Matt Connarton Unleashed: Erich Pilcher reviews Creepshow.

0:02 I've told you before, I didn't want you to read this crap. I never saw such rotten crap in my life. Where do you get this? Who sells it to you? I'm talking to you, young man? You want to answer me when I'm talking to you. You remember who puts the frigging bread on the table around here, don't you stand? Don't be too hard on him. All the kids read him, my boy, isn't all the kids? I want to know where this is going, Billy in the garbage, right into the freaking garbage. Now you got any smart mother about that?

0:30 In the books you'll keep in your dresser those ones in a year, underwear those sets books. Damn, you didn't have to hit him. Not only do I find out he's reading this crap, he's a snoopers. Well da, then for me to get your cofflin day. The windows are open downstairs. I better get down a clothes and the rain will get in. No, I'll do it. I got some garbage I want to throw away, Daddy, Please don't throw it away. I'm sorry. The next time, young man, I find you with a worthless piece of like this again, you want to sit down for a week, buddy, boy, remember that fuck it.

1:09 Anthologies have long been synonymous when not just horror films, but horror in television, books, and even comics. This week's film is a homage to all of those means of media, but yet it found a way to stand all on its own as one of the greatest anthology films made. Our next film honoring director George A. Romero this month is nineteen eighty two's Creep Show. This film teams up two masters of horror, with Ramero wrecting and the script being written by horror king Stephen King. The film features five tales of horror and has a star studded cast featuring Ted Danson, Ed Harris, hal Holbrook, Leslie Nielsen, Adrian Barbou, and even Stephen King's stars in one of the tales.

2:25 To tell the story of Creep Show, we must first delve into some history. Creep Show was a homage to the ec comics of the fifties and sixties, the comics Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear, and Tales from the Crypt. If that sounds familiar, it was because it was made into a very successful HBO series in its own right. These comics became insanely popular due to the stories in graphic artwork they depicted. Eventually they became the target of politicians and parents alike. Such is the parent in the opening clip of this film, which was the opening clip of our review.

3:17 Our next clips explain a brief history of EC comics. First, the late publisher William Gaines explains how the artwork drove the popularity of the comics and what each prime artist brought to the table. And then we will hear how the comics became targeted by politicians and parents and eventually led to not just their downfall, but the downfall of EC comics itself in the nineteen fifties, if comics were killers, the mild manner, publisher William M. Gaines was public enemy number one. My father had been instrumental in starting comic books back on the thirties, and he had a whole stable of comics which included The Flash and Wonder Woman and number of others, and he sold out his entire business to DC.

4:17 He then went back in business and started little comic books for children he called the Outfit Educational Comics. When Max Gaines was killed in an accident, Bill, who was planning to be a chemistry teacher, decided to concoct his own comic book formula. He changed the name to Entertaining Comics and started publishing Western War and Prime comics. Eighteen fifty, editor Al Feldstein conducted a creepy experiment in an issue of Crime Patrol. We introduced the cryptive Terror, and I kind of based it on what I've envisioned when I used to listen to Archobs, Lights Out or The Witch's Tale on radio.

5:00 Gaines and Feldstein quickly realized that horror could be a hit. We were so excited that we went ahead and changed the titles to Tales from the Crypto, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear soon followed, and by early nineteen fifty, the first Horror comic books were selling half a million copies per issue. Russ Cochrane, who's been reprinting the original EC series, was typical of the kids that got hooked on EC Horror. I had about stopped reading comic books when I was fourteen fifteen years old.

5:32 I'd sort of outgrown the superhero comics, and all of a sudden I picked up an EC comic, and here were comics that were written better and drawn better than anything I'd ever seen before, and they hooked me right back in. Feldstein continued to create cover art and write stories based on Gaines's ideas, but they soon began to draw on a gruesome group of artists to bring EC's tales of terror to life. Every story was written for the artists who drew it. Graham always got the dripping, rotting corps of slimy cookie stuff oozing out of the solid kind of things, and Johnny Craig, who wrote his own stuff.

6:13 Everything was nice, clean looking, except terrible things were going on in this beautiful, clean situation. Joe Orlando could go either way. He could have a clean job, or he could have an who's job, and he did a lot of either. Orlando himself remembers the awe inspired by another Easy alumnus, Zach Davis. Didn't sweat, and we all envied him that he just tossed it off. And he's just pure genius. You know. It was roomed. He could do four complete pages a day if he wanted to, and we'd counted up. Oh my god, he can make that much money.

6:50 EC artists were, remember, the most talented in the history of comic art I and now outcry leads to the end of EC comics. But not everyone appreciated the joke, and in nineteen fifty three, a Senate subcommittee convene to find out if comics created juvenile delinquents. My name is William James. I was the first publisherman these United States the published horror comics. I'm responsible I thought of them. I don't if you remember Mayor Walker who once said I never knew a woman to be ruined by a book, and I never knew a child would be ruined by a comic book.

7:32 There's just under nonsense. We were really the most shocked people in the world. We discovered that we were these terrible people who were causing juvenile delinquency in America, which is what happened, and would put us out of business. The controversy helped kill the horror comics, but EC score stories wouldn't stay buried. Since this film is a homage to the aforementioned EC comics, it couldn't jus be a simple horror anthology on film. It had to have the look in the feel of a comic book that had come to life.

8:11 Romero did this by using many tricks such as bright vibrant lighting to indicate horror. Instead of implementing traditional cuts in the film, Romero and his crew used comic book blocks to indicate passages at time in text blocks to establish areas and if more time had passed or an exact amount of time. In our next clip, lead animator Rick Catizone speaks on how this comic look was achieved for the film by using animation and why it is so key to the film success. But if you reels and it's almost something that would be impossible to capture, and so they suggested that probably sell animation would be the better way to go with that, and so we created animation segments of the actual comic book that would cause it to blow down the street and land in the garbage can so on, still be able to open to the page that they needed it to, and then we would zoom in and do match dissolves.

9:26 The other part of the problem that they were dealing with was that Tom's creep at the window the o reason We're going to have a big crane pulled back over the whole neighborhood with the creep floating in the air and so on, and I believe that it was a budgetary consideration. I believe the crane was going to become a twenty thousand dollars shot probably and that wasn't in the budget. And they thought, well, you know, it is an ec comic takeoff, and it seemed natural to have the creep through a flash of lightning and a is all change into an animated creep because the EC comic book characters were always hand drawn, so it seemed natural to go to a hand drawn creep as well.

10:09 The animation process was pretty involved, particularly with the creep, because you're trying to achieve a character, and of course you're trying to achieve motion that's interesting and believable, and so the process of course is doing drawings by hand, frame after frame. Actually we do key drawings first and then these are some of the drawings. You can see the detail in the drawings. The key drawings are done first, and then I decide how many drawings should go in between, and then those are filled in afterwards.

10:47 Try and get the key poses first, to get the dynamic action for the main elements of the motion, and then we fill it in afterwards. And then he flies back over the name prove it here, of course, and that he points down towards the garbage can here near the end and zooms in. It was really difficult in terms of drawing the hands. The hands on some of the parts of this are acting on a different level, but it was actually pretty difficult to draw because there's no flesh, and so when you have bony segments that are basically cylindrical.

11:29 It became some very demanding drawing and it was one of the better challenges that I've had in my career. As I stated earlier this week, I chose to do this review in this specific way because I felt that to choose just a handful of scenes from this great film would be way too difficult. That is, because all five stories shown in this film are truly great. There is no way or no fair way to choose which wants to include. To be honest, that could be a whole month of reviews all in itself. That's how great this film really is.

12:13 Our final clip is our Man of Honor himself, George A. Romero discussing this film on a Pittsburgh talk show shortly before its release. Of note hear how Romero separates this film from the horror films that were popular during the eighties, and he has a very special and hilarious story regarding the villains of the final story of this film stories based on a young child's it's a comic books. I guess the real story of the movie is about a comic book. And we go into the comic book and there are five stories in it, and the pages turn and the drawings turn into to live action stories.

12:58 Yeah, well, thank you. It's it's a lot of fun. Steve Wright's traditional Gothic horror. This isn't a typical as many of the horror films recently have been what they call Dyson, slice slash your movies, and this isn't like that at all. It's uh, this is really gothic, has its root in Gothic traditions, and Steve believes it's much more frightening when you know that something's behind the door. Your imagination makes it a lot more frightening. Once you see the monster, you start dealing with it.

13:29 It's sort of resolved so much of the time and creep Show has spent saying don't go in there, don't put your hand in that box, and it's more anticipatory than it is shock and it's it's one of the things about I mean, I like all the variety of the shows, as you say, doing you know, the five different stories, but there are certain parts of it that are really very very realistic, and those are the things that are are most frightening, you know, dealing with the situation that could could possibly happen.

13:55 That. Yeah, I think it's hard for me for I would like to think that I will never have to you with three million cockroaches coming up up out of drains and things. But that, you know, I understand you had a great search to find those bugs. Well it wasn't really a search. It's just that, you know, and everyone says, boy, moviemakers really go to some extremes to pull off the scenes they need. The fact is, cockroaches are very expensive. Plain old American styled cockroach cousts at a laboratory read under laboratory conditions fifty cents of peace.

14:33 And we needed in order to fill that room about fifty thousand of them, and it was actually more economic. We sent entomologists to Trinidad and they got the real article out of caves down there, and we had to go through government clearances and everything to bring them in and make sure that they were you know, they weren't infested with any infected with anything and all that. So it was all done under supervised programs. These guys were they were, they were. But when you bring them, you bring them into this country.

15:03 Cockroaches I thought, were afraid of light. I mean, well, that's part of the trick. They don't take direction well, so you have to sort of trick them into doing things. And the only way we could get them to move one way or move another way would be to have they they'll run from light into darkness. So when we needed them to run that way, we would just make it dark over there and put a lot of light over here, and they don't go running that way. You really can't get them to do very much. They don't have a big repertoire of talents, but they're creepy.

15:33 Yeah, oh yeah, that's true. Now, the book itself, the script was written by Steven Steve King. Yeah, Steve and I have become really good friends over this project, and we're going to do another. We're doing one of Steve's novels called The Stand, which was the novel right after The Shining and that's hopefully we'll be one of the next projects that we do. Sadly, romeros In King's version of The Stand was never made. However, in good news, Unlike last week's film, this film found great success at the box office.

16:09 It was released November tenth of nineteen eighty two and garnered over five million dollars it's opening weekend, making it the number one film that week. Overall, it made over twenty one million dollars, making it the highest grossing horror film for Warner Brothers that year. This film success also led to a revival for O anthologies both in cinema and TV. Tales from the Dark Side, which was created by Romero, Tales from the Crypt, and the Twilight Zone revival of the eighties all odetta gratitude to Creep Show for them being brought to the small screen in for theatrical releases.

16:57 Films such as Tales from the Hood in Monkey Shines became monumental classics in their own right and showed that I anthologies could be successful on the large screen as well. Without the success of Creepshow, one could argue that all of those would have never found the successes that they have. This film has spawned two sequels, one in nineteen eighty seven and a direct to video release in two thousand and seven. In twenty nineteen, the fledgling streaming service Shutter announced Creepshow would be made into a series.

17:43 It has aired since and was recently renewed for its fourth season, set to begin next month. This just shows the lasting legacy of this film and adds to the legend of two mass of horror. I hope you joined me. Next week, when we continue our month long tribute to George A. Ramero, we will look at one of his rare non horror films, the nineteen eighty one drama Night Writers, starring Ed Harris for W M and H and Matt Connerton Unlench. This has been a classic film review with Eric Filcher boke ug a book Uger boke uger uger bug bog buker bok book.

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