Exploiting the Archives: Shudder's Creepshow Adaptation Eschews Tales from the Crypt's Nudity-Based Approach To Horror But Succeeds Anyway
Welcome, friends, to a special edition of Spookthology of Terror. Spookthology of Terror is, of course, my epic exploration of all 93 episodes of the iconic HBO horror anthology Tales from the Crypt.
Tales from the Crypt’s notorious 1950s comic book run inspired two fairly solid British anthology films in the early 1970s I will probably get around to covering for this column at some point as well as Stephen King and George Romero’s much-loved 1982 horror anthology Creepshow.
In structure, tone and format Creepshow was a better, purer cinematic reflection of the spooky-funny essence of the Tales From the Crypt television series than official spin-offs like Demon Knight and Bordello of Blood in that it shares the series’ anthology structure instead of focussing on a single story like the American Tales From the Crypt movies.
Creepshow’s vignettes of wildly varying quality were tied together with comic book wraparound segments featuring a fiendish, pun-loving ghoul known as The Creep created in the undead image of beloved Tales From the Crypt hosts like the Crypt-Keeper but also his less famous contemporaries The Old Witch and the Vault-Keeper, who were shut out of the HBO series but jockeyed for supremacy with The Crypt-Keeper in Tales From the Crypt-Keeper, its animated, kid-friendly spin-off.
The Creep returns as the host in Shudder’s Creepshow adaptation. To give the show credit, The Creep is not EXACTLY like the Crypt-Keeper. Sure, the Creep shares the Crypt-Keeper’s love for wordplay that is horrific in multiple ways and he looks so much like the Crypt-Keeper that his design could easily pass for an early, rejected model for the iconic puppet that amused audiences nearly as much as he entertained himself. But he has a slightly different name and there are minor differences in their look as well.
The Creep’s appearances in Creepshow are far more fleeting than the Crypt-Keeper’s revered introductory and closing segments. Where the Crypt-Keeper was a huge presence in Tales From the Crypt The Creep is something closer to a pure mascot.
Creepshow deviates from Tales from the Crypt in other, more substantive manners as well. Watching twelve terror tales working the glorious, tricky intersection of horror and comedy that never even threaten to wander into Cinemax territory only highlighted how intensely Tales From the Crypt’s approach to horror and storytelling is nudity-based.
Copious, wonderfully gratuitous nudity wasn’t just a prominent feature of Tales from the Crypt. In some ways, it was the series’ raison d’être. As a twelve year old boy that’s what I liked most about the show but as a forty-three year old dad I appreciate a horror anthology that exists for more than just the gratuitous display of naked female bodies.
Creepshow establishes that it’s about more than delivering the nudity, violence and profanity pay cable subscribers crave and pay good money for with its harrowing and deeply sad first story, “Gray Matter.” The Stephen King adaptation is a hypnotic and deeply sad companion piece to The Shining that similarly takes a long, hard, self-lacerating look at the human costs of alcoholism and addiction through the story of Richie, a father and husband who sacrifices his humanity and his free will for the sake of feeding his addiction.
In “Gray Matter” the monstrousness of addiction becomes horrifyingly literal. The father’s decline begins with the death of his wife. In despair he retreats further and further from a world with seemingly nothing to offer but pain and heartbreak and into the sad, soused comfort of perpetual inebriation.
Alcoholism and Depression render Richie barely human and then at a certain point he ceases to be human at all. He devolves into a sub-human, avaricious blob that assimilates everything it encounters. What makes “Grey Matter” surprisingly moving in addition to horrifying is the tragically misplaced love and loyalty the boy still feels towards his father, who may be a Lovecraftian horror beyond our imagination but is also the only dad he’s got.
It’s often said that people are not the same when they are in the throes of addiction, that it corrupts and coarsens then, depriving them of their humanity and transforming their lives into a monomaniacal quest to feed a hunger so insatiable it can never be satisfied. That’s the father in “Gray Matter.”
Like The Shining, “Gray Matter” attains an extra-textual emotional resonance from knowing that King was drawing on his own experiences as an alcoholic with a family as well as an addiction to feed when he wrote it. At its best there is a real, surprising emotional heft to Creepshow.
On the surface, Creepshow is about werewolves and vengeful spirits and zombies and at least one Monkey’s Paw. But just under the surface, Creepshow is about the things that really terrify us. I’m talking about loneliness, about sadness, about feeling like a failure the world has passed by.
I found myself identifying with several of the doomed protagonists of Creepshow. That is not true of Tales from the Crypt. I find the characters on that show difficult, if not impossible, to identify with and relate to because I’ve never, for example, even contemplated using a voodoo curse to relieve an eccentric heiress of her fortune.
But the scenarios in Creepshow are much easier to imagine in real life, even as they take a decided and inevitable turn towards the supernatural. In “House of the Head”, the second story, for example, a little girl gets a lovely, expensive new dollhouse she uses to recreate happy domestic tableaus from her household.
It’s a miniature world she lords over as a benign deity until she discovers that the dollhouse has an unwanted, fiendish new addition in the form of a monstrous head whose unexpected appearance precedes a dark shift in the dollhouse’s mood. The sunny, uncomplicated pleasantness that once defined the dollhouse has been replaced by disturbing scenarios full of conflict, discord, unhappiness and ultimately murder and death.
Like “Gray Matter”, the surprising depth of “House of the Head” comes from the way it captures the vulnerability of childhood and adolescence, that sense of powerlessness that comes with dealing with a big, weird, scary adult world full of big, weird, scary adults with torments and issues children can’t begin to understand.
“All Hallows Eve”, another standout vignette, takes a similarly dark and bracing turn. It begins as a Spielbergian creature feature in the Monster Squad/Stranger Things mold about a group of kids going trick or treating a final time before morphing into Funny Games territory once it becomes apparent why these lost souls feel the need to put on costumes one last time and venture out into the night. Here’s a hint: it has nothing to do with candy.
DJ Qualls, who has grown into a surprisingly handsome man, shatters the fourth wall as the depressed slacker protagonist of “The Finger”, a bitter, debt-plagued collectors of random junk whose life changes dramatically when he comes across a disembodied finger that grows and grows and grows until it has become a combination pet, alien-like monster and creature of pure vengeance while Heat Vision & Jack Rob Schrab’s “Bad Wolf Down” knows there’s no formula more foolproof than Nazis vs. werewolves.
Creepshow wouldn’t be an anthology if it wasn’t at least a little uneven and this has its share of standard-issue fare. Any new show that devotes one of its twelve segments to “Monkey’s Paw” is not overly concerned with reinventing the format or breaking radical new ground but on the whole I was quite impressed with Creepshow. I even liked it better than the film that inspired it.
Creepshow is probably the closest we’re liable to get to a new incarnation of Tales From the Crypt any time soon after that unfortunate business with fright master M. Night Shyamalan and the aborted reboot and I’m happy to say that this filled the Tales From the Crypt-sized and shaped hole in my heart quite nicely.
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