George Romero and Stephen King Pay Loving Tribute to E.C. Comics with the Classic 1982 Horror Anthology Creepshow

A terror-iffic treat for boils and ghouls!

Stephen King never wrote an episode of Tales From the Crypt despite being an elder statesman of horror and perhaps the single most successful author in American history.

Yet an argument could be made that he is largely responsible for the HBO adaptation of the classic E.C Comics beloved by boils and ghouls everywhere.

Stephen King didn’t need Tales From the Crypt because he and his friend and collaborator George Romero created their own version of the iconic horror hit with 1982’s Creepshow and, to a lesser extent, Creepshow 2.

It would be difficult to overstate the influence E.C’s horror and suspense comic books had on Creepshow. The cult horror anthology isn’t exactly subtle in its borrowing. The title is a dead giveaway: King and Romero’s Show about a Creep and his terror tales, fear fables and nauseating nuggets owed a tremendous debt to the warped wisecracks of The Crypt-Keeper.

The cover of the horror comic book that figures prominently in the proceedings was drawn by legendary E.C. Comics artist and writer Jack Kamen after King’s first choice for the gig, Graham Ingels, AKA Ghastly Graham Ingels, turned him down. Kamen is also responsible for the film’s iconic poster.

Creepshow’s framing device finds a horror-hating patriarch, played by Tom Atkins, seething with rage towards his son and his love of horror comic books he’s convinced will corrupt his boy.

It’s more of an in-joke than it was at the time because Atkins would become a horror icon thanks to his appearances in this, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (which competed with Creepshow at the October 1982 box office), Night of the Creeps, Maniac Cop and the television version of Creepshow.

I’ve seen Creepshow a few times because of my love of horror anthologies, but this is the first time I’ve seen it since I went back and read pretty much all of E.C. Comics’ 1950s output.

I enjoyed Creepshow more this time because I’m so familiar with its influences, literary as well as cinematic. Creepshow perfectly captures the eerie essence of E.C. Comics and its signature blend of gallows humor, moralism, and gore.

George Romero mirrors the visual language of comic books. With help from make-up and special effects wiz Tom Savini, the frightmasters succeed in their goal of creating the cinematic version of a Tales From the Crypt/Haunt of Fear/The Vault of Horror with five jolting tales of horror.

Things begin in an appropriately ghoulish manner with “Father’s Day,” another tale of murderous immorality punished through posthumous homicide, a ubiquitous theme in E.C. Comics.

The vignette follows the Grantham family, a wealthy clan ruled by malevolent patriarch Nathan Grantham (Jon Loomer), a bootlegger, murderer, and all-around stain on society who is cruel to everyone but saves his most savage cruelty to his long-suffering spinster daughter Bedelia (Viveca Lindfors).

The awful old man has Bedelia’s fiance killed in a fake hunting accident to keep her reliant on him, just as he is reliant upon her, particularly after a stroke.

In rage, Bedelia murders her father with a marble ashtray that reappears in the other four stories as a sort of proto-easter egg.

Bedelia does the deed on Father’s Day when her demented dad angrily demands a cake. You can’t keep a bad man down. A maggot-festooned Nathan emerges from his grave on a quest for revenge while still raging about the cake he still feels he’s owed.

It’s a taut terror tale that is nothing revolutionary but proves effective due to its gruesomely inspired gore and fine cast, which includes a young Ed Harris (with hair!) as one of Nathan’s victims.

Stephen King generally limits his appearances in films to M. Night Shyamalan-like cameos. King is the star of the next nasty nugget, "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” King plays the titular goober as the stupidest dumb dumb in the history of idiocy.

It’s weird and oddly refreshing to see a non-actor who achieved more success than anyone in the history of horror fiction play a cartoon caricature of an impossibly stupid rube.

King isn’t just the star of "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” The goofy gorefest is pretty much a one-man show, as the titular redneck spends much of the segment talking to himself in the absence of company.

The morbid morsel finds the titular man of the soil finding a mysterious meteor. Being possibly the dumbest man in the history of film, if not the universe as a whole, he’s excited about the prospect of selling it to a fancy egghead university type for two hundred dollars, which is seemingly the largest sum of money Jody can imagine in the malfunctioning walnut he calls a brain.

The simpleton makes the mistake of touching the meteor. It gets under his skin, literally and figuratively. The meteor transforms Jody into a tree man whose skin is covered with grass and moss until he resembles someone’s lawn more than a human being.

“Funny” episodes in ghoulish anthologys generally succeed as neither comedy nor horror, but there’s something winningly cartoonish and silly about “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill.” It marks the beginning as well as the end of King as a big-screen physical comedian, and while the violent vignette isn’t remotely scary, it’s nevertheless a winningly silly one-off from one of our most beloved entertainers.

Not sure what happened to this actor. He was a bit of a ham, to be honest.

Speaking of out of character performances, Leslie Nielsen, who had already begun his transformation from serious dramatic actor to broad physical comedian, is boldly cast against type in “Something to Tide You Over” as Richard Vickers, a wealthy man with a sinister scheme to torture his wife and her lover before relegating them to watery graves.

In 1980 Nielsen was a standout in the Airplane! cast and first played Frank Drebin in the short-lived 1982 Police Squad! but he’s uncharacteristically terrifying as a wealthy, powerful man who is horrifyingly matter-of-fact and casual in the way he enacts revenge on Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson, in his second film role after 1981’s Body Heat), his wife’s lover.

The affable sociopath buries the younger man up to his head on a beach so that when the tide comes, it will drown him, just as it will drown Richard’s unfaithful wife as well.

There are two basic plots for E.C. comics. One involves someone unexpectedly being a vampire. The other entails people who’ve been screwed coming back from the dead looking for revenge.

“Something to Tide You Over” is a skillful representation of the second variety of horror anthology. It’s Leslie Nielsen as you’ve never seen him before: as an eminently hiss-worthy villain who receives an inevitable comeuppance when, in a highly predictable non-twist, the lovers come back from the dead looking for revenge.

Creepshow is a star-studded affair for a modestly budgeted horror anthology. Danson and Ed Harris were not yet stars when they appeared here, and Nielsen wasn’t yet a comedy superstar, but the film boasts plenty of established stars, like Hal Holbrook, who plays tweedy Professor Henry Northrup, and Scream Queen Adrienne Barbeau as his wife Billie, a drunken nightmare wife so obnoxious it’s impossible NOT to root for her vicious murder.

Sour misogyny is the engine that keeps the weakest segment sputtering along. Holbrook’s milquetoast academic is completely dominated by his shrewish wife, who constantly asks him what he’d do without her. He’s too henpecked to respond, honestly, “Possibly experience a moment of peace and contentment for the first time in decades.”

Henry just barely holds onto what’s left of his sanity by fantasizing about murdering his wife. He sees a way out of his predicament when a mysterious crate arrives at the university with a fluffy, fanged monster Henry would very much like to introduce to the bane of his existence and a blight on humanity as a whole.

The weakest vignette leads to the last and strongest, “They’re Creeping Up On You.” E.G Marshall delivers a tour de force performance as Upson Pratt, a miserable, pre-transformation Scrooge who delights in his own curdled villainy and aggressive disregard for the sanctity of human life.

Upson is a miserable bastard completely cut off from the rest of the world and his better angels. He’s a Howard Huges-like germaphobe in a gleaming white penthouse of Kubrickian iciness.

The misanthropic miser lives to make others suffer. It’s not enough for him to win; his enemies must suffer humiliating defeats. When he learns that a business rival has ended his life, Upson makes no effort to hide his glee.

Upson is rich and powerful, but that does not matter to the cockroaches that penetrate his antiseptic abode, first one by one and then en masse.

Except for Mr. White (David Early), a black handyman who taunts Upson, Marshall is the only actor onscreen for the segment. “They’re Creeping Up On You” plays like Robert Altman’s Nixon meditation Secret Honor reconceived as an insect-themed terror tale.

Creepshow was not a monster hit but rather a modest commercial success that led to two sequels, a Shudder television adaptation and an unofficial TV adaptation in Tales From the Darkside, which in turn produced Tales From the Darkside: The Movie, which may not be official but is much closer to being Creepshow 3 than the 2006 film of the same name, which did not involve King or Romero or anyone associated with the first two films.

King and Romero’s love of E.C. Comics led them to create not just a loving homage but an alternate multi-media world rooted in ghouls and gag/creeps and comedy.