Last week, I got my hands on Creepshow, a graphic novella of 64 pages based on the works of Stephen King. It was released by Plume, a division of Penguin, in 1982. Bernie Wrightson and Michele Wrightson have done the art for the comics. Creepshow is published as a tie-in with a movie of the same name, directed by another master of horror, George Romero, the creator of the 'Night of the Living Dead' series of horror films. The movie is an anthology of five horror stories and was a small critical and commercial success at the time.
All five stories are written by King. Three of them were freshly created, and two were already published. The stories are not at all elaborate or complicated, but quite simple and campy, displaying a liberal dose of gore. I felt that they directly addressed the very basic human emotions of terror, anger, greed, and jealousy. A thick slice of wicked humour tops the serving very nicely. The comic and the movie complement each other very well, while at the same time playing to the strengths of each medium.
The movie has a prologue, a wrap-around story, which can't be seen in the comic because the comic itself is a character in this segment. An irritated father throws the Creepshow comic, which his young son is reading, into a dustbin. When the son curses his father in his mind, Creep, the narrator in the comic, appears, and the comic opens itself to reveal the other stories to the kid and to us. In the movie, the kid is played by a young Joe Hill, credited as Joe King. No surprise that Hill changed his second name growing up!
There is a difference in the order of the stories in comics and movies. Other than that, we could see some additional details in the movie that elevate the horror. In the comic, I could sense a level of terror that's implied, which is impossible to perfectly capture in the movie, especially for one that's made in the beginning of the eighties. So probably the movie used some additional footage to compensate for that. The consideration for a conventional runtime may also have contributed to the decision.
Out of the five stories, my favourite is 'Something to Tide You Over', in which a millionaire devises an ingenious plan to torture and kill his wife and her lover but forgets to consider the dead returning. It created more of an impact in the movie because Leslie Nielson turned out to be phenomenal, far surpassing the sketches of his that appeared in the comics. The guy is a genius. I loved the story 'The Crate’, about an abandoned crate inhabited by a perpetually hungry creature. But ultimately, it is proven that against human evil, it doesn't stand a chance.
The opening tale 'Father's Day' and the closing one 'They're Creeping Up On You' are decent horror snippets that could interest fans of the genre. The fifth segment, titled 'The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill', is my least favourite in both versions. It's based on a pre-written short story by King, and I really loved the story, which is amusing though a little too generic. But the translation left a lot to desire. In the comic, it failed to make any impact, while in the movie, Stephen King, whose acting in the segment, made it a lot worse than the comics.
The book and the movie are perfect if you love cheesy, campy horror that doesn't take itself seriously, though one could detect a subdued subtext on the societal decadence somewhere beneath all the macabre, if one may bother to. The collaboration between the masters of horror, King and Romero, was pretty impressive for me.
Interesting.