A meeting of two great masters of horror, Creepshow blends George A. Romero’s macabre brand of satire with Stephen King’s darkly moral vision of the world. The anthology film doesn’t blossom out from the nihilism that marks Romero and King’s more famous works, but from audience-friendly parody and their shared love of the infamous publisher EC Comics, one of the earliest targets and casualties of the Comics Code Authority. Comic-book aesthetics dominate the film, from vivid splashes of color to animated effects like frames divided into panels and page-flip transitions between segments. With Creepshow, Romero and King stepped far enough outside their creative comfort zones to find fruitful common ground in the film’s five stories, and without one artist’s personality outweighing the other’s.
Creepshow’s five stories are linked by a through line of sardonic moralism, a sense of reckoning redolent of Flannery O’Connor’s anti-fables. “Father’s Day” concerns a family grappling with the trauma of having lived a life under their now-deceased tyrant of a father (John Lormer), yet the widow (Viveca Lindfors) and her adult children are all foolish aristocrats whose narcissism and idleness makes it easy to root for their downfall when the patriarch returns from the dead as a dirt- and maggot-crusted skeleton demanding his Father’s Day cake. That the revenant looks like a man wearing a rubber suit one size too big only compounds the farce of watching a bunch of trust-fund sloths demolished by the shambling corpse of their paterfamilias.
In “Something to Tide You Over,” a cuckolded husband (Leslie Nielsen) takes sadistic revenge on his wife (Gaylen Ross) and her lover (Ted Danson), only for them to return from their watery graves to enact a cycle of violence and revenge that lacks any clear demonstration of moral justification. The segment’s final image, of the deranged husband laughing defiantly in the face of his comeuppance, obliterates any satisfaction in his just deserts.
“The Lonesome Death of Jody Verrill” presages the plot of Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation by decades, but it plays the material for near-slapstick. King himself stars as Jordy Verrill, a hick farmer whose land and flesh is slowly overgrown with otherworldly grass when he touches a meteor that crashes on his property. In a film blessed with Tom Savini’s makeup effects, King sports a set of buck teeth that look as if they came out of a gumball machine, and wears the puffed-out, wide-eyed expression of a man attempting to pass a kidney stone the size of a Super Bowl ring. King’s writing and acting is so cartoonish as to rob the segment of menace, though some moments make for genuinely inspired comedy, as in a sequence of Jody feverishly imagining paying off his minor debt by selling off the meteor to a nearby university scientist (Bingo O’Malley, recalling a balding version of a Rudolf Klein-Rogge mad scientist).
Elsewhere, though, the comedy only compounds the horror, as in the final two segments. “The Crate” manages to find the hopefulness of a feral, apelike monster wreaking havoc at a university as a henpecked professor (Hal Holbrook) wistfully dreams of feeding his nagging wife (Adrienne Barbeau) to the creature, his blissful looks of bloody imagination as funny as they are disturbing. “They’re Creeping Up on You” takes place in the antiseptic, sparkling white apartment of stock baron Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall). The short satirically sees the man’s home as a metaphor for the isolating nature of extreme wealth, and the filmmakers dig deep into the manner in which Pratt’s mysophobic seclusion merely extrapolates from his prejudices and fears of common people and the filth of an economically unequal New York.
When roaches begin to invade his home, Pratt goes berserk, and his increasingly helpless calls to various underlings in the face of thousands of bugs make a subtle case for including the segment in Romero’s zombie canon, with pitiless hordes of insects subbing for the walking dead. The perfectly self-contained “They’re Creeping Up on You” stands as one of the best moments in both Romero’s and King’s filmography, and the surprisingly gory coda is one of the most savage takedowns of the conspicuous consumption that marked the Reagan era.
Image/Sound
Shout! Factory’s 2018 Blu-ray was sourced from a 4K restoration that looked mostly strong but betrayed a few waxy moments of overeager digital touch-up. The label’s new UHD disc comes from an updated 4K scan that does away with the minor flaws of the prior transfer. The moments of too-clean sheen are gone, replaced by healthy grain and filmic detail throughout. The Dolby Vision adds even more pop to the bold, hyperreal colors, further accentuating the strong reds and blues while bringing more gradation to neutral tones and black levels. The audio has also been upgraded from an excellent 5.1 mix to a superior Dolby Atmos track, and the new soundtrack offers an even richer depth of sonic field between dialogue and ambient effects.
Extras
Shout! Factory ports over all the extras from their prior release of Creepshow. Among those are three commentary tracks: an archival track with director George A. Romero and effects guru Tom Savini that provides a holistic overview of the film’s conception and production, as well as the pair that was recorded for the 2018 release, one with cinematographer Michael Gornick and the other with composer/assistant director John Harrison and construction coordinator Ed Fountain. The new tracks offer more grounded observations into a hectic shoot that saw the independently minded Romero butting heads with his studio overlords.
A roundtable interview with cast and crew is filled with further anecdotes about their memories of the production. There are also featurettes on Creepshow’s comic-book inspirations and animations, as well as ones on the film’s restoration. A brief interview with some of the staff at movie art studio Mondo delves into Creepshow’s influence on their work, and there’s also a feature on superfan Dave Burian and his extensive collection of Creepshow paraphernalia.
Some throwaway deleted scenes are also included alongside behind-the-scenes footage and various promotional material. Finally, an accompanying booklet contains an exhaustive essay by former Fangoria editor-in-chief Michael Gingold, who covers the film’s conception and production, as well as its lasting influence on the horror anthology genre.
Overall
Shout! Factory improves upon an already superb Blu-ray with an outstanding 4K release of one of George A. Romero’s most pleasurably rewatchable films.
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I will never be capable of fathoming how anyone who likes appealingly murky, dismal atmospheric horror wouldn’t utterly adore this film- start to finish. Is it the Wilma plotline? Not all revolting stories in 70’s, 80’s (would-be?grindhouse) horror wrapping are created equal but, in Creepshow, aren’t all the beats of mood at least impressive?
It never bothered me that – again, I’m going to assume it’s the Wilma plot that causes a few eyerolls – we don’t know what caused her retaliation at everything Henry does that displeases her or how they could ever agree to marry one another. I just know I greatly enjoy an old-fashioned “hag” type performance from Adrienne Barbeau, same as I like Carolyn Purdy-Gordon’s Cruella rendition in Dolls. Though everyone in the film is acting pretty evil.