Matt Connarton Unleashed: Erich Pilcher reviews Creepshow.

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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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

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