The Halloween season always comes with certain classic songs that turn any jukebox into a haunted house. From Boris Pickett’s “Monster Mash” to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell on You” to, of course, “Thriller,” there are plenty of tunes to tap one’s toes with while trick-or-treating. But this year, with “Tales From the Crypt’s” putrid pun-loving host the Crypt Keeper coming back from the dead to host AMC’s FearFest 2026, now feels like the perfect time to dig up his deep cut, “Crypt Jam.”
When “Tales From the Crypt” debuted in HBO in 1989, it translated the spirit of the beloved 1950s anthology horror comic series into the realm of premium cable by combining the books’ narrators (“The Crypt Keeper,” “The Vault Keeper” and “The Old Witch”) into one haunting puppet voiced by “Star Search”-winning stand-up comic and stage musical veteran John Kassir. As the show and the character grew in popularity, the choice was made to take the Crypt Keeper out of the Crypt and into the many realms of Kassir’s talents.
The Times caught up with Kassir at Minnesota’s horror convention Crypticon, where almost 40 years after the Crypt Keeper’s debut, fans are still having a frighteningly good time meeting Kassir and getting four decades worth of memorabilia signed, including some music releases. “We’d already had a history of music with the show. Danny Elfman did our theme song, Walter Hill’s episode ‘The Man Who Was Death’ [the series pilot] had music from Ry Cooder, we had Hans Zimmer do music and all these different people. It was a natural progression for the Cryptkeeper to be the next recording artist.”
The Crypt Keeper
(Courtesy of Kevin Yagher)
According to Kassir, “Crypt Jam” wasn’t the first hip-hop horror conjured for the Crypt. “Heavy D had been on the show and he wrote a song for us, we recorded it but I don’t know what happened to it.” While Heavy D’s episode “On a Deadman’s Chest” did air in June of 1992, the Crypt Keeper’s first hip-hop foray was helmed by an admiral in the Rhythm Nation, Chuckii Booker. Two years after serving as musical director for Janet Jackson’s tour, Booker wrote and composed “Crypt Jam,” having Kassir in the booth giving life to the vocals.
The “Crypt Jam” video was directed by the Crypt Keeper’s original designer Kevin Yagher, who had previously directed all the Crypt Keeper’s wraparounds as well as the episodes “Lower Berth” and “Strung Along,” so when it came time to shoot the video, Yagher said the puppeteers were a “well-oiled machine.”
“I knew that I needed a lot of dancers for it,” he recalled. “I immediately thought of a dancer-choreographer that I knew by the name of Michael ‘Shrimp’ Chambers. I’d worked with Michael on “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” where he played the dancing Bill Robot. I relied on Michael to find all the dancers and choreograph all the dancing. He did a fantastic job with minimal time and a small budget. Michael is also one of the two zombie dancers that appear in the video.” Yagher adds the Crypt Keeper was stylized for the video based on the look of then-current hot music artists, namely Ice-T, Axl Rose, Ice Cube “and even Vanilla Ice.”
Yagher says he was largely left to his own devices and given a lot of creative freedom with the video, shooting on the existing but expanded set to fit the dancers. “I tried to get as much humor into the video as possible. We had three singing skulls that spun around along with other props, like a severed human foot that would tap to the music … One of my favorite shots is when we wet down the Crypt Keeper’s hair and used slow-mo as he whipped his head back in a silhouetted close-up.” Adding that the only note he got from the front office was to use as many clips from the series as possible, Yagher didn’t want to make the video look like a big commercial. “I had the Crypt Keeper mounted to the front of the camera dolly and pulled him through the crypt so he’d appear as if he was dancing along with everybody else.”
Not only does an in-the-flesh Kassir appear with Booker dancing in the background with the Crypt Keeper, but Kassir told us the shoot had a very special guest. “William Gaines, who [co-created] the ‘Tales From the Crypt’ comic book was there. He may have been in the video, he has long hair and a huge beard. We did shoot some fun photos.” Also on set but not appearing in the video was actor Margot Kidder, who had appeared in an episode the previous season. Yagher recalls “ At the time, I know she was going through some personal issues and didn’t come off as well as she could have. We shot with her, but I didn’t use the footage in the final cut. “
Once it came time for “Crypt Jam” to be unleashed, the promotional tour brought Kassir face-to-face with another iconic broadcast storyteller, Howard Stern. “Stern didn’t know who I was, and if Howard doesn’t know you, he purposely goes after you in a fun way. He started, ‘First of all, I hate the Crypt Keeper’ and I was like [in the Crypt Keeper voice] ‘That’s all right Howard, he loves to be hated, just like you!’” From there, things became much more jovial. “He said ‘What’s this music? Is it like a William Shatner album?’ I was like ‘No, it’s actually really good. Chuckii Booker wrote it.’ He said ‘Chuckii Booker? I know who Chuckii Booker is!’ He puts it on and goes ‘Oh, this is good.’” As Kassir recalls, the song made enough of an impression to remain in Stern’s music library. “Somebody called me last year and said they were playing songs by other non-recording artists that should never have done music. Then they played mine and go, ‘Now this is an example of somebody who should have done more.’”
Fortunately the Crypt Keeper did do more, later releasing a 1994 Christmas album, “Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas” (featuring that seasonal standard “Deck the Halls With Parts of Charlie”), and more recently, after striking up a friendship with singer Spencer Charnas on the convention circuit, Kassir provided band Ice Nine Kills’ stage introduction for their tour with Metallica.
As for “Crypt Jam,” it does maintain a beloved place in the “Tales From the Crypt” fandom. In addition to having its own trading card (with the full lyrics on the back) and being the namesake multiball on the 1993 “Tales From the Crypt” pinball machine (where the Crypt Keeper greets the player with “Tonight’s episode is about a man with three balls”), Kassir still welcomes it being added to playlists. “Every once in a while, I’m at a convention and someone will put it on and I’ll do a few lines of it.” Yagher also looks back on the legacy of “Crypt Jam” fondly: “Doing the video was like a wraparound segment on steroids! There were so many more cuts and footage to shoot and moving the Crypt Keeper around the set and interacting with living people instead of corpses. It was exhausting, but a ton of fun!”
The Halloween season always comes with certain classic songs that turn any jukebox into a haunted house. From Boris Pickett’s “Monster Mash” to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell on You” to, of course, “Thriller,” there are plenty of tunes to tap one’s toes with while trick-or-treating. But this year, with “Tales From the Crypt’s” putrid pun-loving host the Crypt Keeper coming back from the dead to host AMC’s FearFest 2026, now feels like the perfect time to dig up his deep cut, “Crypt Jam.”
When “Tales From the Crypt” debuted in HBO in 1989, it translated the spirit of the beloved 1950s anthology horror comic series into the realm of premium cable by combining the books’ narrators (“The Crypt Keeper,” “The Vault Keeper” and “The Old Witch”) into one haunting puppet voiced by “Star Search”-winning stand-up comic and stage musical veteran John Kassir. As the show and the character grew in popularity, the choice was made to take the Crypt Keeper out of the Crypt and into the many realms of Kassir’s talents.
The Times caught up with Kassir at Minnesota’s horror convention Crypticon, where almost 40 years after the Crypt Keeper’s debut, fans are still having a frighteningly good time meeting Kassir and getting four decades worth of memorabilia signed, including some music releases. “We’d already had a history of music with the show. Danny Elfman did our theme song, Walter Hill’s episode ‘The Man Who Was Death’ [the series pilot] had music from Ry Cooder, we had Hans Zimmer do music and all these different people. It was a natural progression for the Cryptkeeper to be the next recording artist.”
The Crypt Keeper
(Courtesy of Kevin Yagher)
According to Kassir, “Crypt Jam” wasn’t the first hip-hop horror conjured for the Crypt. “Heavy D had been on the show and he wrote a song for us, we recorded it but I don’t know what happened to it.” While Heavy D’s episode “On a Deadman’s Chest” did air in June of 1992, the Crypt Keeper’s first hip-hop foray was helmed by an admiral in the Rhythm Nation, Chuckii Booker. Two years after serving as musical director for Janet Jackson’s tour, Booker wrote and composed “Crypt Jam,” having Kassir in the booth giving life to the vocals.
The “Crypt Jam” video was directed by the Crypt Keeper’s original designer Kevin Yagher, who had previously directed all the Crypt Keeper’s wraparounds as well as the episodes “Lower Berth” and “Strung Along,” so when it came time to shoot the video, Yagher said the puppeteers were a “well-oiled machine.”
“I knew that I needed a lot of dancers for it,” he recalled. “I immediately thought of a dancer-choreographer that I knew by the name of Michael ‘Shrimp’ Chambers. I’d worked with Michael on “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” where he played the dancing Bill Robot. I relied on Michael to find all the dancers and choreograph all the dancing. He did a fantastic job with minimal time and a small budget. Michael is also one of the two zombie dancers that appear in the video.” Yagher adds the Crypt Keeper was stylized for the video based on the look of then-current hot music artists, namely Ice-T, Axl Rose, Ice Cube “and even Vanilla Ice.”
Yagher says he was largely left to his own devices and given a lot of creative freedom with the video, shooting on the existing but expanded set to fit the dancers. “I tried to get as much humor into the video as possible. We had three singing skulls that spun around along with other props, like a severed human foot that would tap to the music … One of my favorite shots is when we wet down the Crypt Keeper’s hair and used slow-mo as he whipped his head back in a silhouetted close-up.” Adding that the only note he got from the front office was to use as many clips from the series as possible, Yagher didn’t want to make the video look like a big commercial. “I had the Crypt Keeper mounted to the front of the camera dolly and pulled him through the crypt so he’d appear as if he was dancing along with everybody else.”
Not only does an in-the-flesh Kassir appear with Booker dancing in the background with the Crypt Keeper, but Kassir told us the shoot had a very special guest. “William Gaines, who [co-created] the ‘Tales From the Crypt’ comic book was there. He may have been in the video, he has long hair and a huge beard. We did shoot some fun photos.” Also on set but not appearing in the video was actor Margot Kidder, who had appeared in an episode the previous season. Yagher recalls “ At the time, I know she was going through some personal issues and didn’t come off as well as she could have. We shot with her, but I didn’t use the footage in the final cut. “
Once it came time for “Crypt Jam” to be unleashed, the promotional tour brought Kassir face-to-face with another iconic broadcast storyteller, Howard Stern. “Stern didn’t know who I was, and if Howard doesn’t know you, he purposely goes after you in a fun way. He started, ‘First of all, I hate the Crypt Keeper’ and I was like [in the Crypt Keeper voice] ‘That’s all right Howard, he loves to be hated, just like you!’” From there, things became much more jovial. “He said ‘What’s this music? Is it like a William Shatner album?’ I was like ‘No, it’s actually really good. Chuckii Booker wrote it.’ He said ‘Chuckii Booker? I know who Chuckii Booker is!’ He puts it on and goes ‘Oh, this is good.’” As Kassir recalls, the song made enough of an impression to remain in Stern’s music library. “Somebody called me last year and said they were playing songs by other non-recording artists that should never have done music. Then they played mine and go, ‘Now this is an example of somebody who should have done more.’”
Fortunately the Crypt Keeper did do more, later releasing a 1994 Christmas album, “Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas” (featuring that seasonal standard “Deck the Halls With Parts of Charlie”), and more recently, after striking up a friendship with singer Spencer Charnas on the convention circuit, Kassir provided band Ice Nine Kills’ stage introduction for their tour with Metallica.
As for “Crypt Jam,” it does maintain a beloved place in the “Tales From the Crypt” fandom. In addition to having its own trading card (with the full lyrics on the back) and being the namesake multiball on the 1993 “Tales From the Crypt” pinball machine (where the Crypt Keeper greets the player with “Tonight’s episode is about a man with three balls”), Kassir still welcomes it being added to playlists. “Every once in a while, I’m at a convention and someone will put it on and I’ll do a few lines of it.” Yagher also looks back on the legacy of “Crypt Jam” fondly: “Doing the video was like a wraparound segment on steroids! There were so many more cuts and footage to shoot and moving the Crypt Keeper around the set and interacting with living people instead of corpses. It was exhausting, but a ton of fun!”
The Halloween season always comes with certain classic songs that turn any jukebox into a haunted house. From Boris Pickett’s “Monster Mash” to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell on You” to, of course, “Thriller,” there are plenty of tunes to tap one’s toes with while trick-or-treating. But this year, with “Tales From the Crypt’s” putrid pun-loving host the Crypt Keeper coming back from the dead to host AMC’s FearFest 2026, now feels like the perfect time to dig up his deep cut, “Crypt Jam.”
When “Tales From the Crypt” debuted in HBO in 1989, it translated the spirit of the beloved 1950s anthology horror comic series into the realm of premium cable by combining the books’ narrators (“The Crypt Keeper,” “The Vault Keeper” and “The Old Witch”) into one haunting puppet voiced by “Star Search”-winning stand-up comic and stage musical veteran John Kassir. As the show and the character grew in popularity, the choice was made to take the Crypt Keeper out of the Crypt and into the many realms of Kassir’s talents.
The Times caught up with Kassir at Minnesota’s horror convention Crypticon, where almost 40 years after the Crypt Keeper’s debut, fans are still having a frighteningly good time meeting Kassir and getting four decades worth of memorabilia signed, including some music releases. “We’d already had a history of music with the show. Danny Elfman did our theme song, Walter Hill’s episode ‘The Man Who Was Death’ [the series pilot] had music from Ry Cooder, we had Hans Zimmer do music and all these different people. It was a natural progression for the Cryptkeeper to be the next recording artist.”
The Crypt Keeper
(Courtesy of Kevin Yagher)
According to Kassir, “Crypt Jam” wasn’t the first hip-hop horror conjured for the Crypt. “Heavy D had been on the show and he wrote a song for us, we recorded it but I don’t know what happened to it.” While Heavy D’s episode “On a Deadman’s Chest” did air in June of 1992, the Crypt Keeper’s first hip-hop foray was helmed by an admiral in the Rhythm Nation, Chuckii Booker. Two years after serving as musical director for Janet Jackson’s tour, Booker wrote and composed “Crypt Jam,” having Kassir in the booth giving life to the vocals.
The “Crypt Jam” video was directed by the Crypt Keeper’s original designer Kevin Yagher, who had previously directed all the Crypt Keeper’s wraparounds as well as the episodes “Lower Berth” and “Strung Along,” so when it came time to shoot the video, Yagher said the puppeteers were a “well-oiled machine.”
“I knew that I needed a lot of dancers for it,” he recalled. “I immediately thought of a dancer-choreographer that I knew by the name of Michael ‘Shrimp’ Chambers. I’d worked with Michael on “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” where he played the dancing Bill Robot. I relied on Michael to find all the dancers and choreograph all the dancing. He did a fantastic job with minimal time and a small budget. Michael is also one of the two zombie dancers that appear in the video.” Yagher adds the Crypt Keeper was stylized for the video based on the look of then-current hot music artists, namely Ice-T, Axl Rose, Ice Cube “and even Vanilla Ice.”
Yagher says he was largely left to his own devices and given a lot of creative freedom with the video, shooting on the existing but expanded set to fit the dancers. “I tried to get as much humor into the video as possible. We had three singing skulls that spun around along with other props, like a severed human foot that would tap to the music … One of my favorite shots is when we wet down the Crypt Keeper’s hair and used slow-mo as he whipped his head back in a silhouetted close-up.” Adding that the only note he got from the front office was to use as many clips from the series as possible, Yagher didn’t want to make the video look like a big commercial. “I had the Crypt Keeper mounted to the front of the camera dolly and pulled him through the crypt so he’d appear as if he was dancing along with everybody else.”
Not only does an in-the-flesh Kassir appear with Booker dancing in the background with the Crypt Keeper, but Kassir told us the shoot had a very special guest. “William Gaines, who [co-created] the ‘Tales From the Crypt’ comic book was there. He may have been in the video, he has long hair and a huge beard. We did shoot some fun photos.” Also on set but not appearing in the video was actor Margot Kidder, who had appeared in an episode the previous season. Yagher recalls “ At the time, I know she was going through some personal issues and didn’t come off as well as she could have. We shot with her, but I didn’t use the footage in the final cut. “
Once it came time for “Crypt Jam” to be unleashed, the promotional tour brought Kassir face-to-face with another iconic broadcast storyteller, Howard Stern. “Stern didn’t know who I was, and if Howard doesn’t know you, he purposely goes after you in a fun way. He started, ‘First of all, I hate the Crypt Keeper’ and I was like [in the Crypt Keeper voice] ‘That’s all right Howard, he loves to be hated, just like you!’” From there, things became much more jovial. “He said ‘What’s this music? Is it like a William Shatner album?’ I was like ‘No, it’s actually really good. Chuckii Booker wrote it.’ He said ‘Chuckii Booker? I know who Chuckii Booker is!’ He puts it on and goes ‘Oh, this is good.’” As Kassir recalls, the song made enough of an impression to remain in Stern’s music library. “Somebody called me last year and said they were playing songs by other non-recording artists that should never have done music. Then they played mine and go, ‘Now this is an example of somebody who should have done more.’”
Fortunately the Crypt Keeper did do more, later releasing a 1994 Christmas album, “Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas” (featuring that seasonal standard “Deck the Halls With Parts of Charlie”), and more recently, after striking up a friendship with singer Spencer Charnas on the convention circuit, Kassir provided band Ice Nine Kills’ stage introduction for their tour with Metallica.
As for “Crypt Jam,” it does maintain a beloved place in the “Tales From the Crypt” fandom. In addition to having its own trading card (with the full lyrics on the back) and being the namesake multiball on the 1993 “Tales From the Crypt” pinball machine (where the Crypt Keeper greets the player with “Tonight’s episode is about a man with three balls”), Kassir still welcomes it being added to playlists. “Every once in a while, I’m at a convention and someone will put it on and I’ll do a few lines of it.” Yagher also looks back on the legacy of “Crypt Jam” fondly: “Doing the video was like a wraparound segment on steroids! There were so many more cuts and footage to shoot and moving the Crypt Keeper around the set and interacting with living people instead of corpses. It was exhausting, but a ton of fun!”
The Halloween season always comes with certain classic songs that turn any jukebox into a haunted house. From Boris Pickett’s “Monster Mash” to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell on You” to, of course, “Thriller,” there are plenty of tunes to tap one’s toes with while trick-or-treating. But this year, with “Tales From the Crypt’s” putrid pun-loving host the Crypt Keeper coming back from the dead to host AMC’s FearFest 2026, now feels like the perfect time to dig up his deep cut, “Crypt Jam.”
When “Tales From the Crypt” debuted in HBO in 1989, it translated the spirit of the beloved 1950s anthology horror comic series into the realm of premium cable by combining the books’ narrators (“The Crypt Keeper,” “The Vault Keeper” and “The Old Witch”) into one haunting puppet voiced by “Star Search”-winning stand-up comic and stage musical veteran John Kassir. As the show and the character grew in popularity, the choice was made to take the Crypt Keeper out of the Crypt and into the many realms of Kassir’s talents.
The Times caught up with Kassir at Minnesota’s horror convention Crypticon, where almost 40 years after the Crypt Keeper’s debut, fans are still having a frighteningly good time meeting Kassir and getting four decades worth of memorabilia signed, including some music releases. “We’d already had a history of music with the show. Danny Elfman did our theme song, Walter Hill’s episode ‘The Man Who Was Death’ [the series pilot] had music from Ry Cooder, we had Hans Zimmer do music and all these different people. It was a natural progression for the Cryptkeeper to be the next recording artist.”
The Crypt Keeper
(Courtesy of Kevin Yagher)
According to Kassir, “Crypt Jam” wasn’t the first hip-hop horror conjured for the Crypt. “Heavy D had been on the show and he wrote a song for us, we recorded it but I don’t know what happened to it.” While Heavy D’s episode “On a Deadman’s Chest” did air in June of 1992, the Crypt Keeper’s first hip-hop foray was helmed by an admiral in the Rhythm Nation, Chuckii Booker. Two years after serving as musical director for Janet Jackson’s tour, Booker wrote and composed “Crypt Jam,” having Kassir in the booth giving life to the vocals.
The “Crypt Jam” video was directed by the Crypt Keeper’s original designer Kevin Yagher, who had previously directed all the Crypt Keeper’s wraparounds as well as the episodes “Lower Berth” and “Strung Along,” so when it came time to shoot the video, Yagher said the puppeteers were a “well-oiled machine.”
“I knew that I needed a lot of dancers for it,” he recalled. “I immediately thought of a dancer-choreographer that I knew by the name of Michael ‘Shrimp’ Chambers. I’d worked with Michael on “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” where he played the dancing Bill Robot. I relied on Michael to find all the dancers and choreograph all the dancing. He did a fantastic job with minimal time and a small budget. Michael is also one of the two zombie dancers that appear in the video.” Yagher adds the Crypt Keeper was stylized for the video based on the look of then-current hot music artists, namely Ice-T, Axl Rose, Ice Cube “and even Vanilla Ice.”
Yagher says he was largely left to his own devices and given a lot of creative freedom with the video, shooting on the existing but expanded set to fit the dancers. “I tried to get as much humor into the video as possible. We had three singing skulls that spun around along with other props, like a severed human foot that would tap to the music … One of my favorite shots is when we wet down the Crypt Keeper’s hair and used slow-mo as he whipped his head back in a silhouetted close-up.” Adding that the only note he got from the front office was to use as many clips from the series as possible, Yagher didn’t want to make the video look like a big commercial. “I had the Crypt Keeper mounted to the front of the camera dolly and pulled him through the crypt so he’d appear as if he was dancing along with everybody else.”
Not only does an in-the-flesh Kassir appear with Booker dancing in the background with the Crypt Keeper, but Kassir told us the shoot had a very special guest. “William Gaines, who [co-created] the ‘Tales From the Crypt’ comic book was there. He may have been in the video, he has long hair and a huge beard. We did shoot some fun photos.” Also on set but not appearing in the video was actor Margot Kidder, who had appeared in an episode the previous season. Yagher recalls “ At the time, I know she was going through some personal issues and didn’t come off as well as she could have. We shot with her, but I didn’t use the footage in the final cut. “
Once it came time for “Crypt Jam” to be unleashed, the promotional tour brought Kassir face-to-face with another iconic broadcast storyteller, Howard Stern. “Stern didn’t know who I was, and if Howard doesn’t know you, he purposely goes after you in a fun way. He started, ‘First of all, I hate the Crypt Keeper’ and I was like [in the Crypt Keeper voice] ‘That’s all right Howard, he loves to be hated, just like you!’” From there, things became much more jovial. “He said ‘What’s this music? Is it like a William Shatner album?’ I was like ‘No, it’s actually really good. Chuckii Booker wrote it.’ He said ‘Chuckii Booker? I know who Chuckii Booker is!’ He puts it on and goes ‘Oh, this is good.’” As Kassir recalls, the song made enough of an impression to remain in Stern’s music library. “Somebody called me last year and said they were playing songs by other non-recording artists that should never have done music. Then they played mine and go, ‘Now this is an example of somebody who should have done more.’”
Fortunately the Crypt Keeper did do more, later releasing a 1994 Christmas album, “Have Yourself a Scary Little Christmas” (featuring that seasonal standard “Deck the Halls With Parts of Charlie”), and more recently, after striking up a friendship with singer Spencer Charnas on the convention circuit, Kassir provided band Ice Nine Kills’ stage introduction for their tour with Metallica.
As for “Crypt Jam,” it does maintain a beloved place in the “Tales From the Crypt” fandom. In addition to having its own trading card (with the full lyrics on the back) and being the namesake multiball on the 1993 “Tales From the Crypt” pinball machine (where the Crypt Keeper greets the player with “Tonight’s episode is about a man with three balls”), Kassir still welcomes it being added to playlists. “Every once in a while, I’m at a convention and someone will put it on and I’ll do a few lines of it.” Yagher also looks back on the legacy of “Crypt Jam” fondly: “Doing the video was like a wraparound segment on steroids! There were so many more cuts and footage to shoot and moving the Crypt Keeper around the set and interacting with living people instead of corpses. It was exhausting, but a ton of fun!”
