Sorry, boils and ghouls, but future televised appearances by the Cryptkeeper have been delayed indefinitely. TNT’s partnership with director M. Night Shyamalan to reboot the popular anthology series Tales From the Crypt has been in the works for a long time now, meant as an anchor of a proposed “horror block” of television dedicated to genre programming. The original series ran on HBO from 1989 through 1996 and resulted in multiple spin-off films and a cartoon.

Which equates to a lot of red tape when it came to obtaining rights to the series, ultimately spelling doom for the planned “horror block.” The complicated matter of rights has stalled all plans of rebooting the franchise for the foreseeable future, having delayed TNT’s plans long enough. TNT president Kevin Reilly expressed his thoughts on the matter when speaking to Deadline, stating:

That one got really caught up in a complete legal mess unfortunately with a very complicated underlying rights structure,” Reilly said of Tales From the Crypt. “We lost so much time, so I said, ‘Look, I’m not waiting around four years for this thing’. Maybe that will come back around but in the meantime, Ridley Scott had come up, who has so much creative enthusiasm.

TNT has offered a silver lining to the bad news, well, depending on how favorably you viewed Alien: Covenant that is. Reilly is looking to launch a sci-fi block of television in 2018 centered around a new partnership with Ridley Scott.  Details remain to be revealed, however.

It’s not the outcome that we hoped for, but with so many genre shows in the pipeline like NOS4A2, the sting doesn’t hurt as much. Besides, the iconic opening sequence and John Kassir’s masterful voice-acting would have been tough to top.

Tales of horror based on the gruesome E.C. comic books of the 1950s.