King-o-Ween: Creepshow (1982)

Spooky Season kicks off with this spooky and fun anthology.

In a few years, Creepshow may be a great candidate for my son’s first R-rated horror movie. 

The first collaboration between director George Romero and Stephen King is just spooky enough to qualify as a real-deal scary movie, but it also wants you to laugh after screaming. With its comic book-inspired aesthetic and over-the-top gross-out scenes, it’s pitched perfectly at kids watching through their fingers. It’s an R-rated movie designed for audiences who brag about sneaking into R-rated movies. 

And I absolutely love it. 

When I decided to spend October looking at films inspired by the works of Stephen King, I knew I wanted to focus on movies I hadn’t seen. I have a lot of love for many adaptations of his work, and I’ve written about some of them before. King’s novels and short stories have been the inspiration for many of the greatest horror movies ever made, but you don’t need another essay on why Carrie, Misery or The Shining are masterpieces. I was curious about the ones that had slipped by me, or the ones that don’t get overly discussed. Creepshow came out when I was 3 and I never got around to it; it seemed like a good place to start. 

Certainly in 1982, there were few bigger names in horror than Romero and King. It had been a decade and a half since George Romero had transformed the genre with Night of the Living Dead, but he was only a few years removed from its first sequel. Only three adaptations of King’s novels had been released by the time Creepshow hit the big screen, but you couldn’t set the bar much higher than Carrie and The Shining, as well as Tobe Hooper’s ‘Salem’s Lot miniseries. And if you hadn’t seen his movies, you certainly couldn’t escape his books; between 1974 and 1982, King had already published Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining, The Stand, The Dead Zone, Firestarter and Cujo, not to mention the first Dark Tower novel, two short story collections, a handful of books under the pseudonym Richard Bachman, and the nonfiction Danse Macabre. That is a hell of a run. 

Both King and Romero’s imprints are all over Creepshow, from the former’s ability to conjure memorable characters in a short space of time and wring scares from the mundane, to Romero’s wit, adroitness with gore, and willingness to experiment visually. What marries the two is their shared love for the horror comics of the 1950s.

The film is framed by the tale of a young boy (King’s son Joe Hill, an accomplished horror writer himself) whose father (Tom Atkins) discovers him reading the comic book from which the film gets its name. He throws the book in his trash, and while the kid plots revenge — observed by a ghoulish specter outside his window — the film uses the comic to kick-start its various tales, which run the gamut from traditional ghost stories to revenge tales to creature features. Probably the best way to discuss them is to take each story step by step. 

• “Father’s Day” is probably my least favorite of the bunch, but there are things to like in this story of a murdered patriarch seeking revenge from beyond the grave. For one, a young Ed Harris dancing might be more haunting than nearly anything else the movie serves up. But I like the way that Romero and King spin this yarn and set the mood for an elegant ghost story, only to unleash skeletons crawling out of the earth covered in bugs and then build to a wonderfully grotesque punchline. 

• “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” stars King himself as a dumb hick who discovers a meteor but sees his plans for fame thwarted when a mysterious moss overtakes his body. I won’t lie that when I first saw King’s cross-eyed, “duh, what?” approach to the character, I braced for the worst. And while I won’t say King is a good actor, Romero uses his broadness to help us understand what’s going on inside Jordy (spoiler: not much) and leaven the body horror, culminating in a finale that is both tragic and goofy. 

• “Something to Tide You Over”: My favorite of the bunch, if only because it leans into the pulpier crime elements that ran through several of his earliest short stories (see “The Ledge”). Ted Danson plays a man caught sleeping around on a mobster’s wife, only for the bad guy to devise a cruel revenge. The fact that the mobster is played by Leslie Nielsen, just two years off Airplane!, initially made me laugh. But Nielsen gives his character a jaunty menace, and Danson’s solid as the terrified victim. The fate Nielsen’s character devises is the right mix of terrifying and over-the-top, and the supernatural twist at the end is wonderful. 

• “The Crate”: A suspenseful and gory little creature feature based on a King short story. Rather than just the tale of a beast run amok on a university campus, it weaves in the story of a put-upon husband (Hal Holbrook) presented with a fiendish and convenient solution to the problem of his haranguing wife. I’ll ding it some because the beast in question is rather silly looking, but King’s script gives it more layers than we’d usually get, and Romero is clearly having a blast with the jump scares and gore. 

• “They’re Creeping Up Behind You”: I would normally dismiss this closing story, which has to do with cockroaches infesting the apartment of a germaphobe, as creepy but empty. But E.G. Marshall creates such a hateful man in the rich and ruthless Upton Pratt that the joy of this is just waiting for him to get his comeuppance. Romero gets a lot of mileage from shots of cockroaches sullying Pratt’s pristine environment and when he goes for the jugular, he unleashes a gloriously gross denouement. 

Romero and King would circle collaborations throughout most of their careers, with the director at one point attached to adaptations of The Stand, Pet Sematary, ‘Salem’s Lot and It (he would helm a few shorts for anthologies, but his only feature-length adaptation would be The Dark Half). Their voices meld well.

There are many flavors of Stephen King. He can go horrifying and bleak, as in Pet Sematary, The Mist or Revival. His horror can have more psychological roots, as with Misery or it can be epic, as seen by It and The Stand. But my favorite is when he leans into the pulpier elements of the genre, content to spin a story that keeps you up late, jumping at noises in the dark. Scary as they get, you can hear him chuckling behind them the entire time. His early short stories are some of my favorites; there’s a glee he gets in scaring you, like a kid peeking from around the corner to see his sister shriek at the fake spider he left on the steps. 

Even though Creepshow only adapts two of his stories (“Jordy” is a take on a short he did called “Weeds”), the entire thing feels like a solid early King short story collection. There’s the more classical “Father’s Day,” which is a standard family curse ghost story, complete with a ghoul bellowing a chilling catch phrase (“where’s my cake”). Romero uses King’s over-the-top acting to capture the inner thoughts of a none-too-bright victim for “Jordy,” and brings to life the internal terror and existential horror that fuel many of the author’s stories. “The Crate’s” marriage of domestic tension with bloody beast antics is suitably pulled right from King’s pages, and even Pratt’s dialogue in “Creeping Up Behind You” repeats choice lines in a way that will be familiar to Constant Readers. 

But it’s not merely the Stephen King show. Romero is clearly enjoying the opportunity to work with a studio budget and play with the form. He leans hard into the comic book aesthetic, punctuating scares with rich colors and canted angles, at times framing shots with hand-drawn comic book borders or transitioning into scenes with the “flip” of a page. The monsters and gore are just the right side of cartoony, and the mayhem is balanced by actors who understand the assignment. Comic actors like Nielsen and Danson help combine humor and horror ably, and I was impressed by the desperation Holbrook brings to his role. The intermittent use of animation also helps set the tone; this is supposed to be spooky and a bit silly. 

I don’t know that Creepshow is ever truly scary, but that’s not the point. There’s a fine line between horror and comedy, as both depend on navigating the unexpected and eliciting a big, often unanticipated, emotional response. Plenty of films try to navigate both genres at once but tilt more to one side. Creepshow does both at once, going hard on the creepiness because it knows how fun it is to be scared. It might a perfect Halloween film.