‘Creepshow’ Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: “Skeletons In The Closet” + “Familiar”

Shudder’s superlative anthology series, Creepshow, finds its footing after a shaky Season 3 start with Joe Lynch’s “Familiar:” a short featuring a genuinely boss monster and an emotional payload buried in its subtext that honors the best of the show’s EC progressiveness.

To get there, alas, one more terrible outing with “Skeletons in the Closet,” a Shrek for genre-incels that mistakes references for reverential fan service and extends the fantasy wish-fulfillment of owning the original orb from Phantasm to having a submissive, promiscuous, super-hot young girlfriend who also happens to be into horror paraphernalia which is not so unlikely as it is that she would also be interested in… well, you. I think it’s meant in good fun, but it plays like the worst kind of pandering: pervy and pathetic in equal measure. Written by John Esposito and directed by Greg Nicotero, it has about it the whiff of desperation: a distinct lack-of-planning vibe that speaks to a late-night cram manufactured to fill a slot. “How about we do one about horror geeks and… uh… one of the props come to life…?” But then questions about rights float to the surface: can you actually have Michael Myers in your show? Freddy? Pinhead? Indeed, multiple references in the thing to stuff like The Goonies and Star Trek go untagged.

Lumpen, bearded Lampini (Victor Rivera) owns a horror movie memorabilia museum he’s inherited from his dad. He runs it with his girlfriend Danielle (Valerie Leblanc) who worships Lampini for his “magic” or something – a weird fact we learn after Lampini delivers an awkward monologue about how his mother was a goddess his father worshipped after the two met at the Magic Castle in LA. The dialogue is all this mush of unintelligible and ill-considered dreck mixed up with less clever than it thinks in-references to genre touchstones. It’s The Simpsons Comic Book Guy’s wet dream. Yet for all the pissing about, it all plays as curiously unironic. It’s that SNL William Shatner sketch except instead of calling out the nerds for being dangerously obsessed with make-believe, it seems reluctant to call out what it believes its audience is actually like.

Worse, I think “Skeletons in the Closet” thinks that waxing rhapsodic about your father’s fetishistic objectification of your mother to your girlfriend in this way is romantic rather than a big, giant, red flag. One night, his collector rival Bateman (James Remar) shows up, a murder happens, and then there’s the part where the skeleton fight from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad takes place kind of – but only after there’s a jokey redux of Psycho’s shower sequence and a meaningless deployment of a couple of famous chainsaws. Aside from the sloppiness and the… grossness… of the bit, Creepshow already did this (and better!) to close out the last season’s capper “Night of the Living Late Show” (S2E5). The “prestige” at the end of this episode is a bit of exploitive necrophilia that should have been mined as critique of a culture built around the veneration of dead things, but is presented as a punchline instead. Just guys dicking around. Lonely guys.

Then there’s “Familiar.” Written by Josh Malerman (Bird Box) and directed by Lynch, the story follows a late night after work with a lawyer, Jack (Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor) and his giggly artist girlfriend Fawn (Hannah Fierman), drunk and stumbling on a lark into a late night psychic’s parlor. Said psychic, Boone (Keith Arthur Bolden), asks for Fawn’s left hand and after a moments’ confusion, she gives it to him. Fawn is portrayed as a bit of a dingbat and there’s immediately tension in the way Jack looks at her. Boone is Black, and Jack is, too; Fawn, meanwhile, is white, and when Boone slips Jack a note, warning him that something terrible has followed the couple into this room, the understanding that passes between them is freighted with issues of class, of education, of miscegenation. Boone’s warning to Jack is the kind of warning I received about marrying a white woman — or the kind of warning someone might receive if they were a JD and their fiance was a sculptor. There’s even subtext to mine here in how Fawn’s dog doesn’t seem to like Jack very much. Sam Fuller, eat your heart out.

Jack becomes obsessed with Boone’s note, seeing an extremely-cool demon familiar manifesting in the shadows of their living room. I love the idea that this thing is Jack’s “familiar” — that is, a thing attached to Jack, not as a curse or some possession of some kind, but rather a projection of desire: his id, his own dark places. Lynch does well with the limited time and budget to build a couple of nice set-pieces: a Poltergeist-inspired stacking moment and especially a conclusion involving a trap and a plan to send his darkest impulses deep into a sunken place. All of it pays off in a final image and line: one person saying to another “I believe you now,” a line that is so perfectly haunted, so entirely damning of the power imbalance in Jack and Fawn’s relationship. Jack is the asshole here. Fawn deserves better.

While the strain of maintaining a standard of quality for an anthology series is starting to show more now than in the past, here’s “Familiar” as a reminder of just how excellent Creepshow can be when it has a plan and someone able to execute it.

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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 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Creepshow Season 3 Episode 2 on Shudder