Spookthology of Terror Special Edition: Creepshow Animated Halloween Special
As some of y’all may have noticed, I have devoted the last few months of this site to writing up Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 selections and the films and podcasts of Travolta/Cage and the Travolta/Cage Project. My goal was to get through my entire backlog of Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 nominees so I can execute the column more quickly and efficiently going forward, as it is integral to its survival, but three months in I still have a ways to go so I am going to continue concentrating on Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 in the weeks and months ahead but I’ll also be writing non-Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 articles as well for the sake of my sanity and yours.
When I found out that there would be a two-part Creepshow animated special for Halloween, I knew that was the kind of niche, page-view-unfriendly, screamingly inessential fare I absolutely had to write about because I fucking love horror anthologies. I can’t get enough of them. Even when they fucking suck, which is much of the time, I still kind of love them just for being horror anthologies, particularly if they aim to be funny as well as spooky. It almost doesn’t matter if they succeed in being funny: the effort is often enough.
If I were to appear on WTF and Marc Maron asked me who my guys were, everybody I’d list would be a horror host. I’d answer confidently, “The Crypt-Keeper of course. Rod Serling and to a lesser extent Jordan Peele, and to a much lesser extent Forest Whitaker. The Creep. The Darkside from Tales from the Darkside. Larry the Outer Limit from The Outer Limits. Murray the Monster from Monsters. Freddy Krueger from Freddy’s Nightmare. David Bowie from that season of The Hunger TV show he inexplicably hosted, but only for that reason. I can go on…”
I love horror anthologies so much that when I was offered a chance to write about every episode of the Treehouse of Horror on an absurdly tight deadline for a relatively modest amount of money I said hell yes despite the immense amount of work (well over ten hours of The Simpsons for starters) and the fact that it would take me away from this site for several days.
While suffering through the later seasons I found myself wondering why I’d taken on the assignment, beyond having recently started re-watching the “Treehouse of Horror” episodes with my sons and my enormous fondness for the early Treehouse of Horror episodes, which hold up beautifully.
It was only today that I had a definitive answer as to why I agreed to the assignment: it’s because Treehouse of Horror is a horror anthology, albeit of the comic variety, and I cannot resist horror anthologies.
I’m glad the work of watching and writing about thirty episodes of the “Treehouse of Horror” released over a period of decades is over and done with forever because it’s already paying off in terms of expanding my frame of reference in a way that’s useful professionally. Just a few days ago I watched a fascinatingly damning, meta “Treehouse of Horror” segment based very loosely on a 1982 Stephen King short story “Survivor Type” in which Homer, left to his own devices after the rest of the family visits Patty and Selma, very quickly resorts to self-cannibalism after he discovers just how delicious his own body parts taste.
Always one to state the obvious, I wrote about how the episode’s plot seemed to comment withering on the show’s own unfortunate predilection for cannibalizing itself in this, its 4784th year on the air. That’s right: The Simpsons pre-dates television. It pre-dates almost everything. The Simpsons has always been with us. It will always be with us. When civilization finally succeeds in destroying itself, new episodes of The Simpsons will somehow emerge from the ashes.
Today I had the surreal experience of watching a straightforward adaptation of something I’d seen a parody of just a few days earlier when the Creepshow animated Halloween special decided to adapt “Survivor Type” as its first terror tale.
That’s gonna leave a mark!
The animation for the Creepshow animated special stays true to its comic book roots with motion comic style animation that’s a decidedly acquired taste. If you like your animation fluid and full the special’s limited animation might drive you a little bonkers. When I was engaged in the story, I found the decision to try to recreate the look and feel of animated comic book pages to be audacious and largely successful. But when the story lost me, in the second vignette, it struck me as one more failed choice in a segment full of them.
The Creepshow animated special is a family affair. That is, if the “family” in question is that of Maine-based Frightmaster Stephen King! Which it is. The first story is based on “Survivor Type” while King’s son Joe Hill wrote the dire “kids today with their damn Twitter and the Facebook with the Myspace and the Friendster!” zombie social media shocker "Twittering from the Circus of the Dead.”
Keifer Sutherland, whose voice sounds like whiskey and gasoline and cigarettes and shattered dreams, is perfectly typecast as Richard Pinzetti, the zonked-out anti-hero of “Survivor Type.” The segment takes the form of a rambling, tragicomic monologue from a ship-wrecked surgeon who tries, and fails to keep himself sane while starving to death on a desolate island with only corpses, birds and a sizable amount of heroin to keep him company by reflecting back on his life.
A consummate survivor who prides himself on his resilience and toughness, the amoral doc was born in poverty, to the kind of drunken, abusive, piece of shit father who makes his children want to succeed to spite him rather than to make him proud. Richard wants to leave the neighborhood behind for the life of a big-time surgeon and he isn’t at all squeamish about committing felonies to make that happen.
So the ambitious young man with the hardscrabble roots sells drugs to help pay for medical school. When he gets caught, he turns snitch because he has no moral compass; all he cares about is survival and getting ahead by any means necessarily.
That same indomitable drive leads Richard to think that he’ll be able to survive the inhuman crucible he finds himself in. Of course, the heroin he smuggled onboard the sunken cruise ship he was on helps him he think his predicament is not as dire as it actually is but every time he gazes down at his diseased, rotting foot he’s reminded that he’s in hell, with seemingly no rescue or respite in sight.
In desperation, the surgeon cuts off his gangrenous appendage but that’s only the beginning. In order to survive he will need to do things no human being should even have to consider, let alone resort to, including cannibalism of both the conventional variety and self-cannibalism.
There is no real twist to “Survivor Type.” Our oddly charismatic anti-hero begins the vignette in an almost impossibly difficult situation that just gets harder and harder and harder until it’s so impossibly grim that it makes even violent, horrible death seem as idyllic as a breezy Summer vacation in Paris by comparison.
In an interview with Monsterland magazine, King observed of “Survivor Type”, “As far as short stories are concerned, I like the grisly ones the best. However, the story 'Survivor Type' goes a little bit too far, even for me.”
To its credit, “Survivor Type” makes a point of going more than a little bit too far. It captures the gruesome body horror of its inspiration on a visceral level. It’s at once a waking nightmare of survival at all costs and a claustrophobic, compelling character study of a tough guy pushed to the point of madness and beyond by cruel fate.
The second segment, based on Joe Hill’s “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” also takes the form of an extended monologue from someone whose predicament grows progressively more deadly. This time our anti-heroine is Blake (Joey King), a sullen, sardonic teenager who decides to live-tweet an unbearable family road trip so that all of Twitter, or at least her 40 to 120 followers, can experience the torment of being locked in a car with the most annoying teenager in the history of the world.
Blake is supposed to embody the vapid self-absorption of the Twitter generation, with its narcissistic delusion that everything it does and thinks and feels is so important it must be shared with the world in real time but she’s so insufferable and obnoxious that every second she’s not suffering the torment of the damned feels like a wasted moment and a blown opportunity.
Then Blake’s family decides to check out a sinister roadside attraction very honestly and accurately called The Circus of the Dead, where a terrified sexy goth ringmaster presides over a circus seemingly made up of brain-hungry, insatiable undead ghouls because, and this would be a twist and a spoiler if it wasn’t in the fucking title, they ARE brain-hungry, insatiable, undead ghouls, a Circus of the Dead, as it were.
How’s that for a non-shocker? At first our obnoxious online over-sharer is like whatevs and #lame but she gradually starts to get more and more into it when her annoying brother becomes part of the gruesome spectacle.
By the third or fourth time Blake has obliviously, guilelessly expressed amazement at how real the zombie holocaust looks and feels you want to yell at your laptop, “That’s because it IS real, you fucking idiot! Run away and stop tweeting!”
For a segment all about Twitter, that actually references Twitter and its trademarks, from an active Twitterer, “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” does not seem to understand how Twitter actually works. Though her follower count goes up while she’s live-Tweeting what she does not realize is a genuine massacre, she doesn’t seem to interact with anyone, or demarcate that she’s in the middle of what is apparently the longest tweet storm in the site’s history.
Blake eventually suffers, and suffers harshly for her obliviousness and stupidity but mostly she just makes us suffer.
Anthologies are, by definition, uneven. So it’s not terribly surprising that the animated Creepshow Halloween special is half good and half bad. One segment works beautifully; the other is a total non-starter.
If nothing else, this special whetted my appetite for Creepshow’s second season, although being a horror anthology super-fan I was going to watch it anyway.
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