It was the 80s. Stephen King was still fresh and new to the horror scene, but his first bunch of novels established him as a powerhouse author. George A. Romero already achieved his glory with his iconic zombie pictures. Put the two together, and what do you get? The 1982 film
Creepshow, an anthology of horror loaded with purposeful camp and flashy effects to emulate the style of 1950s pulp horror comics. The film ranked #1 in the box office of 1982 and has since become a cult classic.
This film opened eight months before I was born. Its sequel came out when I would have been four years old. Thus, the two movies have been part of the zeitgeist for most of my life, and I would have gained awareness of it when I was older (ten maybe?). My parents developed an affinity for these films, and they will quote the movies to this day. Well, I might too--as hammy as all the actors were, the movie is loaded with funny and over-the-top dialogue.
Around 2007, I did a double-take when I perused a video rental store and beheld
Creepshow 3 on the shelf. A third one? They really made it? How did I never hear about it? Holy crap! I bought a used DVD of it for four bucks. Unfortunately, four bucks might have been too much--the movie ranks as one of the worst I've seen. Much like a plague, I wouldn't wish it upon anybody.
Revisiting all three films this Halloween season (yes, I even sat through #3), I've come out with a renewed appreciation for them. There are solid reasons why the first (two) persisted as cult favorites, and I finally pinned down what it is that works in them.
Creepshow
The original
Creepshow is a darn good film, plain and simple. It has an epic cast (including Tom Atkins, a young and confused-looking Ed Harris, Leslie Nielsen as a hammy villain, Adrienne Barbeau as a lush you just love to hate, and Stephen King himself playing the goofiest and most lovable yokel in Maine. And even his son makes an appearance as Billy, a kid). The film very playfully toys around with transitions and animation to replicate a pulp comic effect, and it makes for visually stunning cinema. The use of groovy backgrounds, lighting, and color gives it a theatrical flair that hasn't been topped. All of this, along with the writing (King's first screenplay) and performances deliver a level of camp that makes each story fun and digestible.
At the same time, the film is careful not to overplay the comedy to overshadow the horror. All five stories embody the horror genre in spirit, and it does so by approaching many different angles (or subgenres).
- The Macabre: This is the type of horror that focuses on death and painful-looking injuries. Macabre works tend to be dark, grim, and ghastly. You can see this pretty easily in classics like Edgar Allan Poe stories, and it carries over in King quite often. The body count is fairly high in Creepshow--we see bludgeonings, stabbings, beheadings, suicides, people getting eaten and mauled, drowning, and bugs exploding out of a body. Among other things.
- The Supernatural: Probably best described as anything that happens that can't be explained. In Creepshow, we see this when the dead come back to life (many times). Few other things, such as why the goo inside a meteor causes plant life to grow and how so many bugs invade Mr. Pratt's apartment, are not given much explanation--things simply happen, often times without rationality, and it creates a more unsettling (possibly uncanny) atmosphere.
- The Psychological: Seems like the stuff of thrillers more than anything--this is the terrors of the human mind affecting behavior. We do see some of this with Jody Verill rationalizing with himself over the plant growth and what to do about it. It causes him to hallucinate and talk to dead relatives, although this could just be another part of his mind. Mr. Pratt talks to himself a lot too (unless he's on the phone or answering the door), and most of it expresses his intolerance towards his "bug problem."
- Body Horror: The type of horror in which the human body mutates, falls apart, or something else goes horribly wrong. You see this most often in David Cronenberg movies, but it has its roots in earlier media and some classic gothic tales. This brand of horror is probably best experienced in "The Lonesome Death of Jody Verill," in which plants grow out of Jody's body and consumes him. I think Mr. Pratt's demise touches on body horror as well.
- Cosmic Horror: This is the fear of all things so above-and-beyond mankind that they can't even be comprehended, and doing so drives people insane. The closest thing Creepshow has to this is the meteor sh*t Jody Verill encounters--definitely not the same as the classic formula established by H.P. Lovecraft, but I think it lightly touches the subject in the sense that it's a substance from outer space and it's never explained or understood. It is worth noting that the original short story "Weeds" was roughly inspired by Lovecraft's "The Color Out of Space."
- The Unknown: Going hand-in-hand with cosmic horror, I find myself looking at all brands of terror and realizing most have their roots in the unexplainable. Every Creepshow tale has an aspect that can't be rationalized. Billy and his voodoo doll--it's something that shouldn't work in real life, but it does. The dead coming back to life--it's the whole premise of "Father's Day" and "Something to Tide You Over." How do those bugs get into Mr. Pratt's apartment? We never find out for certain. And of course, "The Crate" embodies the unknown in the best way, by presenting a literal mystery box that, when opened, reveals a monster of unknown origins and classification. "The Crate" also touches upon Lovecraftian tropes, seeing as the creature came from an Antarctic expedition and was dumped in a university setting--it may as well be Miskatonic U.
See? You get a little bit of everything.
 |
| The terror! *GASP* |
Creepshow builds every story around one simple forumla that works every time.
- A set-up: backstory is delivered, scenes are set. Some characters are wronged in some way. Antagonists sieze the advantage, but something unnatural is revealed gradually until the climax.
- A payoff: something creepy happens. Revenge happens. Characters, good or bad, are gruesomely dispatched with some form of irony.
"Father's Day" is a very simple, straightforward revenge story. The payoff is more like a punchline here--Nathan Grantham really wanted that cake, and he finally got it by rising from the grave, butchering a bunch of snobs (including Bedelia), then presenting it as a severed head with candles. Yay, cake for everyone!
"The Lonesome Death of Jody Verill" only features one character. All the conflict revolves around his inner dialogue (externalized as a goofy form of monologuing and daydreaming). The real trick (and the sad thing) about this is that Jody accelerates and brings about his own demise by refusing to see a doctor and giving into the temptation of a bath. The plants triumph.
"Something to Tide You Over" has a long setup that feels more at home in a murder mystery. Most of it is plotting that sets up the bizarre circumstance in which Richard Vickers convinces Harry Wentworth to bury himself on a beach so the surf can drown him. This works because Richard leads Harry along by drip-feeding information (or perhaps some fake news) and making promises in a very coy manner. Sure, he'll let Harry see Becky...on a video screen showing her own drowning. Once all this happens, Harry and Beck return as waterlogged zombies and they force Richard to endure the same fate.
"The Crate" has an involving setup that works on two different fronts. On one hand, a bunch of people discover this crate under the stairs and crack it open. On the other hand, Henry Northrup gets fed up with his wife Wilma. These two strands get tied together when Stanley experiences the monster in the crate (and the gruesome way it eats the janitor) and stumbles into Henry's den to tell him the whole dilemma. This causes Henry to use the crate monster as a way to take revenge and get rid of Wilma once and for all. It happens, but it's not quite as uplifting as he hoped. He takes it upon himself to seal the crate and dump it in a lake somewhere (although that doesn't hold the crate monster).
"They're Creeping Up On You" features Upson Pratt as a germophobe desperately trying to rid his apartment of bugs. But they just keep coming and coming, and they eventually overwhelm and eat him up. You don't really miss the guy because the whole time it's revealed that he's a heartless miser who caused the death of one of his employees. Bugs become a metaphor for the underlings he's used and abused in his business, so revenge is achieved.
The bookending prologue and epilogue sequences feature Billy, a kid scolded harshly by his dad for reading a pulp horror comic. Surprise, it's a comic called
Creepshow! At the end of the movie, it's revealed that Billy used the mail-order clipping to buy a voodoo doll, and he uses it on his dad. That'll teach him.
One thing to note is how death is treated. Death
is necessary to establish threat--it's hard to understand why one should
be afraid of a shambling corpse if it doesn't hurt
anybody. Among the worst and goriest deaths, "The Crate" probably works
the best because the monster is so vicious it mauls and deforms
everybody it claws. The way it lifts the janitor up by the head allows
the camera (or POV character) to see the death in a way that's
suggestive--we imagine it's eating the chewing the poor's guy's head,
but the only indication we really see is blood dribbling down his torso.
That's grotesque enough. We do see the bites and claw marks on one poor
kid, and it further reinforces the threat. In the payoff, we see
practically nothing of Wilma's death, but her husband's reaction is
enough--even though he should be glad to be rid of her, he's actually
horrified.
The manner of death can also be revealing. A fast, violent death comes off as nihilistic. The crate monster is an uncaring, unknowable thing after all--it will not pause or care for human life, so it takes it viciously and fast. Its effects on the human body is horrifying and creates a reaction in us. The zombie in "Father's Day" also dispatches his victims in a very fast and vicious way--he straight-up twists a woman's neck 180-degrees before he's satisfied.
On the flipside, a slow death suggests agony, pain, and suffering. When Jody Verill slowly turns into a plant, we can't help but to feel for him because it's such a drawn-out process full of doubt and fear. Not to mention, it's such an uncanny form of death--if we speculate on how it would feel and how we'd react to growth taking over our bodies, we shudder and become repulsed.
This could extend to the more grotesque death of Mr. Pratt. Between this film and
Halloween III, bugs coming out of bodies in horror cinema is a very macabre thing to behold, and it elicits feelings of disgust and terror. Probably because bugs themselves are grotesque and we fear them. To have them come out of the body is just wrong, so it becomes terrifying.
Slow death also happens to Harry in "Something to Tide You Over." Can you imagine being stuck in the sand, forced to drown? It would be a painful way to go. With this particular story, the agony of death sets up Harry and his lover as victims--we're outraged by Richard's diabolical plan, so we root for the seaweed zombies when they gain up on him and force him to endure the same agonizing death.
Creepshow 2
Many have scoffed at this sequel for having far less stories than the first film and not being quite as good overall. I can't deny that the animation quality drops quite a bit, but the film holds up well for me because it's still faithful to the spirit of
Creepshow and its pulp-comic inspirations. The cast may not have as many big stars, but their performances are still spot-on.
What really helps this movie is that the stories are still pretty awesome. I actually like some of this more than the stories in the first film. They all have the exact same set-up and payoff formula.
"Old Chief Wood'nhead" suffers from having a really long setup, but it is a storytelling necessity to establish the two shopkeepers as good, but poor, people. When they receive the treasures of an Indian tribe as a form of collateral, it presents something of value that all the characters want--it's something that the Spruces want to keep safe because it embodies the pride of a whole people. But when three violent hoodlums invade their store, they covet the treasure purely for its monetary value. Naturally, their dishonorable behavior and lack of pride incurs the wrath of a wooden Indian chief that comes to life and hunts the punks down one by one. The real delicious irony occurs when Sam, who went on and on about how his hair would make him a movie star, is scalped. It's pretty delicious revenge.
"The Raft" features a bunch of stoner kids who gleefully swim in a lake and find themselves trapped on a raft. A bizarre "oil slick" surrounds them. When one girl sticks her hand near it, it oozes up her arm and pulls her in, slowly eating her. One by one, the creature devours all the kids until the last surviving one makes a mad rush towards shore. Just when he thinks he won, the oil slick leaps up on the beach and eats him all the same. The real irony here happens when the camera pans to the right and reveals a "No Swimming" sign among overgrowth.
"The Hitchhiker" tells the story about a woman racing home in the middle of the night. She runs over a hitchhiker and keeps on driving. But the same hitchhiker keeps coming back in bloodier and bloodier forms, and eventually kills her in her own garage.
Interwoven in these stories is an animated story in which Billy picks up a box from the post office, having mail-ordered venus fly trap bulbs. A bunch of bullies jump him and step on his package (wait a minute, is this a metaphor?). After a bicycle chase, they all wind up at a dead end where giant venus flytraps eat the bullies.
 |
| Worst barber ever. |
Irony and revenge are the common themes across both films (although irony is probably heavier in the sequel). In the second movie, we see plenty of unexplainable phenomenon (wooden statue animated, random oil slick monster, undead hitchhiker won't die, giant carnivorous plants). Some aspect of the macabre exists, mostly in the gruesome ways the kids die on the raft, but the film has more splatter to it than ghastliness. Body and cosmic horror come up dry. "The Hitchhiker" is probably the most psychological of all these stories, since it revolves around the character talking to herself, struggling to come to grips with what she's experiencing. One interesting thing about "Old Chief Wood'nhead" is that it feels like a kind of folklore with a horrific spin.
Deaths handled in this film are probably more horrifying than in the first movie. Old Chief Wood'nhead shoots arrows in the fat kid, uses a tomahawk on the rich kid, then scalps Sam--we see splashes of blood everywhere, enough to suggest sudden and painful death. Maybe it's too good for these punks (and it might be why I feel this payoff runs a little short). But what helps is that the chief establishes himself as a menace by being invincible--bullets don't stop him, and neither do walls. It becomes a slow chase ending in sudden death.
The deaths in "The Raft" probably horrify me the most, because the oil slick literally digests its victims in plain sight. We see everybody's skin peeling off, and one girl cries out that it hurts. Plenty of detail for us to understand how slow and agonizing this is. And much like the crate monster, the oil slick is a nihilistic creature that simply wants to eat--it doesn't care about its victims' plight.
"The Hitchhiker" is a weird one--death for both characters is pretty fast. What it's more about is the guilt of death that seems to follow the woman around until it finally becomes her undoing. This is reinforced by the fact that running over the hitchhiker repeatedly doesn't stop him--he is also invincible, and even as his body falls apart he just keeps reappearing.
And then there's the flytrap deaths--all fast, brutal, kinda bloodless.
Creepshow 3
Now this is where the hotdogs hit the fan.
Creepshow 3 is a real thing, but it is such a terrible film that many wish it didn't exist. It has zero involvement with Romero, King, or anybody related to them. It was released direct-to-video in 2007. If I never saw it at the video rental store, I probably would have never known it existed.
Reviewing the film now, I am actually intrigued by what doesn't work in the film and how it differs so much from the first two. One of the reasons why it fails is because of the tone--there is so much comedy to this that the horror becomes almost nonexistent. Even worse, the comedy is forced thanks to extreme over-acting (especially from Emmett McGuire), a lighthearted music score, occasional sound effect cues, and pedestrian scenery (mostly in broad daylight). Compare this to the first two movies: their funnier moments happen out of the dialogue, performances, and ironic twists of each story, without help from anywhere else. Music remained earnest and uncanny, to the point of becoming unsettling (or just plain awesome, as it is in #2 with the guitar riffs). Production took care to douse many scenes in darkness or nighttime settings, with a lot of atmospheric detail. Horror elements still felt like true horror, and had the ability to creep under the skin. Drama felt like drama. Romance felt like romance. The first two films treat every aspect of their stories with gravitas. This third one--everything is a joke it seems, but none of it is really funny.
Which brings up the core problem: storytelling priorities.
Creepshow 3 has an attempt at irony, but it falls flat most of the time.
 |
| What is this? The ghost opera? |
"Alice" is the strange tale of a snotty school girl who becomes zapped across alternate dimensions because her family members keep toying around with a remote control some mad scientist invented that can do that to her (wasn't there an Adam Sandler movie like this?). With each transition, she becomes more and more mutated until she's rejected by her family. The girl meets the professor, who turns her into a bunny rabbit.
Wow, this sounds way stupider typing it out. The film makes a point to suggest that Alice's true form is her monstrous self. And that might be warranted, since she starts off rather snotty and demanding. The payoff seems to hint at an
Alice in Wonderland motif, but this never comes up again in the movie. As well it shouldn't, because there is no point in which anybody crosses a threshold into any kind of "wonderland." I suppose the point is all of Alice's transitions into alternate realities is her "wonderland," but it's a weak metaphor in my opinion. What I find really odd about this story is that Alice undergoes all this change through no fault or cause of her own--she has no agency and no chance of redemption. If we're supposed to accept that her fall is some kind of justice or revenge, we don't see why because nobody was hurt in the opening setup (at least not that we see--there might have been hints in the dialogue, but then it becomes telling not showing, which is bad form). On top of that, I fail to see how universal remotes translate into body horror--I do appreciate the body horror in this segment, because the make-up is genuinely grotesque.
"The Radio" is kinda funny to watch nowadays, as it feels like a precursor to modern smartphones with voice recognition. In this case, it's a private security officer who buys a radio from a bum on the street (why?) and it starts telling him what to do. He invests his money. He steals and murders. He's told to kill this hooker he happens to like--when he refuses, she kills him. Afterwards, it's revealed that a pimp who lived in the same building (and occasionally threatened the dude) has a talking radio too. Um...yeah.
"Call Girl" is straightforward--it's about a call girl who likes to knife people all over town. She goes to some dude's house to do more of the same, only to find that he's some kind of vampire that bites her neck off.
"The Professor's Wife" follows a couple of dippy guys who visit their former college professor and meet his fiance. They get this crazy idea that she must be a robot--substantiated by old conversations in which the professor joked about it. It's revealed that she doesn't drink. She's not eating that night because she says she's watching her figure. The guys figure that the professor spent the last twenty years building and perfecting his own wife, so they get the bright idea to knock her out and dismantle her to see what works.
Now, this is the only part I think actually works in the movie. And it's probably by accident. When the guys rip apart this poor woman, gleefully laughing without realizing how psychopathic they actually are, it's a really horrifying scene. But it's so over-the-top, with all the goofy bad-comedy effects, that it becomes a bittersweet black comedy. It's sorta the same as in
Monty Python's Meaning of Life with
the live organ donor scene.
That being said, there is a missed opportunity. Once the two idiots realize what they've done, they hide all the body parts while the professor comes home and wonders where everybody is. The scene ends when he opens the oven and finds his fiance's head shoved in there. All he does then is whine. But come on--this is a possible moment that could have turned this character around completely and shattered all his good humor and bright outlook on life. He should have turned angry and vengeful, and it would have become a setup for a future revenge story. That doesn't happen though--what we get is a goofy wedding scene in which the professor uses voodoo magic to reanimate his wife, and she comes out all stiff and bandaged up. It is kinda amusing actually, and the one moment when blood wells out of her eyes could suggest a kind of morbid irony--it's the happiest day of her life, but she's dead. Maybe she wishes she's dead. That's pretty punchy to think about, even if the film only hints at it.
"Haunted Dog" is the only story here that actually feels like it belongs in
Creepshow anything, probably because it's a rehash of "The Hitchhiker." It's about the worst doctor in the world, so uncaring and such a jerk. After cutting in line to grab a hotdog from a stand, he drops it and decides to feed it to a bum that was panhandling him. The bum dies, but comes back as a ghost that keeps haunting the doc. Eventually, the doctor dies of a heart attack (I guess that's ironic?).
The movie is bookeneded by scenes involving a hotdog stand--a really horrible animation opens the movie, looking like
South Park from hell. It shows a kid in a hoodie murdering a dog then selling it as actual hotdogs (hahahaha, get it?! No?). This hotdog stand shows up throughout the movie, becomes important for the "Haunted Dog" story, then the movie ends with the owner revealing his face and it turns out to be the creep dude that hosts all these movies. His face turns to CGI mush for no apparent reason.
Deaths we see in this third movie aren't nearly as nuanced as its predecessors. Nobody even dies in the first story. Most others we see are unceremonious--lots of people get stabbed like it's just another day in prison. The vampire is probably the scariest thing, because he does kill very fast and viciously. As mentioned above in detail, the two idiots disassembling the professor's wife is a sickening scene, and it contrasts so much with the tone that it becomes totally messed-up. It's worth noting that nobody actually dies as a way to establish threat in any supernatural being or monster, so tension comes up extremely dry.
Go Ahead, Creep Yourself Out
The series diminishes in quality the further away from its original core talent and inspirations it gets. While #3 exhibits a broad range of weaknesses that makes the experience gaudy, unpalatable, and droll, the first two hold up well in my opinion, offering stories worth experiencing that will get under your skin. They work because they touch upon an array of different fears and horrors. They're palatable because of the camp, style, and talent poured into them. Above all, their storytelling works on a simple formula or idea and it works well.
The series is a great way to examine short story formats visually, seeing them unfold in individual arcs and plots. Some of them end in twists. Some end in an unsettling way. Some just end. They all manage to provide satisfying payoffs thanks to the care in their setups.
The series is also valuable in the way it portrays death in horror fiction, useful to elicit fear and tension. There are other aspects worth examining too--pieces of the macabre, unknowable horrors, psychological terror, and more.
You get a little bit of everything with these movies, much like a trick or treat bag. I've found the first two films quite rewatchable over the years, especially as a Halloween treat. If you haven't experienced this bittersweet treat in a while and you're looking for inspirations in horror, maybe it's time to dust off the ol' VHS tape and pop it in (oh who are we kidding, get yourself the new Shout Factory Blu-Ray and behold its glorious new 4K transfer).
