Creepshow (1982)
Is it camp, kitsch or the illustrated field guide to unholy comeuppance?
“I told you before, I didn’t want you to read this crap!
(thunderclap!)
I never saw such rotten crap in my life! Where do you get this shit! Who sells it to ya?
I’m talking to you young man! You want to answer me when I’m talking to you! You remember who puts the friggin bread on the table around here, don’t ya?
(thunderclap!)
The next time, young man, I find you with a worthless piece of shit like this again, you won’t sit down for a week, buddy boy! Remember that!”
Creepshow begins with a father traumatizing his son. Threatening him, humiliating him, beating him, all because he bought a scary comic book.
It’s an ugly, frightening scene and the casting is brilliant.
The belligerent Dad is played by Tom Atkins. Atkins was usually the hero in horror movies, but not this time.
Shorn of his trademark dapper moustache, dressed in a hideous golf sweater, and wincing the way only someone with a narrow mind can, Atkins becomes the personification of cruelty.
When he’s convinced his son is sufficiently broken, Atkins heads downstairs, pours himself a tumbler of whiskey and smugly retires to his La-Z-Boy, satisfied he’s taught that snotty little brat a lesson.
He hears the high pitched laughter intermingled with the thunderclaps outdoors, but he ignores it. He doesn’t realize he’s a character in a movie about divine retribution and that he’s just angered the son of a King.
Atkin’s child is played by Joe Hill.
Joe Hill is the son of Stephen King.
(thunderclap!)
Stephen King is the writer who conceived Creepshow. And as we all learned from (Darren Aronofsky’s) ‘Mother!’, writers are gods.
And King is a most vengeful god!
The 1982 movie, Creepshow, was so many things
It was Hal Holbrook and E.G. Marshall at the twilight of their careers.
It was Ed Harris and Ted Danson at the start of their careers
It was Adrienne Barbeau and Leslie Nielson at the pinnacle of their careers.
It was, perhaps, George A Romero’s best movie1, but definitely his funniest and the one with the best editing, cinematography and score.2 Oh and the lighting! Creepshow has better lighting than Suspiria!
Creepshow was homage to EC Comics3, which in the 40s and 50s produced horror comic books so extreme for their time that the US Senate held hearings to determine if they promoted Juvenile Delinquency4.
Creepshow was Stephen King’s first screenplay. A screenplay that would become both his first adapted5 and his first original6 work for the screen.
It was also the first time he acted and the only time he would play the lead.
But, above all these things, Creepshow was, and Creepshow is, Stephen King playing god, a god of poetic justice! The movie is divided into six comic book chapters and in each, a wrongdoer receives their unholy comeuppance.
Chapter One: Father’s Day.
Wrongdoer: Aunt Bedelia (Viveca Lindfors)
Offenses: Patricide, Cake fraud, multiple parking violations
Punishment: Throttled to death by her undead father.
Poor Aunt Bedelia, she really deserved better. And her father, Nathan Grantham (Jon Lormer) totally deserved getting bludgeoned to death on that Father’s Day when he was being particularly ornery.
Nathan forced Bedelia to spend her entire life as his servant, only letting her date when she was in her seventies. He probably thought she wouldn’t find any suitors at that age, but she did.
Nathan didn’t like that and had Bedelia’s fiancée murdered.
Everyone thought she would just accept it and return to being her father’s handmaiden, even Bedelia herself. But on the next Father’s Day, as Nathan bellowed “Where’s My Cake?” one too many times, Bedelia lost control.
Shortly afterwards she and everyone in the Grantham family received a generous inheritance.
There’s so many amazing thing going on in Father’s Day but best is Viveca Lindfor’s adlibbed monologue at her father’s tomb. She oscillates between tears of guilt and hysterical laughter as she tells her father she’s sorry-not-sorry she killed him and revels in how she got away with it.
But as Bedelia drinks bourbon straight from the bottle, she hubristically spills some onto Nathan’s grave, reanimating him and sealing her doom.
The only consolation is that her nasty nieces and nephews suffer far worse. As does Ed Harris for being a terrible dancer.
Poor Mrs. Danvers, though.
Chapter Two: The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill
Wrongdoer: Jordy Verill (Stephen King)
Offenses: Poor hygiene, giving up too easily, sleeping with the TV on.
Punishment: Consumed by an extra-terrestrial lawn
Poor Jordy, he wasn’t very smart, but there’s nothing he did that most people wouldn’t have done.
One night there is a bright explosion over Jordy’s corn crop.
He rushes to see what happened and finds a small crater, holding a meteor the size of a bowling ball.
Without thinking, Jordy touches it.
It burns! So, Jordy immediately stuffs his fingers into his mouth.
Later, he fantasizes about selling the meteor to pay off some debts, which is very funny.
But soon something green is growing on his finger tips, and also on the inside of his mouth.
The meteor has spored an alien weed that can take root in soil, wood, metal, glass, carpet and even human flesh. There’s probably something it can’t grow on, but whatever that is, there’s none on Jordy’s property.
Throughout his ordeal, Jordy’s black & white TV continuously broadcasts upbeat, syrupy content that contrasts Jordy’s situation with considerable irony. Notably, 1941 Best Picture Winner ‘How Green Was My Valley’.
The best part of TLDofJV is King’s performance, which might surprise you if you haven’t seen Creepshow before. In the many bit parts and cameos King played in subsequent decades, he’s never really done that great of a job. But he really goes for it here and plays Jordy like the best guest star Saturday Night Live never had
Chapter Three: Something to Tide You Over
Wrongdoer: Richard (Leslie Nielsen)
Offenses: Burying people up to their necks on the beach so they slowly drown in the rising tide. Video taping that for entertainment purposes. Not knowing the difference between camp and kitsch.
Punishment: A taste of his own medicine administered by his recently departed wife and her lover.
Poor Richard, he didn’t deserve, um…well……..actually, Richard kind of does deserve what he gets, he deserves worse, actually. Much worse.
Richard is the scariest character in Creepshow. This is down to King’s writing but also Leslie Nielson’s brilliant performance, made between his iconic roles in Airplane and The Naked Gun.
It is truly jarring to see such a funny guy play someone so violent and yet Nielsen is in his element as a rich lunatic who gets revenge by, well, look at Poor Ted Danson in the picture above.
Steven Spielberg (deservedly) gets much praise for putting the camera at sea-level in Jaws to mimic the terror of being helpless in the water. In Creepshow, Romero puts the camera right on the beach as the tide rolls in so you get a first-person visual of what drowning looks like.
It’s one of many scenes where Creepshow unexpectedly crosses the line from camp into actual terror.
Chapter Four: The Crate
Wrongdoer: Wilma (Adrienne Barbeau). But just call her Billie, everybody does.
Offenses: Being a shrew, poor taste in jewellery, listening to Henry
Punishment: Eaten like corn on the cob.
Co-wrongdoer: Henry (Hal Holbrook)
Offenses: cold blooded murder, tampering with evidence, drugging people.
Punishment: Nothing.
It is a testament to Adrienne Barbeau’s acting skills that she actually makes Wilma seem like the bad guy in this story, at first anyway. She manages to be hideous using nothing but facial expressions and a tacky necklace.7 With her extraordinary voice, she makes Wilma shrill and insufferable. And even though she’s short and weighs very little, she carries herself with true menace. Everyone on camera seems terrified Wilma’s going to punch them out. I kind of thought she might.
Her husband Henry (Hal Holbrook) is an introverted literature professor who has secretly hated Wilma for years and yearns for solitude. He frequently fantasizes about strangling his wife to death or shooting her in the head, in his latter fantasy any witnesses present always give a round of applause.
One fateful day, fellow professor Dexter (Fritz Weaver) turns up on his doorstep hysterically, babbling about a monster in a wooden box.
Turns out, Mike the college janitor (Don Keefer) found a 150-year old crate under the stairs in an abandoned wing of the college. Mike asked Dexter to help open the box and when the lid was cracked, Dexter peeked in and saw this
Mike didn’t peek, he just reached in and then he screamed and screamed and screamed. Poor Dexter could only watch as Mike was eaten like a soup dumpling full of ketchup.
Dexter ran for help and found a grad student named Charlie (Robert Harper), but Charlie insisted on seeing the Crate and the Monster got him too. Ate him up like a chicken wing. He screamed even more than Mike.
This is what led to Dexter on Henry’s doorstep, hysterical and sobbing like a child. Henry patiently listens to the story and immediately knows what this creature is.
It is an opportunity to get rid of Wilma.
He pours Dexter a stiff drink, spikes it with sleeping pills and when his friend is unconscious, Henry drives to that abandoned campus wing. He finds a horrific amount of blood and viscera, but gets soap, water and a mop and soon you’d never know anything happened.
That’s when Wilma arrives. Henry left her note claiming Dexter attacked a woman and beat her so badly she crawled under the stairs and won’t come out. In the letter, Henry insists that Wilma is strong enough to help this woman and begs for her assistance.
For all her flaws, Wilma actually wants to help. So she winds up under the stairs with the crate, and though it initially seems like the monster isn’t hungry, it is and Wilma meets her fate.
Then Henry chains up the wooden box and dumps it in a flooded quarry. He drives away all smug, not realizing that the monster or “Fluffy” as it later came to be known, has escaped and is on the loose.
The Crate really messes with your mind. At the beginning of the story, you hate Wilma as much as Henry does. By the end, you can’t help thinking how Henry was worse than her, so much worse.
And you can’t help thinking about Fluffy loose in the wild. About what would happen if it ever found its way onto a crowded bus.8
Chapter Five: They’re Creeping Up on You
Wrongdoer: Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall)
Offenses: All of them
Punishment: Invaded through every orifice by a cockroach army.
This chapter tends to divide people.
Those who fear bugs in general and cockroaches in particular find it the scariest of the five.
For everyone else, it’s the least interesting. Pratt is a cold blooded corporate asshole with a phobia of bugs, so it’s pretty obvious that bugs are going to get him some how. It’s pretty predictable.
Pratt lives in a hospital-white germ proof penthouse.
But he can’t keep the cockroaches out.
One night there’s a black out and so many pissed off cockroaches flood into Pratt’s home that he has to hide from them in a panic room. But guess what, the roaches are already in there and they eat him alive.
Ironically, if there had been anything else in Pratt’s apartment, plants, books, a decent rug, the roaches probably would’ve eaten that instead.
Chapter Six: (epilogue) Until Next Time
Wrongdoer: Billy’s Dad (Tom Atkins)
Offenses: Bad parenting, bad sweaters, threatening a kid played by Stephen King’s actual son
Punishment: Look at the Picture above! This is what the wrath of Stephen King looks like!
Thanks so much to the incredible Kyle Ryan for inviting me to take part in this Scarestack, and please tune tomorrow when Sean Mo jumps forward nearly 40 years to review ‘The Outsider’.
The Tea: Any tea will do, so long as it’s shipped to you by crate via Julia Carpenter
The snack: What’s that? Where’s your cake? Right here, Daddy! And pay homage to Something to Tide You over by serving wakame seaweed salad on a ‘beach’ made of tempura crumbs. You can also honor Jordy Verrill by gnawing on some green cotton candy, or eating chia right off the pet!
Spring Of King (Post Schedule)
5/1 It miniseries-Sahar Khan
5/2 Pet Semetary-JHong
5/3 Pet Semetary 2-Horror Hangouts
5/4 Cujo-Kyle Ryan
5/5 Creepshow-B-Movie Tea5/6 The Outsider- Sean Mo
5/7 Gerald’s Game- H. H. Duke
5/8 The Mangler- Timothy Atkinson
5/9 Maximum Overdrive- Yanni Hamburger
5/10 Salem’s Lot 2024- Meat Head Media
5/11 Silver Bullet- George R. Galuschak
5/12 Creepshow 2- Thehumangaze
5/13 Carrie- Hellish Views - Harry Evans
5/14 Christine- Emma
5/15 Big Driver- Molly O’Blivion &
Stand By Me- Matt Cyr
5/16 The Shining- Jamie B.
5/17 The Long Walk- Decarceration
5/18 King Of Home Video- Jean-Pierre Diez
5/19 The Langoliers- Beverley’s Horror Corner
5/20 Sleepwalkers- Brandon Rae
5/21 The Running Man- Stevie Duffy
5/22 Misery- Skyla
5/23 The Night Flier- Bryan Wolford
5/24 The Shawshank Redemption- Genevieve Brock
5/25 Dreamcatcher- Kimberly B🌴👻🌴
5/26 The Mist- Cedric
5/27 The Dead Zone- Offscreenshaman
5/28 Cat’s Eye- Backyard Movie Critic & Graveyard Shift- Liam Palmer
5/29 Rose Red- Kristen (Blood,Blush ,& Guts) & Storm Of The Century- Adam Hunter
5/30 It Chapter 1- That Horror Lesbian
5/31 Dolores Claiborne- Kimberly Ramsawak & The Lawnmower Man- Mike smith
Picking a best Romero film is impossible
Yes, I like Goblin and Dario Argento’s work on the Dawn of the Dead too, but it ’s no match for what John Harrison accomplished in Creepshow
At various points in the company’s history EC stood for “Entertaining Comics” or “Educational Comics”
They didn’t, but they did inspire many children who would grow up to be horror geniuses, notably Romero and King.
The Crate is based on a short story with the same title King wrote in 1979. The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill is based on ‘Weeds’, written by King in 1976.
Father’s Day, Something to Tide You Over and They’re Creeping Up on You were all written for this movie.
Even though she’s Adrienne Barbeau
But what did happen to Fluffy? The internet is full of theories, my favorite is that Fluffy hid in forests and sewers for years, waiting for the right time to emerge. And that time came in 1986 when Fluffy could sense that another of its kind had traveled to this world.
