’t hold your breath for the original series to hit the internet. The best bet for fans would be to the buy the DVD or Blu-Ray box set, which can generally be found for under $80.