Hell-o, boils and ghouls! As you might recall, a Tales from the Crypt reboot from fright-master M. Night Shyamalan was announced back in 2016…and then never materialized. The project was eventually put on hold, and then killed off entirely. Now, a few years later, Shyamalan is ready to dig up the reboot’s corpse and explain the cause of death.

Back in 2017, TNT president Kevin Reilly announced that the network’s planned Tales From the Crypt reboot with M. Night Shyamalan was dead. “That one got really caught up in a complete legal mess unfortunately with a very complicated underlying rights structure,” Reilly said. “We lost so much time, so I said, “Look, I’m not waiting around four years for this thing.'”

Now, M. Night Shyamalan himself is shedding more light on the failed reboot. Speaking with Digital Spy, Shyamalan confirmed that it was indeed a legal nightmare to spring Tales from the Crypt from its moldy coffin:

“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 and here we are.”

This is a damn shame, because as a ride or die Shyamalan fan, I would’ve loved to see what the filmmaker did with the property. Tales From the Crypt originated as an EC comics title, featuring ghoulish, violent drawings telling tales of terror. In the 1970s, Amicus Productions adapted several stories from the comics into an anthology film. In 1989, HBO adapted Tales From the Crypt into a television series that ran until 1995. The show leaned heavily on dark comedy, and featured several recognizable directors and filmmakers. In 1993, an animated Saturday morning series called Tales From the Cryptkeeper hit the airwaves. There were also two Tales From the Crypt movies spun-off from the HBO series: the very entertaining Demon Knight, and the absolutely terrible Bordello of Blood, starring comedy vacuum Dennis Miller.

Shyamalan’s approach was likely to be a bit more serious than the HBO series, but sadly, we’ll never see it. We’ll just have to settle for the thriller series the filmmaker is making for Apple, and his upcoming movie Glass, due out on January 18, 2019.