You get the sense that this story was Romero’s opportunity to really go to town and he seizes it with relish and healthy dollops of ick. It offers up a slice of blackly comic macabre with the tale of poor Bedelia Grantham (Viveca Lindfors) and her return to the grave of the father she murdered, miserly Nathan Grantham, only to discover he’s come back for her (there also happens to be some great shoulder-dancing from Ed Harris, as the husband of one of Nathan’s descendants). There are also some great nods for genre aficionados to pick up from casting choices to an appearance from a housekeeper called Mrs Danvers.įather’s Day is a great slice of Gothic schlock to open the main anthology with.

Everyone gets their just desserts, be it revenge or some form of gruesome death. There aren’t really any nice characters here, apart from the unfortunate Jordy Verrill, so there’s a thrill in seeing them face their comeuppance in some way.

Everything is designed with a blackly comic sensibility in a way that is reminiscent of some of Roald Dahl’s nastier stories. It also builds into Creepshow’s big, defining feature: an enormous sense of fun. It works very well as a pulpy, distinctive concept for the film and provides coherence between the disparate stories. Romero transitions between each story with comic book renditions of the opening and closing frames, utilising panel-like split screens and captions throughout. EC artist Jack Kamen was employed to provide the comic art for the film, giving it an added authenticity and visual style. The Creepshow format is a tribute to the EC and DC horror comics of the 1950s and the film practically brims with affection for them. Romero ( Night Of The Living Dead), the pair craft an anthology that can be a little uneven, but is full to the brim with affection not only for the horror genre, but for storytelling as an experience. It makes sense that King would jump at the chance to replicate this format in film, adapting two of his own stories and writing three more especially.

Story anthologies are one of King’s own formats when it comes to his particular brand of storytelling, his novels punctuated by such collections throughout his career (adaptations of some will be popping up throughout this ‘revisiting’ series). Finally, a nasty businessman finds his hermetically sealed apartment slowly filling with cockroaches in They’re Creeping Up On You. Something To Tide You Over finds a vengeful man finding a particularly soggy way of getting even, while The Crate offers a unique, monster-shaped solution to his marital problems. In The Lonesome Death Of Jordy Verrill, a country bumpkin comes across a fallen meteorite that contains voracious alien plantlife. Father’s Day sees a woman guilty of murdering her father on the titular celebration return to the scene of the crime, but she’s not the only one.

Creepshow 1982 stephen king