Creepshow (Romero, 1982)

Creepshow

Year: 1982

Dir: George A. Romero

"Is that camp or kitsch, Harry?" "It's stupid.”

Let me start by saying that I could easily be writing about Creepshow 2 here, and I almost decided to do just that (especially in light of the brutal and brilliant relevance of The Raft these days-“I don't believe in oil slicks man!”). But I'm not. I'm writing about Creepshow. There was just no denying the greatest of the horror anthology films and one of the most profitable collaborations in the history of horror that is Creepshow. Totally superfluous opening--out of the way.

I want to avoid making this a history lesson on the horror anthology (***NOTE*** I totally did make this into a history lesson on the horror anthology. Sorry. If you want to skip it and just read about the goddamn movie already, skip this paragraph and go to the last like 4 sentences of the next one ***END NOTE***), but some context would probably be helpful. On the most basic level, a horror anthology film presents a number of different self-contained narratives (we could just call them short films for convenience), all horrific. Anthology-got it? Oftentimes, these individual tales are encompassed within some larger “wraparound” story. These wraparound stories serve as a sort of backdrop or binding tie for all of the individual stories. So, for example, the wraparound story in Creepshow is that each tale is drawn from the pages of the horror comic books collected by the boy we meet at the beginning (the film is an homage to the E.C. comics of the 50's, such as Tales From the Crypt and The Vault of Horror).

As a genre, horror anthologies goes back much further than most people suspect. The first example of a recognizable horror anthology could be Richard Oswald's Eerie Tales from 1919, which included a rendition of Poe's “The Black Cat.” Oswald would go on to direct another early anthology(ish), The Living Dead aka Ghastly Tales which was actually meant partly as a parody of German expressionist cinema, and, in particular, the legendary Waxworks, directed by Paul Leni in 1924, which is another early example of a horror anthology (Leni would go on to direct one of the most important haunted house films of all time in The Cat and the Canary). One other important early anthology of note is Fritz Lang's (yes, THAT Fritz Lang) Destiny (1921) in which the character of Death relates three stories of heartbreak and loss to a young woman who is trying to reunite herself with her lover. The shocking twist of an ending to the main wraparound story in Destiny is a crucial moment in the development of the horror anthology.

Destiny. It's serious.

After the German anthology boom, there was mainly dead air until the early 40's which saw a few American entries to the genre, as well as perhaps the most influential horror anthology of all time, 1945's Dead of Night. The English production represented the first few rolling pebbles in what would become, in the 60's and early 70's, an avalanche of British horror anthologies. Examples would include the films of Roy Ward Baker (most famous for 1958's A Night to Remember), e.g. The Monster Club (1980), The Vault of Horror (1973), and Asylum (1972), as well as other luminary films such as Kevin Connor's From Beyond the Grave (1973) and Peter Duffell's The House that Dripped Blood (1971). Most of these films resulted from the turf war that erupted between film production companies Hammer and Amicus over the British horror market, which Hammer had dominated throughout the 60's. Amicus was looking for new ways to draw people into their horror films, and so began experimenting with the anthology format. They saw some success with the early experiments, and poof, we have the British horror anthology wave. There were other notable horror anthologies produced during this time throughout the rest of the world as well, including Italian horror genius Mario Bava's 1963 film Black Sabbath and Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan (1963) (likely the only horror anthology that is ever going to get a Criterion release :( ). Amicus and Hammer squashed the beef in the early 80's(mainly because both companies shifted away from horror films. Hammer because their trademark Gothic-style was becoming less and less popular with the rise of more “edgy,” “sophisticated” fair [e.g. Rosemary's Baby and Night of the Living Dead, both from 1968]. Amicus because they misjudged the change in horror taste to mean a moving away from horror in general and decided to shift focus to science fiction films, which just fucking never works). This left the good old U.S. of A. to take up the horror anthology mantle, which brings us (FINALLY) to Creepshow. As you may recall from like two sentences of a really long parenthetical ago, George A. Romero had just finished dropping a huge elbow from the sky on the British anthology wave with his Night and Dawn of the deads, and so may have been feeling some pangs of guilty conscience. So he and Stephen King (also a rising star in horror at the time for his books Carrie (1974), Salem's Lot (1975) and others) decided to team up a la LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh (Tom Savini can be Chris Bosh) to make a horror anthology film of their very own. King wrote (two of the segments are based directly on previously existing short stories of his) and Romero directed (Savini, a legendary horror makeup artist and general fan favorite, acted and did makeup). Creepshow was born, and released in 1982.

“So what the fuck is the movie about dude?” Shut up and I'll tell you man. Creepshow consists of 5 main stories, a prologue, an epilogue, and the background of the E.C. comics that I previously mentioned. We'll take the prologue first, and move through the 5 stories, and end with the epilogue, analyzing as we go (and whistling while we work).

The prologue shows us a young boy (Billy, played by Stephen King's real life son), reading some comic books entitled “Creepshow” (the comics they used as props in the film, along with the film's poster art, were all inked by Jack Kamen, who was one of the original artists for E.C. comics), and subsequently getting smacked around by his rampaging father (Stan), who also takes away his comics and throws them in the trash. The usual intellectual decay-style phrases are batted about a bit and the mother suggests that Stan need not be so hard on Billy. Back in his room, Billy is mourning the loss of his comics and notices a sound at his window. A ghostly, skeletal figure hovers outside, beckoning Billy to come closer.

THE CREEP.

This character, “The Creep,” serves as the host for the rest of the stories. A wind blows one of the comic books out of the trash, the pages begin to flip, and the stories start to come to life, with the cartoon frames shading into live action. I can't really explore everything that happens in the prologue because there is a second part to it and I don't want to give it away yet/get ahead of myself, etc. But, a few interesting things should be noted. First of all, we should immediately recognize one of the most common tropes in Romero films in the plight of Billy, namely, the patented Romero-style-social-commentary about the lives of oppressed individuals (as well as those who do the oppressing). This is particularly evident in Night of the Living Dead, if we pay special attention the way race is treated in that film and the cultural events surrounding its release (race riots in most major American cities, assassination of MLK, etc.). With Billy, a similar phenomenon seems to be happening. The character is kept down by his tyrannical father, who, it is crucial to note, states his case in explicitly religious terms, claiming that God's whole purpose in creating fathers was to have them take care of stuff, protect their (who they are is never specified) way of life and their children. By extension, if we keep in mind God's typical status as Holy Father, we can assume that Stan is of the mind that HIS particular way of life is synonymous with God's. However, Billy becomes liberated by the very thing his father (again, by extension, God as well) is attempting to protect him from: The Creep, who also represents the intrusion of the supernatural (similarly, the very thing Stan invokes to justify his disciplining of his child) into the real. For Billy, the supernatural in the form of The Creep is much more real and immediate than the supernatural of his father, namely God. So here, while exploiting the typical comic book trope of generational differences, and his personal interest with repressed populations (in this case children), Romero also seems to be suggesting that perhaps the justifications at the heart of many of these disagreements (be they over trashy comics, sex, violent media, reality tv or whatever else) are merely different tokens of the same type. God is utilized to justify rejection and the world-hopping logic of escapism and immersion is utilized to justify acceptance, but both are ultimately supernatural explanations, in some sense severed from “reality” (which itself becomes a nebulous concept when all justifications become supernatural, as the bleeding of the comic book art into live action illustrates). Like I said, there is much more to say about this prologue, but much of it wouldn't make sense without the epilogue in hand, so we'll put it off until later.

The first proper story of the bunch is entitled “Father's Day” and it was written by King specifically for the film. “Father's Day” is the story of a rich family (the mother Sylvia, her son Richard, her daughter Cass, Cass's new husband Hand [played by a young, sprightly Ed Harris], and their aunt Bedelia) who has gotten together on father's day for their annual dinner, part celebration, part memorial for the family patriarch Nathan Grantham, who as murdered by one of his daughters (Bedelia) seven years previous. Nathan, we learn, was an awful father who was paranoid Stalin-style about his money and gold-diggers trying to get at it. He suspects Bedelia's fiance of conspiring to take his fortune and arranges to have him murdered, which he bills to Bedelia as a hunting accident. The death of her fiance, and her suspicion of her father sends Bedelia over the edge. She murders Nathan on father's day by bashing his head in with a marble ashtray (a prop which has a place in each of the five stories for the discerning viewer. WHO CAN FIND THEM ALL!?) as he screams at her for his father's day cake. Seven years later, she is making her annual visit to his grave on the anniversary of his murder. During this particular visit, the corpse of Nathan rises from the grave to exact revenge on his ungrateful progeny and retrieve the cake he never got. The first to go is Bedelia, who is sitting right on his grave drinking whiskey when Nathan rises up and strangles her to death, screaming hilarious obscenities about his fucking cake (for any literature buffs out there, King seems to include a nod to Finnegan's Wake here. Nathan does not rise until Bedelia spills some whiskey on his grave. As you may remember, in Joyce's novel, Finnegan falls to his death from a ladder as he works on constructing a wall, but is resurrected when whiskey is spilled on his corpse at the wake. Additionally, the word for whiskey in Gaelic roughly means “water of life”).

The family is murdered in turn as Nathan rampages around the mansion looking for his cake, culminating in an incredible finale in which the head Sylvia is presented as the centerpiece of a cake (complete with lit candles and frosting decorations) to her two children by Nathan's corpse. Besides providing some of the most memorable quotes in the whole film, I think there is a lot going on in this segment. I think the nature of returning (to an event, a place, etc.) is at the core of the story. Clearly, we have a classical revenant (a folkloric figure of the corpse who returns again and again to haunt the living) in Nathan, but the character of Bedelia is presented in a very similar light. She arrives in an old and broken down car, disheveled and distant, never making a physical appearance before the family (Ed Harris' character dies after going to look for her when she doesn't show up), all suggesting a ghostly aspect to the character. King/Romero, I think, are here getting onto something profound about our everyday lives. To what degree, we are asked by Bedelia and the family who gathers every year on the same day, are we all revenants? How much of our lives is repetition, coming back for, returning to? If we are to take Bedelia, who returns over and over again to one place and one event on one day every year, as our main example, it seems that the answer is “a great deal.” This, again, is a theme that Romero explores over and over again. Think, for example, of the living dead (a difficult and paradoxical concept that could be explored ad infinitum if we wanted to do that) who, in Dawn of the Dead, return again to the places they spent their living (a word which may not even make sense if we're talking about the living dead) days: the mall. Beyond the commentary about society obvious in this (yes consumerism blah blah), Romero, both in Dawn and here in “Father's Day” seems to be exploring the idea that we are all, at the most basic level, automata; revenants who build our lives out of the constant performing of tiny sets of rituals (holiday celebrations, morning routines, etc.). However, there does seem to be some hope. The one true revenant in the story is not after something general; he does not want to return to his daily routine as the zombies from Dawn do. Rather, Nathan is after a particular, perhaps totally unique, event and a tiny, specific item that was denied to him in life (again a problematic use of the term): a cake. Though we are all essentially creatures who live by rote, it is still the intrusion, perhaps the violent intrusion, as in Nathan's case, of specificity, uniqueness, and distinctness that makes us creatures at all.

The second story “The Lonesome Death of Jory Verrill” was adapted from King's short story “Weeds” for the film. For me this is the main event. The most interesting and dark of all the stories, it makes the film worthwhile all on its own. The story is also perhaps the simplest of all fives main stories, and features King acting brilliantly as the title character. We follow a stereotypical backwoods hick who witnesses a meteor crash into his back lawn. He dreams of selling his find to “the College” (an importantly vague entity, which we'll talk about later) for $200 to pay off his bank loan. He burns his hands trying to pick up the piping hot space artifact, and unfortunately breaks it in half when he tries to cool it off with a bucket of water, likely devaluing it (I just kept thinking “pawn stars pawn stars pawn stars”). He decides to try to sell the two halves anyway, both of which are now oozing a neon blue-green substance. After Jordy returns to his shack, we notice that everything the meteor has come near contact with is covered with a strange, green, plantlike substance. Jordy notices some strange green growths/wounds on his hands, which he attributes to the burn. Eventually, the alien vegetation moves to cover the entire house and farm, growing more clearly all over Jordy's own body.

He becomes manically itchy and can only satiate himself with a bath. By morning, Jordy has essentially been totally taken over the alien life, unable to speak or move coherently. His final act is to shoot himself in the head with a shotgun, revealing to the viewers that the plants had invaded his very brain. Now, as I mentioned earlier, Romero is famous for his social commentary (though I think he works just as well as an explorer of the human experience individually). Here, however, is by far his most powerful exploration of societal relations (I should mention that a lot credit likely ought to go to King as well), and specifically class relations (yes I include Night of the Living Dead here. Oh bring it on). The character of Jordy Verrill, as a stand in for all of the fringe elements of society (poor, insane, underdeveloped, etc.), exhibits beautifully the desperation and fear in the lives of these classes. For example, Jordy shows a profound distrust of modern, advanced society in many ways. First, we have the nebulous entity of “the college” (which we should note is explicitly conceived of as being “up” there, elevated in some way). Jordy has two visions of the college. First, he goes into the “Department of Meteors” office and demands his $200 for the meteor. The college professor tries to rip him off by offering a meager $50 for the item. Jordy stands strong, claiming that his parents didn't raise an idiot. The dichotomy between traditional folk wisdom and the modern intelligentsia is thus framed, with, as is commonly the case on the surface for the outwardly proud “folk,” the traditional wisdom winning out, and Jordy getting his deserved $200 (we need to keep in mind also that this whole episode is put in motion by Jordy's need to repay a bank loan, another common problem for the lower economic classes). However this perfect world in which Jordy gets what he actually deserves is immediately shattered when he breaks the meteor in half. His self-confidence is erased and he refers to himself as a lunkhead, illustrating the deep-seated self hatred that is commonly instilled in those that Jordy represents (Jordy also often comments on how his family's [a family that we might assume is to include all of the outcasts of society] luck is always B-A-D bad). The defiant attitude toward the college is also absent from the second vision, in which Jordy sheepishly brings in his broken meteor and is harshly rebuked by the undeniably more intelligent professor who claims that the specimen isn't even worth two cents and kicks Jordy out. Another instance of this mistrust comes when Jordy goes to call a doctor about the growths on his hands. He has a vision of entering the doctors office, which is populated by strange instruments and moving skeletal models, not to mention a menacing doctor who advises that Jordy's fingers will have to be removed and that it will be very, very painful. Jordy quickly abandons the idea of consulting modern medicine to help his ailment. This beak in knowledge and ways of life between traditional folk and, shall we call them, East coast types, is also illustrated in a short segment in which Jordy has a conversation with an image of his deceased father, who appears in a mirror and instructs Jordy not to get into the bath to ease his itching because, NO DOY, water makes weeds grow. Jordy eventually rejects his father's wisdom and enters the bath anyway, again overriding and undermining the commonsense, traditional approach. Another key to the story emerges from Jordy's conversation with his father, namely, a deep and sorrowful resignation to the hand that has been dealt to Jordy and his kind. After his father tells him that getting into the tub would be like signing his death warrant, Jordy, reverting to a child-like state, gently asks “I'm a goner already daddy, ain't I? Got that stuff out of the meteor on me and I'm gone, ain't I?” Jordy recognizes that there is literally nothing he can do to escape his life, and that he has been doomed from the beginning. Furthermore, this has been orchestrated and brought to be by forces utterly alien to Jordy's life (literally, in this case, but representative of the strange, incomprehensible forces of the stock market, governmental politics and procedures, and the like). At the same time, Jordy also recognizes that, as sorrowful as his state is, it is only getting worse and there is no remedy in site Just moments before the appearance of his father, Jordy resignedly states “I'm growing,” a statement that would seem to refer to a number of growings, e.g. the growing wealth disparity between the rich and poor, the growing numbers of jobless, etc. This resignation is also signaled by a clip from William Wellman's 1937 film A Star is Born that plays on Jordy's television as he is finally recognizing the depth of his problem. The dialogue concerns the nature of the workers of America, who turned the country into something more than a wilderness. The doers vs. the dreamers. The raw work ethic of those who went out to make a new country, realize their dreams and worked incredibly hard, not complaining, enduring the elements, etc. is praised by the old woman who is speaking for most of the conversation. At the same time, this idyllic picture of the American frontier and the protestant work ethic is sharply dismissed as a myth by Jordy when he begins screaming “NO!” as he notices the full extent of the growth outside and over his home, in exact coincidence with the woman in the film asking “Don't you understand all that?” The final straw comes when Jordy has been totally invaded by the alien growth and he lays immobile in a corner of his now totally grass shack, listening to a farm report on the radio. However, this farm report has almost nothing to do with farms as we traditionally conceive of them, but rather is a report on how farm related stocks are doing on Wall Street. It is during this broadcast that Jordy begins crying to God to let his luck finally be good just this once and shoots himself in the head. Ultimately, there is a brilliant type of reversal going on here. On its surface, the story is about how societal outcasts are viewed as, essentially, invasive species, muddying up our utopian modern lives with folk remedies and generally traditionalist ways. Indeed, Jordy, as a representative of these classes, literally becomes an invasive species. However, the film suggests that this knife cuts both ways, as Jordy only becomes invasive after himself being invaded. The alien growth seems to represent the intrusion of modern life onto Jordy's ways of doing things (as we hinted at earlier, when discussing Jordy's resignation in the face of alien forces). I think the final radio broadcast of the so-called farm report that totally ignores the concerns of real farmers out in the fields is the ultimate symbol of this takeover. Lots more could be said here, and there are certainly other ways to take this story (the environmental undertones alone could take up a whole other discussion), but we'll move on.

The third story is entitled “Something to Tide You Over” and stars Ted Danson as Harry Wentworth and Leslie Nielsen as Richard Vickers. Harry has been having an affair with Richard's wife Becky (Gaylen Ross), and so Richard goes to Harry's home to confront him about it. Instead of directly attacking Harry, Richard simply plays him a tape recording of Becky's voice. On the tape, she sounds terrified and is screaming for Harry's help. Richard gets Harry to follow him back to his private beachfront estate, and proceeds to force Harry, at gunpoint, to climb into a hole that he dug in the beach, burying him up to his neck once he gets in. Richard then sets up an elaborate television set in front of Harry's face, which shows him a live feed of Becky who has been placed in a similar situation. Richard returns to his home where he will watch the couple die from remote cameras, leaving Harry to die and watch Becky die as well. Later that night, Richard is at home, just fartin around, when he seems to hear some strange voices calling him. He gets a bit nervous, but figures anything entering his home would have been caught by his arsenal of alarms and security cameras. He takes a shower. We then are shown where the voices are coming from, two strange figures are indeed plodding around Richard's fortress, having eluded his defenses. They are shrouded in a cloud, but they sound wet. Richard emerges from the shower and hears the things. He immediately thinks that Harry must have somehow survived his little game, pulls out a gun and starts yelling (a common reaction to home invasion in film, I've found. Go figure). Eventually he discovers that the two invaders are the living corpses of Harry and Becky, all covered with seaweed and barnacles and junk.

Yikes bikes.

He shoots them, but to no avail. They converge on him, and the film ends with Richard shown buried up to his neck in sand on the beach at night. He screams about how long he can hold his breath, and the story ends. I'll be right up front about this, I think this is probably the weakest story of the bunch, from a philosophical standpoint, but I do think there are a couple things we should take note of. First, in “Something to Tide You Over” we might have on our hands the first explicit consolidation of the idea of torture porn which currently dominates the horror landscape. I mean this is pretty clear-cut. Richard is getting pleasure out of watching two people die in a torturous manner. So the film is interesting in that respect. However, there is also the added dimension that part of the porn, for Richard, is that he is watching someone WATCH SOMEONE ELSE die (specifically a loved one, here). For me this is the most interesting aspect of the film, and seems to be disturbingly prescient with respect to our current culture of voyeurism. It is no longer enough for us to watch torture or other disgusting things on our own, rather, we must also watch others watch these same things, almost as if we have to double (or triple or quadruple) our perverse satisfaction by watchings others experience what we experienced. Take a look at the dramatic rise of so-called “reaction videos” for example. These are videos that record, predictably, the reactions of individuals to other revolting or disturbing videos (many of which receive some measure of fame on the internet). So if I watch a video that makes me cringe, now I can go watch others cringe at the same video. It's a deeply strange and disturbing development in our culture, and one that seems to be presaged in “Something to Tide You Over.” In addition to this, however, the film seems to suggest that there is also a way in which the true horror of this situation escapes our view (as the shuffling phantoms escape the view of Richard's security network). Specifically, it is the idea that, more than we can realize, in viewing this type of material, and, even further, enjoying it, we ourselves come to share more with the subjects of the torture than we might be comfortable admitting. Richard, in the end, comes to share the exact same experience that he put his victims through, and there is a strange, melancholy sort of camaraderie in the voices of the drowned lovers when they beckon Richard to join them in the hole they have dug for him on the beach. Similarly, if we think a bit further about the phenomenon of reaction videos, those who are watched in a reaction video themselves become the subject of a type of torture porn. They are tortured by having to watch another being tortured, and so themselves become the subject of torture porn. It's a very desperate and bleak view on how we come to find closeness with people today in a digital age (don't even get me started), but one that I think strikes pretty close to the reality of things. When actual human contact becomes difficult, we substitute it with extreme and disturbing hypercontact, hoping to forge some type of bond, any kind at all, and it seems to me that reaction videos and torture porn have something to do with this. If I can just bury myself deep enough inside your guts, even via a digital link, we have something. There are also some interesting digs at capitalism in the film (e.g. when Richard states “On the subject of what is mine, I am not sane, at all”), and lots of moral stuff about cheating, societal expectations about relationships, etc. and I could go on about that stuff, but I think the torture porn is the meat of it, and I blew my analytical load on Jordy Verrill just a bit.

Okay next up is “The Crate” which is, I think, the longest of the segments, and probably the most traditional in terms of its story and monster, etc. but also one of the most fun. It is also the only other story based on existing short fiction written by King. The story revolves around a mysterious crate (ah HA!) that is discovered by a janitor under a staircase in a university science building. The crate is labeled as having come back from an arctic expedition in the late 1800's and has laid unopened in the building since then (shades of Horror Express abound, well only for like 2 minutes and if you're crazy). The janitor calls in Professor Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver) to examine the crate with him. Dexter leaves his friend Professor Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook) high and dry at a faculty gathering to go examine the find. Henry's wife Wilma (Adrienne Barbeau) , we can't help but notice, is an insufferable bitch and Henry spends most of his time daydreaming about how to murder her, often doing so to loud applause from those around him. Back at the university, Dexter and janitor Mike attempt to open the crate, hearing strange sounds coming from inside. They finally get the thing open and Mike is promptly attacked, dragged inside, and ATEN. We get our first appearance of the monster, which is big, round, shaggy and nasty lookin (kind of reminds me of the iconic Zuni fetish doll from Trilogy of Terror, an earlier American horror anthology from 1975, but again, this might only hold if you're stupid). Dexter is, understandably, fuckin flipping, and runs out into the hallway to find someone to tell about it. He attempts to convince grad student Charlie Gereson (Robert Harper) of what he has just seen, and finally gets Charlie to investigate himself. When they return to the scene of the crime, the crate is gone, and there is a trail of blood leading back underneath the staircase. Charlie checks it out and then checks out of this life BECAUSE HE GETS EATEN. Now Dexter is really tweaking, and he is too scared to go to the police, so he goes to Henry's house. He tells Henry the whole story, and Henry inexplicably believes every word. Henry gets a bright idea, gives Dexter some sleeping pills, locks him in his study, and leaves Wilma (who was out for the night) a note with a bogus story to lure her to campus (the story involves a student who Dexter was boinking and who is now freaking out and needs a woman to talk to, etc.). Henry gets the building early and cleans up all the blood and guts so Wilma won't be tipped off that anything super creepy is going on. Wilma shows up and Henry gets her under the stairs (the girl is SERIOUSLY freaking out). When she sees that nobody is there she starts bitching and then the frozen ape monster jumps out and eats the shit out of her. Henry then manages to chain the crate up and dumps it in an old quarry/lake. The next morning he and Dexter vow to keep everything secret, because they're tight like that and Wilma was seriously a bitch. The film ends by showing the creature blowing up the crate underwater and, we assume, escaping.

Crate Monster vs. Zuni fetish doll vs. Horror Express yaaaaaa

I think that the film is interesting for its presentation of the professor characters. One of the most prevalent stereotypes in contemporary American society is of the sort of austere, above-it-all, nearly monk-like life of the mind lived by college professors and intellectuals in general. Now I don't know if you know anything about college professors, but fairly often, they're among the most petty, short tempered, sexually deviant people you will ever come across (no offense to all the college professors reading this, yea right roflolmaomg2g). I think the film does a pretty honest and funny job of putting the stereotypical college professor through the ringer. To get a bit more specific, the neuroses that the two professors have in the film are particularly biting considering what they study. Dexter, who is supposed to be some kind of professor of science (biology maybe?) would stereotypically be hard-headed, logical, methodical, Spock, etc. and yet he is quickly reduced to a stammering street guy covered in blood when he is presented with something he cannot explain. To me this seems like a bit of a dig at the so called “objectivity” of science, and a questioning of the idea that science is truly open to any and all new information. That is to say, Romero might be suggesting that there are some inherent, unacknowledged biases within the scientific enterprise itself that, for example dictate what is admissible as evidence in the first place and what is allowable as possible. Science cannot account for the creature in the crate, and is thrown immediately into disarray. In Henry's case, he is a professor English, which has less of a clear cut stereotype attached to it, but I would say something about romance (Romeo and Juliet, romantic poetry, etc.) and having a better idea about love than most people would be pretty close. This is totally undermined by Henry's totally baffled and miserable relationship with his wife, and his murderous inclinations toward her. I think it might be natural to get nervous about the seemingly negative attitude the film takes towards women, presenting Wilma as the typical nagging bitch wife who is good for nothing but monster feed, but for me the focus is more on the fact that it is Henry, a distinguished intellectual, who feels this way, and the implications that has for the rest of society. That is to say, if those among us who are supposed to be our best and brightest are miserable and daydream about shooting their wives, what hope have we?

The last of the five main stories is entitled “They're Creeping Up on You!” and stars E.G. Marshall as Upson Pratt, a bitter, angry millionaire business owner who lives sequestered in his hyper-sterilized, technologically advanced super apartment, isolated from the rest of the world below. Pratt is basically a bubble boy, terrified of any kind of dirt, disease or animal life. His only interaction with the rest of the world comes through his telephone and an intercom system he uses to contact anyone who might be outside his apartment (mailman, doorman, etc.). Pratt receives a phone call informing him that a former employee (Norman Castonmeyer) has committed suicide due to being fired, news that Pratt rejoices at for not having to worry about the former employee complaining to him etc. He's kind of a dick. Pratt, throughout the film, keeps finding cockroaches around his apartment and spraying them with pesticide. He places a call to the building super, pelting him with racially charged language in an attempt to get him to fix the cockroach problem. He keeps finding the bugs and later receives a call from Castonmeyer's widow Lenore (perhaps a reference to Poe's The Raven), who curses Pratt for driving her husband to suicide. Pratt is, predictably, amused by her hysterics and hangs up on her. The cockroaches begin showing up in more and more places in larger numbers, including in his blender, in his cereal boxes, etc. The power goes out and Pratt goes into hiding in his safe room, which, I guess, is SUPER sanitized and sealed off. Once inside, he gets another phone call from Lenore, who screams at him that she hopes he dies over and over. As this is happening the bed breaks open to reveal that it was filled with roaches. Pratt is overcome by the bugs, has a heart attack, and dies on the spot.

His doorbell rings and the voice of the building super comes over the intercom, asking Pratt “Bugs got your tongue?” The roaches burst forth from inside Pratt's body and fill up the glass room. Basically, the story acts as an inverted Jordy Verrill tale, telling the other end of the social narrative. As in the Verrill, Pratt is overrun by an invasive species, which we can take as being the lower social classes that Pratt has gone to such lengths to isolate himself from. Also, like Verrill, Pratt essentially becomes that which invades him, emphasizing the point made in the earlier story that the status as invasive social species can be as readily applied to those at the top of the hierarchy as it can to those at the bottom. The film also seems to suggest that the more one attempts to maintain the barriers between these social classes, as Pratt does by totally isolating himself, the more there will be violent breakings down of those barriers (I refer back to my comments about Night of the Living Dead). Pratt is only fully invaded at the exact moment that he attempts to fully isolate himself. The disembodied voice of the super represents the revenge of all of the oppressed social classes against the manipulation of individuals such as Pratt. At the same time, however, there is an interesting dynamic there because in very basic terms, the super has power over Pratt, because he controls what goes on in the building, where Pratt is only a tenant. So, while the upper classes have control of all the traditional avenues of power (economic, political, etc.) there do exist these strange lapses in the capitalist logic that allow for individuals of a lower social status to gain some control over the lives of those above them on the social ladder. The utilization of a pest (the cockroach) in the film points the idea that if enough of these small cracks in capitalism are exploited, a much larger result could possibly be gained. Again, as in the story of Verrill, a popular myth about the development of American culture, namely the eccentric yet benevolent businessman who lives in an ivory tower (Pratt's apartment is literally pure white) about the rest of the world, is sent up the flagpole and exposed.

The film wraps up with the conclusion to the prologue. The morning after his father threw out Billy's comics, two garbage men (played by Marty Schiff and Tom Savini) find them in the trash and flip through them nostalgically. They notice that an order form for a genuine Haitian voodoo doll has been cut out. We go back inside Billy's house to see his father Stan suffering from some sudden neck pain. We see Billy up in his room stabbing a voodoo doll with a pin. This ending to the prologue represents, first the final statement on the part of the oppressed against the oppressor, and second, a somewhat pessimistic final note that maybe the best we can do against oppressive systems is voodoo. However, this need not be totally pessimistic, as we discussed earlier the possibility of the supernatural encroaching upon the real, a possibility which is validated further here by the fact that Billy's voodoo actually works. I think this is an important lesson to be drawn from the film's ending. Maybe all we have is voodoo, but voodoo actually works.

A couple notes. 1) I don't know if all my posts will be this long. Maybe they will. I had a lot to say about this movie. 2) Sorry for my awful paragraph organization. I just write stuff and then write some other stuff. 3) Stay tuned for the next post, which will be about.....probably Rose Hobart.

Comment. Let me know if you liked this, if it was too long, if you think Creepshow still sucks, if I have no idea what I'm talking about, if my jokes didn't work, or if I have a sexy internet voice.

SEEYANEXTIME