76 Years Later, The Greatest Horror Anthology Of All Time Is Still Absolutely Perfect

Published Oct 19, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT Ambrose Tardive is an editor on ScreenRant's Comics team. Over the past two years, he has developed into the internet's foremost authority on The Far Side. Outside of his work for ScreenRant, Ambrose works as an Adjunct English Instructor. It is almost Halloween, which means 'tis the season to revisit the greatest horror anthology of all time. But which one is it? There are a lot of classic competitors: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Tales From the Darkside, Creepshow, the Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark book series (which were the most banned books of the 1990s, because of how much they freaked people out.) There's an argument to be made for each of these, but real horror-heads know that one anthology stands head and shoulders above the rest. Those just happen to be the desiccated head and shoulders of the Cryptkeeper, the undead Rod Serling who introduced the nightmare-fuel horrors of Tales From the Crypt. Except we're not just talking about the HBO TV show, which aired from 1989 to 1996. That was a pioneering program in its own right, helping to put HBO original programming on the map at the time, and it is the first thing people think of when they hear Tales From the Crypt. No, we're going all the way back to that show's source material. The gamechanging, genre-defining EC Comics anthology Tales From the Crypt, which ran from 1950 to '55. How EC Comics' 1950s "Tales From The Crypt" Changed 20th Century Pop Culture These days, when people think Tales From the Crypt, they think of television. And when they think comic books, they think superheroes. Neither of those things was the case in 1950. At the precise middle point of the 20th century, television was still a novelty. And to a degree, so were movies. Print was still the predominant medium of entertainment. That included comics. And after a surge of popularity during World War II, superheroes had gone out of fashion by 1950, leaving comic publishers to try to replicate their success in other genres. That included crime comics, as well as horror. In fact, before there was Tales From the Crypt, there was an EC Comics series called Crime Patrol. It was in Crime Patrol that the mysterious "Cryptkeeper" was first introduced, and soon after, he became the figurehead for Tales. Along with The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and several other anthology titles, Tales From the Crypt led to a surge in popularity for the horror genre. It is not an exaggeration to say EC Comics terrified an entire nation in the early '50s. So much so that the government got involved. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency put EC Comics, specifically, on blast. Horror comics were made a scapegoat, and when the hearings led to the comic industry adopting the censorial Comics Code, that in turn led to the cancellation of Tales From the Crypt and the rest of EC's horror books. The Original "Tales From The Crypt" Comics Are Still Worth Reading 70+ Years Later To understand why the original Tales From the Crypt comic stands the test of time as the greatest horror anthology ever, you have to go back to a time before anyone could go to Peacock, fire up the new Crystal Lake series, and casually see some of the gnarliest gore imaginable. There were plenty of horror movies before 1950, ranging from scary to goofy, but they weren't gory. Similarly, the first wave of scary TV shows, like Twilight Zone, left the gruesome stuff to readers' imaginations. Tales From the Crypt had imagery that readers at the time hadn't encountered before. That would have felt shocking and subversive to '50s readers. At the same time, it still left plenty of room in readers' minds to fill in the details of the horrors for themselves, which is always infinitely scarier than violence and gore. When HBO's Tales From the Crypt premiered in 1989, it parlayed the legacy of the original comic's influence on a generation of readers, and on a generation of pop culture in every medium. Which makes its own iconic status an extension of the comic's impact. Today, the complete run of EC's Tales From the Crypt comics are available in a series of collected editions. For anyone who truly wants to get into the spirit of Halloween this year, and experience some throwback horror that set the stage for the '80s slasher revolution and beyond, the legendary anthology comic is still perfect. Release Date 1989 - 1996-00-00 Network HBO Showrunner Gilbert Adler Cast John Kassir Crypt Keeper (voice) Michelle Johnson Liz Kelly-Dixon Hosted by a wisecracking corpse known as The Cryptkeeper, Tales From The Crypt is a horror anthology series based on a 1950s comic of the same name, in which each episode tells a different terrifying story.