Creepshow (1982)

Picture this: it's past midnight, torch tucked under your chin, horror comic spread across your lap, and every time a floorboard creaks you nearly jump out of your skin. That's the feeling George A. Romero and Stephen King are chasing with Creepshow, and more often than not, they catch it.

This is an anthology film built from five short horror tales, all wrapped in the visual language of those lurid 50s EC Comics that parents used to panic about. Bright, garish colours bleed into the frame, the camera angles go deliberately theatrical, and King's script leans hard into the campiness of it all. It knows exactly what it is, and it wears that knowledge like a grin. There's real craft in committing this completely to a bit.

Two segments in particular stick with me. "Father's Day" has a properly nasty streak of dark humour running through it, and "The Crate" is genuinely tense in a way that sneaks up on you. Both manage to balance the winking self-awareness with actual menace, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. When Creepshow gets that balance right, it's an absolute blast.

Tom Savini's practical effects work is, as ever, a joy. Goopy, over-the-top, committed to the point of absurdity, and all the better for it. There's a tactile grossness to the creature work here that no amount of CGI has ever quite replicated, and if you're a fan of that school of effects craft, you'll be grinning throughout. I've always had a soft spot for that era of horror, and Savini is one of the reasons why. It's worth comparing this to something like Re-Animator, another film from around the same period that runs on a similar cocktail of gore and black comedy, though Re-Animator holds its nerve more consistently across its runtime.

Where Creepshow stumbles is in the tonal lurching between segments. Not every story lands with equal force, and a couple of them tip so far into daft that they lose the creepiness entirely. The comic-book animation stitching the tales together is a neat touch, a stylish way to turn the page between stories, but it also highlights just how uneven the collection is when you're sitting in a lull waiting for the next segment to find its footing. An anthology lives and dies by its weakest entries, and a couple of these are pretty weak.

Romero, whose earlier work I've explored in pieces like Survival of the Dead, always had a knack for genre filmmaking with something underneath it. Here the subtext is mostly just fun, a celebration of schlock rather than a dissection of it, and that's fine. Not every film needs to be doing something serious. Sometimes you just want a synth score rattling your bones and a monster made of seaweed terrorising someone on a stormy night.

The thing is, Creepshow works best when you meet it on its own terms. Put it on for Halloween, pour yourself something, don't expect every tale to land, and enjoy the ones that do. It's charming in the way that slightly broken things often are, held together by genuine enthusiasm and a shared love between its makers for a disreputable corner of popular culture. It doesn't take itself seriously for a single frame, and that's both its greatest strength and the reason it occasionally feels slight.

Three stars. Recommended for horror fans, especially those with a weakness for the gorier end of the 80s practical effects era. Just go in knowing it's a mixed bag and you'll have a great time.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1982  | Watched: 2025-08-27

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Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca

More from George A. Romero: Jacaranda Joe (2022) · BIOHAZARD 2 TV-CM (1997) · Survival of the Dead (2009) · The Crazies (1973)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)