Creepshow Commentaries Season Three: Episode 1 – Mums/ Queen Bee

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 1: Mums/ Queen Bee

It’s been a long time since Season Two, and even the Specials, but after the Christmas Special we are now going into autumn, and the grim harvest, and everything that falls from there.

Chrysanthemums. In Japanese culture, they apparently symbolize death, but also immortality. Violet or purple ones also represent the wish to “get well,” while pink are all about “longevity.” I’m not entirely sure, but even if these aren’t the plants, or flowers, that feature in Rusty Cundieff’s “Mums,” the first Creepshow story of Season Three, adapted from a story by Joe Hill, these aspects can definitely be seen.

The story is a variation of what we’ve seen in karma-based stories that were ever-present in EC Comics and its spiritual successors such as Creepshow. A woman is abused by her husband, and a child — Jake — is forced to watch it all happen. His mother is murdered, and she is buried in the flower garden that she loves.

But the details are fascinating. Jake’s mother wants to take him to see his great-grandmother, his Meemaw, which is an interesting term as I didn’t know it was a common one for grandmother, and the rest of her family. She’s taking him away from what turns out to be a man, and his friends, attempting to create a “two-bit terrorist” cell that is both secessionist and Confederate-based. Later, we see them referring to a book called The Pale Horse’s Cookbook: which presumably is a compilation of American terrorist ideologies, and home-made explosive designs — the latter of which they are planning to apply to a building. Whatever the situation, in Creepshow death is always in season.

It is a well crafted cinematic narrative. At first, it almost makes you wonder if Jake’s mother — who plans to run away with him — is actually a good person, and if his father is necessarily a terrible one. There are  a lot of references to how bad his mother’s family was to her, and some “strange ideas.” The fact that Jake’s “Meemaw” is over a hundred years old, perhaps older, made me wonder if they were a family of witches, and his father was actually keeping him — or thinking he was keeping him — safe from them.

Even when his father murders his mother elsewhere, and he discovers the seeds in the packets — in the suitcase she packed for the both of them — and the emphasis on blood, I was thinking that both Jake’s mother and father were terrible people, just one in a supernatural sense and linked to her family, and the other in a more banal, abusive, “red-neck” terrorist one.

I really appreciate, however, the variation of abuser to which Jake’s father is actually depicted. He doesn’t smack his son around, or have incoherent rages. He gaslights his wife. He makes it clear that she is an alcoholic, though according to Jake she quit a while ago. But even if she didn’t, her illness and genuine pain is being used by his father to excuse his actions. He wants to keep Jake as his heir, his property, to indoctrinate into his whole idea of personal sovereign land, and make him read that terrorist cookbook. It’s your basic toxic masculinity with more than a side of guns, and explosives.

But Jake’s father fucks up. He kills Jake’s mother. And then he smoothly lies about it, pretending that she is in a “half-way house” and that she will choose “drugs and booze” over Jake any day. He also buries her in her garden, on his land, thinking the law won’t dare trespass. He is an overall terrible human being, who — as it so happens, and as also transpires — doesn’t know as much about the land as he thought he did.

Jake learns about blood. And when I say that, it’s not that he embraces the legacy of murder that his father sets for him — at least not in the way his father intends. He plants those seeds in his mother’s garden, which he doesn’t know is her grave. It’s your basic Cain and Abel situation of murder all over again, where the ground tells. But it gets told through pretty flowers. I began to wonder if Jake’s maternal family were, again, witches, that used blood magic to create plants that obeyed their will: feeding off life essence to do so.

I had it in my mind that the seeds Jake plants are like “dragon-teeth” as per the ancient Greek custom of Thebes, or in this case, his Meemaw’s teeth. Certainly, the humanoid face that appears from the ground could have been  his mother’s altered corpse, but also his ancient Meemaw who lives in the ground. But the story doesn’t go there, even though Jake and the floral entity he nurtures from his mother’s death, gain retribution on the woman who pretended to be her friend and betrayed her, the man who helped his father kill her, and his father who was ultimately going to kill him. And as Jake drives the van, with four of those plants with tiny skulls in them, to see his Meemaw, I wonder if she will ultimately be proud of the boy, and the kind of man that he can become: perhaps even under her tutelage.

Of course, we can’t talk about flowers without considering the bees that pollinate them. I mean, in the hellscape that we’ve made our world bees are an endangered species, and their extinction will mean our own. The honey they create is a byproduct of what they truly do, as is the growth of the plants that will become fruit and such to keep our ecosystem going. They do, however, prefer human aid in continuing to build more secure colonies, and reproduction is their main goal.

Greg Nicotero is the one that creates the story “Queen Bee.” It feels like that would happen if Are You Afraid of the Dark, or Goosebumps, attempted a … B movie. Three adolescent children want to see their favourite singer, Regina, give birth. She actually goes as far as taking control of an entire hospital floor to have privacy. There are so many references to “not having a father,” the name “Haddonfield,” and pregnancy in a secret place, and even a reference to the end of the world that made me thing: “Oh yes, this is going to be another Anti-Christ.”

It’s not. Instead, what happens is the stupid antics of these three kids reveal as they infiltrate the hospital to invade their idol’s privacy, that Regina is actually a … not even vaguely humanoid giant Queen Bee, who is mind-controlling staff with green eyes to facilitate her transformation into her real form, so that she can give birth. She controls them through the sounds she creates, which makes sense given how she’s also a musician.

Eventually, at the end, one girl betrays her friend — even after they are nearly killed by Regina’s drones, and one of their friends is murdered by her — because she is her “biggest fan” at all costs. The fanatical girl, Debra — as played by Hannah Keple — has an absolutely smackable look on her pouting lips. You seriously wish, at the end of this story, that she and her snooty attitude of fan-worship would be repaid by her becoming a meal for her Queen. Seriously, I didn’t love to hate her. I just hated her, though it is in keeping with some stereotypical teenage — and even some narcissistic adult — selfishness. But this is one story where treachery, and even hypocrisy as it was Debra who had them go into the hospital and knew about the whole situation because her mom was a nurse there, is rewarded. Or, perhaps, it’s safe to say that her loyalty above friends and family to her idol is what is recognized.

It’s funny. Jake’s mother, the gardener, in “Mums” is named Bloom and she tries to save her son’s life: and in an indirect way she succeeds: the archetypically feminine power of flowers consuming blood, making it, and freeing him from patriarchal control. It even helps him realize that Beth, the woman who betrayed his mother for his father, isn’t the matriarchal figure that he wants. Whereas in “Queen Bee,” even though I feel like it is the weaker of the two stories, Regina also cares for her children and kills and controls anyone and everyone to nurture them: while taking those loyal to her under the hive-structure in which she creates: her musical production linked to her own reproduction. These are some fascinating feminine themes either way you look at it: the story about a flower and her seed, and about a queen bee recruiting another drone for her hive.

And as with “Mums” — which as of this writing is misspelled as “Mumms” on Shudder — and “Queen Bee,” the journey will continue deep into the ground, where the dead go and their spirits rise, and covetous, green-eyed fans will continue to do anything to make sure that their stories continue on: and they get their pound of sweet, sticky, bloody things.