
Creepshow (1982) Directed by George A. Romero; screenplay by Stephen King; starring Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Ed Harris, E.G. Marshall, Carrie Nye, Leslie Nielsen, and Ted Danson.
It’s not often that a decade is summed up in advance by a single film and even less so that the film in question is in fact an ostensible homage to an even earlier decade. Yet that’s exactly what happened with George A. Romero and Stephen King’s Creepshow (1982), one of the deftest and most savagely adroit horror satires to hit the screens after the ’70s. It wasn’t the first time that the two men had worked together—King and his wife Tabitha had made cameo appearances in Romero’s Knightriders the previous year as spectators at an Arthurian motorcycle joust (don’t ask)—but it was King’s first filmed screenplay and one of the times where a director and a writer’s joint sensibility seem to be in near-perfect sync.
A hyperstylized recreation of the 1950s EC Comics Tales from the Crypt and related titles, the film is an anthology of shorts that take their basic content from the comic book shockers of the postwar era: revenants, yetis, weeds from outer space. Yet mingled with the knowing tawdriness and affectionate stage play (which extends to actual comic book panel dissolves provided by EC artist Jack Kamen) is an underlying sense of antagonism and dread as brutal as anything Romero and King had accomplished separately with Dawn of the Dead or ’Salem’s Lot. What appears to be a breather of sorts for both of Creepshow’s creators is on second look a highly subversive commitment to sticking it to American society where and when as needed. John Waters may have flayed the ’80s more flamboyantly in Polyester (1981), and Bret Easton Ellis may have done so more literally with American Psycho (1991), but King and Romero got in their licks in broad, sober daylight under the rubric of what was, for all intents and purposes, a cheesy drive-in flick.
We start in the suburbs (where else?) where a father (Tom Atkins) is threatening his small son Billy (Joe King, the author’s son) with a thrashing (one of many such, it is implied) if he ever catches him reading “such rotten crap” ever again. The “crap” in question turns out to be an issue of Creepshow, a luridly illustrated horror comic very much in the EC Comics vein, if you’ll pardon my own scant homage of a pun. Dad bins the rag while Billy is joined by the shroud-wraithed figure of “The Creep” itself, who leads us through the pages of the magazine and into five tales of, as the cover would have it, “Jolting Horror!”
The first story up, “Father’s Day” introduces us to the corrupt and snobbish Grantham clan (Carrie Nye, Elizabeth Regan, Warner Shook, and Ed Harris), who have gathered for a dinner to commemorate the murder of family patriarch Nathan (Jon Lormer) seven years earlier by his unbalanced daughter, Bedelia. Bedelia herself (Viveca Lindfors), consumed with a mix of guilt at her actions and rage at her father for having had her lover murdered in a “hunting accident,” marks the anniversary with a trip to Nathan’s grave for a seven-years-ongoing harangue at her appalling parent. On this occasion she is greatly taken aback when the miserable old sod claws his way out of the casket and, to borrow a line from Monty Python, snuffs her without much further ado. The rest of the household wind up on the hastily revised menu, with Mrs. Danvers’s delicious baked ham dinner replaced by Aunt Sylvia’s severed head.
The second tale, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” is the most openly comic, with Stephen King playing the eponymous character for broad laughs. Naive hick Jordy witnesses a meteor strike and immediately fantasizes that this windfall (spacefall?) will provide him with the cash needed to pay off a bank loan. Alas, when he tries to cool the rock off with well water it breaks, releasing a phosphorescent liquid that generates an alien form of plant life which consumes everything it touches, including, over the course of the night, Jordy himself.
The middle segment, “Something to Tide You Over” takes a more bracing tack. Wealthy beach bum Harry (Ted Danson, of all people) wakes to find that Richard (Leslie Nielsen, also of all people), the husband of his lover Becky (Gaylen Ross), has copped wise to the affair and is apparently holding his wife hostage. In a chillingly plausible escalation of events, Harry is not-quite-coerced into joining Richard for a visit to his oceanside estate (the segment was filmed in New Jersey, but the script suggests that the location is somewhere on Cape Cod) to find out what has happened to Becky. What he discovers is one of the most gruesome revenge scenarios ever committed to film—and still serves as a mere prelude to the ultimate whammy.
The fourth story, “The Crate,” is a return to open satire: with its mock–Ivy League location and skewering of academic types, the segment might well be titled “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Werewolf?” Mousey English professor Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook) is wed to drunken shrew Wilma-Just-Call-Me-Billie-Everyone-Does (Adrienne Barbeau) to the ongoing disgust of his ladykiller friend, Professor Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver), and the rest of their colleagues.
Summoned from a cocktail party where the mousiness, shrewishness, and ongoing disgust are all cranked up to full volume, Professor Stanley joins the school janitor back at the college where the latter has uncovered a large wooden crate, a relic of an 1834 Arctic expedition. The Yeti-like creature within has withstood the intervening years fairly well but wakes up with a ravenous appetite and makes short work of first the janitor and then an overconfident grad student who goes after the janitor’s remains “to measure the bite marks.” Stanley flees to Henry Northrup’s house, and Henry isn’t long in putting the crate and its lethal occupant together as a means of ridding himself of Wilma forever.
The final tale, “They’re Creeping Up on You,” is the hardest in many ways to categorize—not quite supernatural, yet not science fiction either, the very impossibility of its denouement suggesting that the entire episode may be one of madness. Ensconced in a “germ-proof” New York City penthouse apartment—a $3,200-a-month “germ-proof” penthouse apartment, no less—misophobic kleptocrat Upson Pratt presides over a stark interior of stock reports, macrobiotic foods, and a Wurlitzer jukebox stocked with low-key big bands pop. A combination of Howard Hughes in his later years and a 1930s German Expressionist mad scientist, Pratt (E.G. Marshall) employs a number of speakerphones and call boxes to abuse his employees, the building staff—including Mr. White (David Early), the African-American superintendant, and the only other person we see onscreen—and, most colorfully, Lenora Castonmeyer (an uncredited Gwen Verdon), the widow of a recent suicide.
The last conversation is particularly relevant: Lenora’s husband, Norman, was the CEO of a company that Pratt’s firm acquired during a hostile takeover, and she blames Pratt for the man’s death. Rather than protesting or feigning sympathy, Pratt is absolutely delighted to confirm that “Norman went out with a bang” and gleefully equates his rivals and underlings with the increasingly active cockroach population in the building. When a blackout sweeps New York, the roaches explode into hyperactivity, crawling over every immaculate surface—and finally, in the sequence’s final moment, from an unexpected interior.
We circle back to the suburbs where a pair of garbagemen have rescued the beleaguered magazine and have taken note of the fact that the coupon for the authentic voodoo doll has already been cut out and presumably posted. Who could have ordered the demonic poppet? Billy’s daddy is about to find out.
Creepshow is not the first film to take the EC comics line as its template: even forgoing such anomalies as MGM’s Twice-Told Tales (1963), from the 1970s onward Britain’s Amicus Productions had had notable success with the anthology format, modeling Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors and later films openly on the EC titles. But despite a certain amount of popular success and the involvement of talent, including Donald Sutherland and Joan Collins in various installments, none of these films actually harked back to their pulp antecedents in any meaningful way past their use of the anthology format and their titles. Creepshow not only frankly acknowledged its source in the pages of Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror, it mined them aesthetically in ways that had never been seen before onscreen and would seldom be matched in decades to come. Beyond that, the film revels in an upturning of genre conventions, including those actually (albeit partially) created and set in stone by EC and its imitators such as the more adult-oriented magazines Eerie and Creepy.
This defiling-disguised-as-homage starts with the first episode. Aside from provoking the viewer into wondering why the late Carrie Nye wasn’t in about every other film made in the 1980s (her hilariously soignée Aunt Sylvia is the distillation of haute camp, like Dynasty’s Alexa Carrington as envisioned by Lillian Hellman), “Father’s Day” effects a neat reversal of the revenant trope by making Nathan Grantham unquestionably the villain. Bedelia’s graveside visit (not in the original script—it replaces a scene where she identifies her murdered beau at the morgue) was apparently largely ad-libbed by actress Viveca Lindfors and is a minor classic: pathetic, horrific, and strangely tender, alternating ruefulness with fury, Lindfors sells both the scene and the idea that Nathan deserved everything he got. “You taught me, you taught Sylvia, you taught us all!” she seethes—which makes his eventual triumph a bleak irony rather than the closure of actual revenge. King and Romero have tipped their hand here, and they have done so subtly for all the neck-snappings and toppling tombstones—we are not in the EC universe of connect-the-dots morality after all.
The second episode ups the social satire ante by a fair notch. Stephen King’s acting in Creepshow has come in for a lot of flak, but for all its cartoonish quality his portrayal of Jordy is profoundly sympathetic (it’s hard not to feel sorry for him as he mutters, “Maybe I can glue it together in the morning” while slouching back to his shack). It’s also the first time Romero’s socio-political leanings surface in Creepshow in recognizable form. The title of the segment references the Bob Dylan song “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” a factual account of the fatal assault in 1963 of a black hotel maid by a white plantation owner, and the episode makes painfully clear that racism is just about the only thing Jordy hasn’t been a victim of. Lonely, dull-witted and, it is implied, a habitual drinker, Jordy is the only lower-class and uneducated primary character in a film otherwise populated by the rich and well-educated. He is as suspicious of “the college” as he is of medical help.
The gleefully tacky science fiction score with its wilting brass notes and theremin interludes has been highly and deservedly praised, but it’s the continual and increasingly bathetic content of the always-on television set that really nails the sequence. Jordy’s get-rich-quick fantasies stem from the same place as his paranoid nightmares about doctors chopping off his star-weed-infected fingers: the venal drivel of television and the programming aimed to dull the senses of the financially and socially challenged. Religious televangelists (“Previously recorded!”) alternate with boxing matches while the high whine of the station’s signoff (this was 1982) wakes Jordy back into his ongoing nightmare.
Dialogue playing on the television from A Star Is Born is there for more than just the gag the title of the movie suggests: as an old lady rhapsodizes about the colonization of the American states and delivers a note-perfect Ayn Rand speech, Jordy takes stock of his overgrown property and yelps: “No! No! No, no, no, no, no....” His rejection of the idiot box and its capitalist yowling comes too late and an army of infant triffids begin their lurch towards Boston.
Predating both Tim Krabbé’s novel The Vanishing and the highly praised original film version by director George Sluizer, “Something to Tide You Over” manages to suggest something even more monstrously sadistic: Harry is forced to endure partial burial (to neck height) in the beach’s dunes before Richard reveals that this is also Becky’s fate and that both have been trapped beneath the high water mark of the incoming tide. Both Harry and Becky’s deaths—and their vengeful, waterlogged return—are less predictable than hideously inevitable, but it’s the way in which Leslie Nielsen’s Richard makes prankish light of the situation throughout that makes this the most disturbing of the segments. It’s also the least overtly humorous, for all that Nielsen’s patter also makes it the most oddly avuncular—a canny take on how murderous resentment can be just barely concealed under a façade of chummy familiarity.
The longest of Creepshow’s segments at a half an hour, “The Crate” might also be the best of the bunch overall, not least for the superlative performances from all involved. (Only one performance strikes a false note, and this may be due to an error in the script: grad student Charlie Gereson is pegged “to get the Nobel Prize before he’s 20,” but the actor playing him, Robert Harper, looked his actual age, 30.) Holbrook’s mild-mannered but hate-filled Henry, Weaver’s aging but still effective pick-up artist Dexter, and, most convincingly and most thoroughly against type, Barbeau’s tipsy, dyspeptic and resentful Wilma are all far more than stock characters.
Henry’s tepidity and not unappealing boyishness are countered by his baleful and increasingly misogynistic inner life, as fantasies of killing Wilma culminate in a last and truly ghastly lie about a rape involving Stanley and a fictitious young woman. (It’s implied that these ugly interior dialogues are driven at least in part by a homosexual attachment to Stanley.) For his part, Weaver’s Stanley manages a sly-old-dog routine as polished as heirloom silver and is convincing as a storied sexual conqueror if not quite actual predator. His descent into hysteria and final drugged unconsciousness is the ultimate muzzling of an alpha male.
Barbeau’s Wilma—who is never called “Billie” by anybody in the movie, save by an irate acquaintance, and then only with heavy irony—is a brash, flailing disaster, but there’s a thorough understanding on the part of the filmmakers and the actress that Henry has done his bit to make her so. When she lists Henry’s many flaws during her final spat with her husband—which takes place directly adjacent to the crate and its occupant—we see from his reaction that her criticism is justified and has been so for a long time.
The subsequent monster attack and Wilma’s speedy demise are played as a sick joke, but there’s no shying away from the fact that Henry is an odious killer who, in addition to murdering his wife, has also covered up the deaths of two other innocent people. When the beast breaks free from its submerged crate during the segment’s final seconds, there’s a sense that revenge from beyond the grave—of a sort—is on its way.
This brings us to the final segment, where E.G. Marshall presides over Creepshow’s closest thing to a black-comic monologue: with his hair swept into frizzy fins, Marshall’s cackling not-quite madman descends into increasingly gleeful hysteria as his austere apartment’s roach problem multiplies past all human understanding. It’s a tour-de-force performance that would have carried a far less cartoonish situation and goes a long way in giving the story’s final image—certainly one of the most original in a film defined by unexpected visual tropes—its uncanny power.
The list of things to praise about Creepshow is fairly comprehensive—the cast, which is near note-perfect (in addition to those already cited above, Warner Shook’s homosexual Richard Grantham is deftly played and presented as no more perverse than anyone else in his clan, while Christine Forrest, Romero’s then-wife, manages to make her character of “Tabitha” a lot more than the passing in-joke the name implies); the astonishing score by John Harrison; the art direction, with its use of strong primary colors and unsettling camera angles to recreate the more bizarre effects of comic book panels; and the various monsters, the creation of makeup guru Tom Savini, who has a small and characteristically self-deprecating part as one of the dim-witted garbagemen in the final scenes. King’s screenplay also mines darker elements than the situations would at first suggest—the recurrence of the failed or abusive father-figure, a pervasive presence of implied alcoholism (with the notable exception of Marshall’s Upson Pratt, the majority of Creepshow’s victims go to their graves either soused or hung over). But the film’s real power lies precisely in its subversion of the perceived homage to the EC line.
It seems amazing, over 30 years’ worth of hindsight later, that the preeminent film critic J. Hoberman, at the Village Voice, should have commenced his review of Creepshow with the comment that the film had “no sociological perspective.” Looking at the film today it seems equally amazing that less than two years into the Reagan presidency and the go-go ’80s, Romero and King between them were able to foresee what was coming. In 1982, Creepshow’s evil billionaires, aristocratic snobs, and uncaring academics, all flanked by unappreciated, openly resentful servants, may have seemed as dated as the actual comic books. Three decades of trickle-down economics and a return to dynastic politics on a more-than-nineteenth-century scale have made them figures of immediate concern.
The film’s open and closing coda make clear what Hoberman and other critics missed—the creeps in Creepshow are of the all-too-human variety, and the real fear the film illustrates is one related to class. EC’s comics were replete with all manner of monsters, but in the ’50s, as King has pointed out in his nonfiction work on horror films Danse Macabre, “you watched for the mutant” and the actual frisson in EC was provided by the contrast of the monster with the context of 1950s America. Ghouls and backwoods savages stumbled out of nooks in the national consciousness—backwoods swamps, old mansions, ghost towns, and other holdovers from the pre-war, pre-suburban normalization of America. The robber-baron/working-poor dichotomy that had always been a feature of American life and which had charged to the fore during the Great Depression was being invoked by EC as a trove of past weirdnesses: lethal, yes, but also frankly fantastic and certainly not part and parcel of “modern” normality.
Creepshow does more than update EC comics—it suggests they and the sociopaths who populate them are modern normality and that the thin screen of middle-class respectability provided by the suburban coda is merely that. Daddy may take away your comic book, but voodoo of some sort—whether a doll or economics—will get him in the end.
David V. Griffin lives in New York.
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