Creepshow

Creepshow
Credits
Title:	Creepshow
Directed by:	George Romero
Written by:	Stephen King
Produced by:	Salah M. Hassanein Richard P. Rubinstein
Music by:	John Harrison
Cinematography:	Michael Gornick
Edited by:	Michael Spolan Pasquale Buba George Romero Paul Hirsch
Production
Production:	United Film Distribution Company; Laurel Entertainment, Inc.
Distributors:	Warner Bros.
Released:	November 12th, 1982
Rating:	R
Running time:	120 min.
Country:	USA
Language:	English
Budget:	$8,000,000
Gross:	$21,028,755 (US)
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Creepshow is an American horror anthology film directed by George Romero with a screenplay written by Stephen King. A sequel film, Creepshow 2, was released in 1987, followed by Creepshow 3 in 2006. The film features five vignettes, all written by King, wrapped inside of a framing story. The premise involves a young boy named Billy who enjoys reading an issue of Creepshow magazine, which includes the five stories. The titles of the stories, in chronological order are, "Father's Day", "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill", "Something to Tide You Over", "The Crate" and "They're Creeping Up on You". Stephen King himself plays the titular dumbbell Jordy Verrill in "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill".

Stories

Prologue

Plot

A young boy named Billy gets abused by his insane father, Stan, for reading a horror comic titled Creepshow. Stan reminds his wife that he had to be hard on Billy because he does not want their son to be reading such "crap". As Billy sits upstairs cursing his father with hopes of him rotting in Hell, he hears a sound at the window, which turns out to be a ghostly apparition in the form of the Creep from the comic book, beckoning him to come closer.

Cast

Actor	Role
Joe King	Billy
Tom Atkins	Stan
Iva Jean Saraceni	Billy's mother

"Father's Day

Plot

(First story, written by King specifically for the film) Nathan Grantham, the miserly old patriarch of a family whose fortune was made through bootlegging, fraud, extortion, and murder-for-hire, is killed on Father's Day by his long-suffering spinster daughter Bedelia. Bedelia was already unstable as the result of a lifetime spent putting up with her father's incessant demands and emotional abuse, which culminated in his orchestrating the murder of her sweetheart.

The sequence begins seven years later when the remainder of Nathan's descendants including Nathan's granddaughter Sylvia, his great-grandchildren Richard, Cass, and Cass' husband Hank — get together for their annual dinner on the third Sunday in June.

Bedelia, who typically arrives later than the others, stops in the cemetery outside the family house to lay a flower at the gravesite and drunkenly reminisce about how she murdered her insufferable, overbearing father. When she accidentally spills her whiskey bottle in front of the headstone, it seems to have a reanimating effect on the mortal remains interred below. Suddenly, Nathan's putrefied, maggot-infested corpse emerges from the burial plot in the form of a revenant who has come back to claim the Father's Day cake he never got. Before obtaining his long-desired pastry, the revenant avenges himself on Bedelia and the rest of his idle, scheming, money-grubbing heirs, killing them off one by one, which includes some apparent supernatural abilities such as making a heavy tombstone move by will.

The final freeze-frame shows the undead Nathan in the kitchen triumphantly carrying a platter that is crowned with Sylvia's freshly severed head and covered with cake candles. The corpse gurgles hoarsely at a terrified Richard and Cass, "It's Father's Day, and I got my cake! Happy Father's Day!"

Cast

Actor	Role
Carrie Nye	Sylvia Grantham
Viveca Lindfors	Aunt Bedelia
Ed Harris	Hank Blaine
Warner Shook	Richard Grantham
Elizabeth Regan	Cass Blaine
Jon Lormer	Nathan Grantham
John Amplas	Nathan's corpse
Nann Mogg	Mrs. Danvers
Peter Messer	Yarbro

"The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill"

Plot

(Second story, originally titled "Weeds", adapted from a previously published short story written by King) Jordy Verrill (played by Stephen King himself), a dimwitted backwoods yokel, thinks that a newly discovered meteorite will provide enough money from the local college to pay off his $200 bank loan. Instead, he finds himself being overcome by a rapidly spreading plant-like organism that begins growing on his body after he touches a glowing green substance within the meteorite. Jordy is eventually cautioned by the ghost of his father not to take a bath. But when the itching from the growth on his skin becomes unbearable, Jordy succumbs to temptation and collapses into the bathwater. By the next morning, Jordy and his farm have been completely covered with dense layers of the hideous alien vegetation. In despair, he reaches for a shotgun and blows the top of his head off. A radio weather forecast announces that heavy rains are predicted and the audience is left with the dire expectation that this will accelerate the spread of the extraterrestrial plant growth to surrounding areas.

Cast

Actor	Role
Stephen King	Jordy Verrill
Bingo O'Malley	Doctor / Jordy's father

"Something to Tide You Over"

Plot

(Third story, written by King expressly for the film) Richard Vickers, a wealthy psychopath whose spry, devil-may-care jocularity belies his cold-blooded murderousness, stages a terrible fate for his unfaithful wife, Becky, and her lover, Harry Wentworth, by burying them up to their necks on the beach below the high tide line. He explains that they have a chance of survival - if they can hold their breath long enough for the sand to loosen once the seawater covers them they could break free and escape. He also sets up several closed-circuit TV cameras so he can watch them die from the comfort of his well-appointed beach house. If you look closely at the desk next to his bed, you can see the same ashtray the was used to kill the grandfather from "Father's Day". However, Richard is in for one hell of a surprise of his own when the two lovers he murdered return as a pair of waterlogged, seaweed-covered revenants intent on giving him a dose of his own deadly punishment. He tries in vain to shoot them but they both remind him that "You can't kill someone if they're already dead!" The final scene reveals that Richard has been buried in the beach at low tide, facing the approaching tide (and the sight of two sets of footprints disappearing in the surf). While the tide is rising, he laughs hysterically and screams, "I can hold my breath for a long time!" The frame then freezes into animation and the pages start flipping again. They come to a stop on the title of the next story, which is one of the longer entries at nearly 30 minutes.

Cast

Actor	Role
Leslie Nielsen	Richard Vickers
Ted Danson	Harry Wentworth
Gaylen Ross	Becky Vickers

"The Crate"

Plot

(Fourth story, adapted from a previously published short story) A college custodian Mike drops a quarter and finds a wooden storage crate, hidden under some basement stairs for 148 years. He notifies a college professor, Dexter Stanley, of the find. The two decide to open the crate and it is found to contain an extremely lethal creature resembling a Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, which despite its diminutive size promptly kills and entirely devours Mike, leaving behind only his boot. Escaping, Stanley runs into a graduate student, Charlie Gereson who is skeptical and investigates. Gereson and Stanley find that the crate has been moved back under the stairs and Gereson is killed by the creature as he examines the crate. Stanley then flees and informs his friend and colleague at the university, the mild-mannered Professor Henry Northrup, of his recent experience.

Professor Stanley, now traumatized and hysterical, babbles to Northrup that the deadly monster must be disposed of somehow. Northrup sees the creature as a way to rid himself of his perpetually drunk, obnoxious and emotionally abusive wife, Wilma, whom he often daydreams of killing. He contrives a scheme to lure her near the crate where the beast does indeed maul and eat her. Northrup later secures the beast back inside its crate and drops it into a nearby lake, where it sinks to the bottom, and he returns to assure Professor Stanley that the creature is no more. However, it is subsequently revealed to the audience that the beast has escaped from its crate, and is in fact still alive and well. Also, watchful eyes will notice the staircase in Northrup's home is the same staircase from "Something to Tide You Over", the previous story; it even has some of the same camera angles.

Cast

Actor	Role
Hal Holbrook	Henry Northrup
Adrienne Barbeau	Wilma Northrup
Fritz Weaver	Dexter Stanley
Robert Harper	Charlie Gereson
Don Keefer	Mike, the janitor
Christine Forrest	Tabitha Raymond
Chuck Aber	Richard Raymond
Cletus Anderson	Host
Katie Karlovitz	Maid
Charles Van Eman	Bartender
Carol McCloskey	Party guest
Richard P. Rubinstein	Party guest
Darryl Ferrucci	"Fluffy"

"They're Creeping Up on You"

Plot

(Fifth and final story, written by King expressly for the film) Upson Pratt is a cruel, ruthless businessman whose mysophobia has him living in a hermetically sealed apartment controlled completely with electric locks and surveillance cameras. During a particularly severe lightning storm, he finds himself looking out over the steel canyons of New York City as a rolling blackout travels his way. When it hits his apartment tower, the fun begins for the audience, and the terror begins for Mr. Pratt. The ruthless tycoon now finds himself helpless when his flat becomes overrun by countless hordes of aggressive multi-sized cockroaches — perhaps symbolizing the revenge of all the "little people" he has spent his entire life stepping on. As the cockroaches begin to overrun him, he locks himself inside a panic room, only to find the cockroaches have already infested the room. With no way to escape, the roaches swarm on him, and eventually grotesquely burst out from his corpse.

Cast

Actor	Role
E.G. Marshall	Upson Pratt
David Early	White
Ann Muffly	Lenora Castonmeyer

Epilogue

Plot

The following morning, two garbage collectors find the Creepshow comic book in the trash. They look at the ads in the book for X-ray specs and a Charles Atlas bodybuilding course. They also see an advertisement for a voodoo doll, but lament that the order form has already been redeemed (Attentive viewers can see the order form had been already cut out in the segues between "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill", "Something To Tide You Over", and "The Crate"). Inside the house, Stan complains of neck pain, which escalates as Billy repeatedly and gleefully jabs the voodoo doll while his accursed father screams in agony as Billy finally gets revenge on him for his past abuse.

Cast

Actor	Role
Joe King	Billy
Tom Atkins	Stan
Iva Jean Saraceni	Billy's mother
Marty Schiff	Garbage man #1
Tom Savini	Garbage man #2 ("The Creep")

Notes & Trivia

• The tagline for this film is "The most fun you'll ever have... being scared!"
• Opened the same day as Jack Sholder's Alone in the Dark.
• The wooden crate from "The Crate" makes a cameo appearance in the basement of the Voorhees residence in the 1993 film Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday.
• Billy has a Rodan action figure suspended from string on the ceiling of his bedroom. Rodan is a Japanese daikaiju and part of the Godzilla series of films. He had his own film in 1956. The toy was made by Mattel and released in the 1970s.
• The segment "Father's Day" is featured in the Femme Fatales episode "Family Business, Part 2".
• The segment "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill" is featured in the Femme Fatales episode "The Clinic".
• The segment "Something to Tide You Over" is featured in the Femme Fatales episode "Help Me, Rhonda".
• The segment "The Crate" is featured in the Femme Fatales episode "Libra, Part 2".
• The segment "They're Creeping Up on You!" is featured in the Femme Fatales episode "Bad Medicine".
• The ashtray that Bedelia Grantham uses to murder her father in "Father's Day" is also seen on Richard Vickers' nightstand in "Something to Tide You Over".
• The main events from "The Crate" take place in 1981, which is when the movie was filmed, not released. This is established when Dexter Stanley says that the events of the 1834 Arctic expedition took place 147 years ago.
• By observing the license plate on Wilma Northrup's car, it can be determined that the events of "The Crate" take place in the state of New York.

External Links

Creepshow at AMG Creepshow at IMDB Creepshow at Wikipedia

Creepshow at Rotten Tomatoes Creepshow at the Horror Film Wiki Creepshow at the Creepshow Wiki

Video

Creepshow (1982) Official Trailer - Hal Holbrook, Leslie Nielsen Movie HD

This article relates to the works of Stephen King.