Around 1978, George Romero, the low budget horror director who’d rocked the world with Night of the Living Dead (1968) tried to adapt Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot for Warner Bros. He had recently delivered his own twist on the vampire movie with Martin (1977) and he turned in a script faithful to King’s book. However, with two other big budget vampire movies hitting the screen, Warner decided to adapt ‘Salem’s Lot to television, instead, and Romero left the project.
Shortly thereafter, Romero pitched King on doing a series of short films for an anthology, each one in a different style: one in 3-D, one in black and white, etc. King gave it his own twist: why not do an homage to EC Comics and deliver a dark anthology film in the style of EC’s old bloody morality tales. Romero went for it and in 1979, King turned in a first draft of the screenplay.
King’s written a lot of screenplays and one of the joys of his movie writing are his stage directions. They never appear onscreen, and most people skim stage directions when they read a screenplay anyways, so there’s no reason for them to be as much fun as they are, but they’re a blast. In Creepshow he really uses them to indulge his inner ham.
Here he is in the “Father’s Day” segment describing the Grantham family:
The other woman, CASS BLAINE, is in her early 20s, a dark-haired knockout, the sort of woman any man would be happy to crawl along behind with his tongue sweeping the pavement. She’s wearing jeans (probably Calvin Klein) and a silky white shirt, open to below the cleavage. The cleavage is mighty tasty-looking, friends and neighbors. CASS is buttering a biscuit, or a scone, or some damn thing.
Watch this scone business. King goes back again and again to her scones in the stage directions.
Then there’s Wilma in “The Crate”:
CAMERA IS CLOSE-UP ON WILMAN — not a lovely sight. She is laughing (or perhaps braying would be a better word), her mouth wide-open, exposing all 900 of her piranha teeth. She is wearing screaming yellow stretch pants and a loathsome green blouse. Can we get Liz Taylor to reprise her role in WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? She would be perfect as WILMA who is the apotheosis of the high-riding, ball-cutting, 100%, dyed-in-the-wool bitch. She’s also well on her way to being shitfaced.
It wasn’t just the people, it was the rooms. In “Something to Tide You Over” Ted Danson’s home is described lavishly:
His room is deserted, but it’s a very nice room; a member of the UMC lives here — that’s upper middle class, not US Marine Corps. You don’t buy furniture like this — the casual Navaho throw-rug, the shite sling-chairs, the RCA SelectaVision system, the Klee on one wall — for much under $100,000 a year.
It wasn’t just people and places that got this kind of ultra-specific detail, it was also the Creepshow comic book itself that frames the movie. The transition between filmed segments is the pages of the comic book fluttering in the wind and every page turn gets a page of chatty description from King, like this flip from “Father’s Day” to “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”:
The wind gusts, flutters the page, and then flips it over. This new page is comprised entirely of ads; on the left is a full-pager for Dawn of the Dead; on the right is a whole range of novelty gadgets like joy-buzzers, snakes that pop out of fake peanut cans, X-ray tubes, with which you can supposedly look through girls’ dresses, throw-your-voice gadgets, books on hypnosis, dozens of others. We won’t be able to read them all, but we’ll get the idea; this page of ads is headed AMUSE AND AMAZE YOUR FRIENDS!
A bony hand flips the page, blah blah...
On the new left-hand page is a so-called “House Ad” defending horror comics; it is headed in glaring black print, WHICH WOULD YOU PREFER FOR YOUR CHILD? Below the head are three comic pictures, side by side. On the extreme left are a number of 12 to 15 year olds shooting dope in a scuzzy basement. On the extreme right is a kid backed up against an alley wall, being menaced by a teenage gang with switchblades. The center picture shows a happy, contented child sitting at home in his own well-lighted living room, a bowl of munchies near at hand. He is reading an issue of CREEPSHOW. In the background, a decidedly 1950s-ish mom and dad are looking at their son approvingly.
There will be a lot of other copy with this House Ad that we won’t have time to read and won’t be interested in anyway (and probably only dedicated movie fanatics will bother to read it at all), but at the bottom is a motto in large black letters: REMEMBER, MOM AND DAD! A LAUREL COMIC IS A MORAL COMIC!
Keep in mind, this is for a moment of screen time that lasts less than two seconds. King just can’t help himself.
Creepshow is one of Romero’s better movies, and it may be his only one to debut at the top of the box office on its opening weekend. And it comes from a long tradition of anthology horror films. There’d been a vogue for anthology films (mostly artsy compilations from the US and Italy) in the ‘40s, but when 1962’s Boccaccio ’70 with segments directed by Fellini, Visconti, and De Sica became an international hit it revived interest in the genre. The first movie to really exploit the trend was a foreign horror anthology, shot almost entirely on soundstages and reveling in theatrical artifice: Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963).
Masaki Kobayashi’s award-winning and highly stylized Kwaidan came out in 1965, the same year as Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors by Freddie Francis, and only a few years before a bunch of fancy arthouse directors had turned in Spirits of the Dead (1968) which has a lot of similarities to Kwaidan: all its segments are based on stories by a single writer (Edgar Allan Poe in Spirits of the Dead Lafcadio Hearn in Kwaidan) with Fellini’s segment in particular being deeply stylized and shot on a soundstage, like Kwaidan. After 1965, the deluge as an avalanche of horror anthologies rampaged through theaters throughout the ‘70s in particular. They boiled down into two types:
1) Anthology horror films with each segment helmed by a different major director like Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) or Two Evil Eyes (1990).
2) Anthology horror films where every segment is shot by the same journeyman director like Tales from the Crypt (1972) directed by Freddie Francis; Tales That Witness Madness (1973) also directed by Freddie Francis; Dead of Night (1977) directed by Dan Curtis; or Tales from the Hood (1995) directed by Rusty Cundieff.
Only three major horror anthologies had all their segments shot by the same auteur director. Each of them are based on the work of a single author, and each of them became a landmark horror movie. They’re also all distinguished for employing a highly stylized, theatrical filming style. They are Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath (1963) based on stories by Chekhov and Tolstoy. Masaki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan (1965) based on Edo-era ghost stories written and updated by Lafcadio Hearn. And Creepshow (1982) directed by George Romero and written by Stephen King.
Anthology horror films would become enormously popular in Asia in the ‘90s and 2000s, starting with Japan’s Really Scary Story v-cinema films from Norio Tsuruta in the early ‘90s, and continuing with the two international Three movies (2002, 2004), and Thai films like Bangkok Haunted (2001), and 4bia (2008). But in Hollywood, Creepshow, would be the last major gasp of the format until 1995’s Tales from the Hood. And after that…pretty much silence.
But there’s nothing silent about Creepshow. Loud, proud, beautifully executed, and totally over-the-top, from the screenplay to the closing credits, this is a movie where the two major voices behind it (King and Romero) are clearly having a blast.