‘A Creepshow Animated Special’ Will Tide You Over Until ‘Creepshow’ Season 2

I was 12 in 1985 and it was terrible, but I had Stephen King. I saw Cat’s Eye in the theater and I bought Skeleton Crew the day it came out. Whenever I hear Paul Young’s “Everytime You Go Away,” I’m transported back to a summer where I worked at my parents’ junk store in Golden, CO, and accidentally sold a thing priceless to my father for a pittance of what it was worth to him. It’s a memory so terrible, I’ve buried it for decades to find it resurfacing now and again. I wonder sometimes if the persistence of the zombie mythos, of things coming back from the grave, has anything to do with memories like these that are ravenous, and deathless, and never far no matter how quickly I run from them. In particular, I think of the image from “The Monkey,” the third story in Skeleton Crew, of the old family dog dying of a cerebral hemorrhage, blood exploding from her eyes, one terrible day.

A lot of my favorite Stephen King stories even still are collected in Skeleton Crew; stuff like “The Jaunt” that Rian Johnson paid tribute to in a gentle way in his video for LCD Soundsystem’s “Oh Baby”; “Word Processor of the Gods” turned into one of my favorite episodes of the Tales from the Darkside series; “Gramma” turned into a great episode of the excellent ’80s revival of The Twilight Zone; and “The Mist,” of course, which I also owned in a 3D Audiotape that I played one day for this girl I liked and still think about now and again with wistfulness of when things could be so simple and pure as a 12 year-old’s crush. There’s another story of suicide in Skeleton Crew, “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet,” to go with the dulcet, lovely “The Last Rung on the Ladder” from King’s first collection, Night Shift. King has a genius for writing people. I wonder if my first consciousness of my own depression came from the way he talked about a loon’s cry at twilight on a lake where all of your friends have gone to die.

I was thrilled that “The Raft” from Skeleton Crew, one of the grisliest, deliciously unbearable stories I’d ever read – have ever read – was to be featured in Michael Gornick’s Creepshow 2 in 1987. I was less thrilled with how they distilled the long, torturous death of a high school jock being pulled through a tiny crack, millimeter by millimeter, by one toe, into a matter of seconds. I was ready. But the movie wasn’t ready. I remember the thought that if they wouldn’t do “The Raft” the right way, they would probably never do something like “Survivor Type” the right way either and resigned myself for it to be one of the few King stories – along with “Grey Matter” from Night Shift, to never probably get a proper adaptation. Of all the things Shudder’s Creepshow anthology does or doesn’t get right, I’ll always love it a little for opening its first season with an honorable “Grey Matter,” and now launching it’s COVID-intermission-inspired Creepshow Animated Special with a clever adaptation of “Survivor Type.” Watching it me sent me back to a terrible summer in a troubled childhood, it’s true, but also back to the things in it that helped me externalize my fear and contextualize my trauma.

Greg Nicotero and the team at Octopie have animated in a minimal, stylized approach reminiscent of the anime sequence from Kill Bill, two stories that while only fitfully successful, serve as a nice aperitif for the series’ upcoming sophomore run. Open with “Survivor Type”, a story that King introduces in Skeleton Crew with a little background into how thinking casually about cannibalism led him to asking doctors how long a person could survive eating, you know, only the non-essential parts of his own body. Written like the found diary entries of a plane-wrecked survivor Dr. Richard Pine (voiced by Kiefer Sutherland in this adaptation) who, trapped on a desert island with a corpse, a suitcase full of illicit drugs and his medical kit, “Donner Parties” the crap out of himself – there are images from the story that have stayed with me as the rest of that book and that summer have stayed with me. They are uneasy bedmates. They turn down the sheets when it gets very late and my defenses are compromised. The animation serves the story well, proving to be a surprisingly gruesome match to some inventive foley work. I will say, though, that there’s not much meat (haha) on this bone and “Survivor Type,” in either incarnation, is more an exercise in shock largely free of the interpersonal development of which Stephen King is unequaled. It’s a laugh, but that’s all it is.

Better in terms of subtext if not subtlety is “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead,” based on a 2016 story by King’s son, author Joe Hill. It’s like “Survivor Type” in that it is both written as a series of “journal” entries, but plays like more like an exercise than a completed thought. The hero of the adaptation is teen Blake (voiced by Joey King, no relation) who spends a family road trip Tweeting the Tweets that are the only text of Hill’s short story. There’s an air of forced insouciance to Blake’s voice that I kind of like because it apes the artificiality of Social Media interaction, but it does begin to wear and, worse, when the events are illustrated rather than suggested in 140 characters or less, Blake’s credulity at what she witnesses seems less genuine than contrived for proselytizing affect. Harlan Ellison did a story like this once that I think is better: he has the world begin conjuring bizarre sights to try to distract people from television. Hill’s version is more on the nose and the danger of dragging subtext into text is that there is nothing left in the subtext. Zombies are horror’s most elastic of metaphors, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they can be forced into every ironic context.

The Creepshow Animated Special works, though, when it works because the EC Comics which inspired the series were not, themselves, the model of sly satire and restraint. Why land the elegant barb when a meathook makes the raggeder hole? The medium itself is the message: a middle-finger defiant raised against the pearl-clutching guardians of our moral development. If there is less innocence left for us to lose in the midst of this daily horror, here at least is A Creepshow Animated Special that throws back to a more innocent time in our lives when pulp dreadfuls had the power to titillate with their lurid, illicit atrocities. Its childishness is a strange balm, but a necessary one. If you’re wired a certain way, their “badness” is like a warm blanket and a cup of tea by the fire. I need it. I can’t wait for Season Two.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch A Creepshow Animated Special on Shudder