Tag: karma

Creepshow Commentaries Season Three – Episode Six: Drug Traffic/A Dead Girl Named Sue

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 6: Drug Traffic/ A Dead Girl Named Sue 

So, despite my reservations from my look at Episode Five being equaled or topped by this  Season Three Finale, Creepshow delivered. And it delivered with power.

Literally.

There is a bit to unpack here, thematics aside, and I can’t promise that I will be able to talk about everything. These Commentaries, like most of what I write, focus on what truly stands out to me. Certainly, many other articles and commentators will examine exactly the elements that I want to look at here, and I feel like — at best — I will just look at the impact that it has on me as a viewer, and a student of horror. That is the best you will get here, and all that I am willing to promise. 

First, we have “Drug Traffic”: a story by Mattie Do and Christopher Larsen, with the teleplay written by Larsen, and the entire segment directed by Greg Nicotero. I just want to talk about the monsters here, to be frank with you, but the only way I can do that is to go a bit into the context: into the situation with which we are presented.

An American politician is riding what seems to be a Greyhound bus with various people, many of them ill, across the border to Canada so that they can get proper medical treatment. This fact, in and of itself, is a commentary on America’s terrible medical care system for those who are not upper-middle class, or generally privileged ethnically or racially as well as a look at how people will use this issue — under the guise of moral outrage — to gain power, or reinforce their own sense of moral superiority while not giving a single damn of the people truly affected by these forces. 

The politician, and the border guard symbolize both of these aspects. The politician running for higher office wants everything recorded, including him making a show of using his power to challenge this guard and his systemic discrimination. But the guard is intelligent and has his own left-of-centre views: calling the politician out on quoting Karl Marx, and blaming his posting on this outward border on his own views. Further, he does perform his job to the letter of the same system in which the politician wants to elevate himself, and he will detain and go so far as to handcuff someone in order to prove a point: whether someone else’s life is at stake, or not.

I am not sure which one of these people I dislike more: the politician is at least honest or transparent that the ordinary people he is escorting to the border to make a point about the terrible condition of the States’ medical program that they have to leave the country — claiming to want to make reform should he get his votes — are tools to that end. The border guard goes out of his way to say he is an ordinary man, and has the audacity to moralize to a woman he handcuffs and denies her daughter seemingly life-saving medication: claiming she is carrying more than the allotted amount of unknown drugs out of the country to another, and that her taking her daughter to another country for treatment is just a short-sighted solution for the greater problem that is America.

Meanwhile, that Asian-American woman is giving her visibly and chronically ill daughter Mai pills to keep her stable. And by stable, I mean in her body, and not detaching her head and neck to hover, and feed off the flesh of human beings.

And that was when I realized, I’d seen this before. The Far East Asian woman with the head that either elongates, or detaches all together is something you would see in, at least within Japanese folklore, as a member of the yokai or youkai: specifically a Nukekubi. Yet I also wondered, when I saw this, especially when I realized the medication the mother was giving Mai had information in a Chinese dialect. And this made me look up more information: to see if these beings existed in other places aside from Japanese mythology. And, as it turns out, there are beings called hitōban, or rakutō: though the former already has a line around its neck, and the latter’s body remains resting in its bed while its head roams. They feed off of blood and human flesh, but they also need to ingest vermin and lamp oil of all things. There are many different depictions of these beings in Far East Asia, and South-East Asia, but one interpretation states that if you move their bodies, their heads can’t reunite with them, and they will die accordingly. 

Mai seems to be, based on her entrails remaining under her hovering neck, a Laotian variant of this kind of being: a Phi Kasu: at least according to Ryan Thao Worra’s article Japanese yokai: The Rokurokubi on his Blog On the Other Side of the Eye. She doesn’t have to sleep for the condition to manifest either, but she does require feeding or a bloodbath will happen. 

My personal thought is that those pills Mai’s mother was feeding her, to suppress her hunger for human flesh and blood, contained specialized animal matter, or even something like lamp oil though there are issues with this concept because neither of these are illegal, or potentially illegal substances. There is also the possibility that it is brine in those pills, which is used apparently to reduce swelling in the organs so that their heads can safely return to their bodies, again according to Worra in his article The Phi Kasu: Supernatural entities of Laos on the above Blog. Certainly, Mai doesn’t need sleep for this condition to happen, though it tends to manifest at night: which seems to occur as she and the other passengers are detained by customs, and her body expels her — or her head leaves it — explosively, with only gore behind. 

I am not a cultural expert in this field, though it fascinates me to no end, but there is a folkloric antecedent for the brilliant practical effects rendition of the being that is Mai, this cross-cultural counter on a border between the East and the West, but there is an even greater precedent for how she, and her mother are being treated in this story: especially with regards to American land border crossing. I’ve taken Greyhound Buses before, and there have been a few instances where families or groups, usually non-white, are detained for a while as customs officials question them: delaying the bus from going further. Profiling exists in the system. Mai’s mother is Far East Asian, perhaps Laotian, but neither the politician nor the border official seem to bother to want to make these distinctions. Certainly, she has every right to take offense when she’s asked to read the Chinese on the packages of the medication involved that even she doesn’t know the contents of: as if just by being Far East Asian, even Asian American, she should automatically know the language. 

It’s true that Mai does look suspiciously sick — perhaps in withdrawal, or overdosed — and her mother is carrying a lot of drugs beyond the allowed amount, but I suppose I thought that the politician’s campaign was more publicized, and there was this implication that Mai was chronically, or terminally-ill. But the system is a failure: there are no Asian-American representatives at the border facility, no medical experts or even First Aid apparatuses. The guard is the only personnel there that day, and there is some obvious understaffing and underfunding going on despite the really fine waiting room everyone else sits in which I have never seen at a border station before. And, as i said, the official immediately wants to make an example of Mai’s mother just to spit in the politician’s eye. 

It could have been a completely avoidable situation, but instead it escalates, everyone else dies, and the politician and border official end up hacking Mai’s body up with an axe while her mother screams out for her, chained to a table, helplessly. And the sad thing is: Mai isn’t a terrible being. She doesn’t immediately try to feed on someone. She isn’t mindless. She is willingly taking the medication, and she almost loses her inhibition only when her mother is taken from her: and even then, one of the politician’s guards scares her away. She then tries to get candy from the vending machine, and looks in the official’s fridge to find food of any kind, and fails. 

Mai can’t help her hunger. I have no idea what kind of aid she expected to find in Canada compared to America for her condition, which is what it is in folklore: she isn’t part of another species, but rather it is an affliction, or a curse … or at least another state of being. Maybe her mother wanted to get her better medication that she doesn’t throw up, or a food she can safely ingest. We will never really know, unfortunately, as her mother cuts off her own head with glass so that Mai can take a new body.

And what happens at the end? What happens when the official destroys Mai’s body “for her own good,” and the politician admits he isn’t going to change the system, says racist shite about immigrants, and callously doesn’t seem to even care about his dead and eaten wife as they both drink some beers? Does Mai kill them?

No. Mai takes her mother’s broken body and staggers back to the bus … to be let on by the Creep. He does this sometimes, in some of the segments. He will interject himself at the end of stories, and break that fourth wall, and in this case — despite the animated skit of him holding her head joyfully out of the window — he is actually the good guy here. Mai is given the chance to live. She chooses to live despite everything that happened to her, and her mother, and the Creep takes her out of a narrative where she is doomed to make other minorities and sick travelers from the States suffer, to hopefully a better one with no further loss, and perhaps somewhere where she can get help, and be accepted. 

It’s like what they say about Frankenstein: the Monster isn’t Frankenstein, but Victor Frankenstein is the monster. And the Monster isn’t a monster, but the Creature. And Mai is only a monster in a system that hates sick people that can’t pay for their right to live, and placed in a system that is actively hostile towards her in a kyriarchal manner: for being disabled, female, and Far East Asian. At best, she is like what I’ve read of the rokurokubi magic tricks in Japan: where she is a minority token of exoticism to prop up a white American male politician’s career, and at worst a foreign abomination that needs to be exterminated, and an example of what “not to let into the country.” And I find it fitting that while the politician barely mourns the wife that Mai killed, she grieves for the mother who sacrifices her life so that she might live: an exchange of heads, of glances, on the floor of sterile governmental bureaucratic brutality in a parody of that Japanese magic trick that allows her to live, and flee the land of the free and the home of the brave that claims to want the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and the wretched refuse of another’s teeming shore. 

I intimated that the politician and the border official are cynical and exploitive, and well-meaning and self-sanctimonious monsters respectively but they are just symptoms of a greater social justice system twisted and horribly wrong: creating disasters. And it is a theme that continues into “A Dead Girl Named Sue.” 

It is a black and white production, with a few exceptions. At first, I thought what we would be seeing is a homage to Serling’s Twilight Zone, or Hitchcock’s Psycho. But the clues are there. It is all black and white, and the date is 1968 during a time of upheaval. “A Dead Girl Named Sue” is written by Heather Anne Campbell, and directed by John Harrison. A small town police officer is confronted by a group of citizens, Black and white, who want to find a young man who has been committing atrocities, the son of their Mayor who has been escaping justice, and take the law into their own hands.

The segment has a slow creeping reveal of events worthy of George A. Romero’s ghouls. And at first, I wondered: were they really going to go there?

And they do.

By god, they do.

In the background, we hear about attacks. And it’s clever. At first, you think it might be Race Riots. Certainly, the timeline as when Romero’s creation was released, would line up with that. But then you hear reports of half-eaten victims, and news reports. And then went there. By god, they go to that place. I recall being disappointed by “Skeletons in the Closet” and wishing that Sentinel from the previews would be used in a story that was an outlier set in the dreamscape of Phantasm, just as the Deadites and the Necronomicon were flat-out introduced in “Public Television of the Dead.” Certainly, Night of the Living Dead” was also referenced towards the end of the Creepshow Season Two finale segment “Night of the Living Late Show.” I never even considered it. 

Yet here we were. Here we are, for that matter. We have basically something like a “Times is Tough in Musky Holler” situation, but I would argue it is more immaculate as you aren’t sure at first where it will go. The officer denies vigilante justice, even as they claim “the law won’t matter tomorrow” which is another clue as to what is going on. He instead goes to find the young man who has been committing these crimes, and arrest him again. This is where, at his place, he finds an old woman with parts of her gnawed off and the back of her head blown off as well. 

At first, you might think that the officer and the criminal have to band together and fight off the legions of the undead in this isolated place. But this officer isn’t Ben, and he sees something on the floor: a blue ribbon in this black and white world. He also notes the bed and the chains and the blood stains around them, which the criminal claims to be from “breaking his dogs in.”

What we see is something truly beautiful. 

The officer arrests the criminal. The young man is belligerent. He thinks that his father will just bail him out again, that he will just escape another trial, and the officer will be punished. It is methodical, much like Romero’s ghouls using tools to bring into a house, or slowly take some bodies apart from which to feed. The police station is still whole. The officer’s subordinate is still there. The townspeople are alive as well.

By the time a large, silent group of people walk down into the cell where the criminal is being held, you almost think they are — if you will pardon the reference to a spiritual descendant — the Walking Dead. But they are not. They are all the townspeople that this man wronged: everyone who lost someone they loved to this madman who has Daddy protecting him.

He is given a chance to admit to his wrongs, but he refuses. This is when the sack is brought downstairs: the squirming, shrieking sack. You see, there was a girl named Sue who had gone missing, and had been killed. This terrible person did it, but the coroner who could have done forensics on her body conveniently went on an all-expenses paid vacation to a resort courtesy of the criminal’s Mayor father. The problem is that standard procedure was to remove the brain, and put it in a jar: something that didn’t happen as the coroner was already gone. Sue reanimated, and well …

Sue and the criminal are reunited. You see a brief flashback, as you look at her very red ruby ring as she crawls towards him in that cell, of how he lured her to him, chained her … and let’s just say, I strongly suspect that her viciousness towards him, biting chunks out of him was more than just the ghoul need for flesh. 

By the time it is over, the officer admits to everyone as they ask him why he changed his mind, why he gave into vigilante justice, that if these are the End Times, where the dead are rising to plague the living, they probably deserved it. I would had him say something along the lines of:

“If these are the End Times, then let this be Judgment Day.”

The story ends with the officer and the others going to get the Mayor, to let him join in his son’s fate as society crumbles all around them. So fucking satisfying.

As I finish this write up of the Season Three of Creepshow, I have to note the following. The finale comes almost right before not only Halloween weekend, but Joe Bob Briggs’ Last Drive-In Walking Dead Special on Shudder, and it couldn’t have been timed better. We live in uncertain times of socio-political unrest, of chaos, and this episode hits harder than a double-tap to a zombified skull. And I am all for it.

Perhaps Season Three started out ambling, but it finished off strong: with the power of a broken system that needs destroying. And yet, that is the question: when this is done, what will we see after it? The Horror Doctor doesn’t know. But we will continue to find out. We will continue to write about it, and with both dread and anticipation, I intend to do so. And I need to watch more of Romero’s ghoul movies. All of them. 

Creepshow Commentaries Season Two: Episode 4 – Pipe Screams/Within The Walls of Madness

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 4: Pipe Screams/Within The Walls of Madness

So let’s get to it. The first story, “Pipe Dreams” is written by Daniel Kraus, and directed by Joe Lynch, where we are introduced to some very … sentient clogs in rusty, ill-maintained apartment building pipes.

It’s so strange seeing Barbara Crampton again, after watching Jakob’s Wife, in a totally new persona. This time, she is a racist, bigoted “Karen” landlady by the name of Victoria Smoot, and it actually gave me a doubletake to see that just by a sleek hairstyle, designer clothes, a necklace, a pink sweater worthy of Dolores Umbridge, and a nasally, unpleasant voice Barbara Crampton transforms herself into this terrible person who talks about her tenants as “animals” and even says things such as how their “hair is different because they come from different places” in the drain. Just like that, I really wanted something bad to happen to this woman, and that is all by design.

This is a person who not only has lead pipes in her terribly run apartment complex, and a general lack of maintenance and open bigotry, but she also hires one Linus Carruthers — a plumber from a company that used to be owned by him and a disreputable brother that is going under — to patch things up, and deal with the clogs in the pipes that shouldn’t legally exist. She knows he won’t report her as one more bad review will bring him under, and it is fairly certain she will try to rip him off of his pay in any case. When Linus talks about his terrible brother, or refers to him, my mind almost wants it to be Harlan King from “Pesticide” and that parallel of what he did to the homeless, though it doesn’t particularly line up, and there are dangers in trying to put things together that shouldn’t be: a lesson that Smoot never took to heart.

He goes to the apartment upstairs, after something devours a cat — and you know Smoot is evil, as she despises cats — to what seems to be the source of a clog that “squeaks” and “chirps” almost like a bird. It skitters in and out of the shadows. You know you’re not going to want to see what this monstrosity is. 
And when you see it, you don’t. It’s … So, a little while back, I was in a Dungeons and Dragons campaign Game Mastered by a friend of mine who really wanted us to confront some rats. So when we saw these rats coming — rats not unlike what Linus kept telling himself they were — we closed the door, only for those rats to bend and twist themselves under the crack beneath the door frame as if they had no bones. One of my friends, during the game, called these creatures — jokingly — octo-rats, and they were bullshit.

This sentient clog, and its kind, are basically octo-rats: malformed, twisted, and they eat flesh. I thought once this thing took the flesh off Linus’ hand, he was going to lose that limb. Then when it got to his face, I thought he was fucked. I thought he’d die, and we would cut to the skittering, bulbous, furry, tentacled clog going after the other tenants in the building, and then Smoot. But likely, it’s coded pretty clearly that Linus is a good man that isn’t just doing the job to save himself, but to protect the children that he knows in his heart is living in the building: the child of the mother that lets him into her apartment, and owned that poor cat that’s eaten.

He survives, gives a good fight, and the mother comes back to actually save him. And this is where, between the two of them, instead of calling the authorities we get some beautiful EC Comics justice in the form of poetic retribution. Oh, it is wonderful. I knew, the moment the tenants, with Linus the plumber, were all down in the basement — and he somehow lured Smoot back — that they weren’t going to simply beat her with tools. No, that is too easy for someone like her. Instead, they lure her to a drain where, as Linus put it as she’s stuffed in there being consumed by the creature, she “is home.” There is something timeless, but timely about this story when you consider the state of landlords and property and tenants during dire times of recessions, and in particular COVID-19. I do feel bad, though, that no one told the girl about her cat, but at least she leaves pretty pictures for her pet by the drain. Oh well, at least the octo-rat might appreciate it.

Speaking of tentacles, and disturbing things, we find ourselves at “Within the Walls of Madness” written by John Esposito and Greg Nicotero, and directed by John Harrison. Imagine William Shatner shouting “There is. Some-thing. On. The. Wing!” from the classic “Terror at 20,000 Feet” in a world created by combining H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” with “At the Mountains of Madness,” “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” and in the spirit of The Thing and you might see the resonance of this story.

It starts off with a graduate student named Zeller held at a military prison being interviewed by a lawyer named Tara Cartwright as he is accused of murdering three of his scientific team in — you guessed it — the Antarctic. What happens is something had already dealt with the rest of their expedition, and the survivors ran back to the base. Zeller had apparently been having an affair with a fellow graduate student named Mallory — who was dating their hostile head of security — but when the latter goes to look for their leader, Professor Trollenberg as played by Star Trek Next Generation veteran Denise Crosby — reality ripples around them into a wormhole as the two students are attacked by an entity from a wormhole.

Of course, the Professor and the security head come back to find Zeller with an axe and Mallory in pieces, and seem to think the worst. But there is security footage that would exonerate Zeller. Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the Professor had erased that footage and kept only him attacking the security head who attempted to kill him.

As it so transpires, Professor Trollenberg found the remains of what she calls the Old Ones — yes, Lovecraftian beings not unlike the ones in the Cthulhu Mythos — who apparently gave humanity Earth millennia ago before dying out, only to have humanity misuse it. She saw through a wormhole that she summons with a strange sonic instrument: an organic bonelike flute or ocarina, almost like a Key — and we know from Cthulhu Mythos lore that “The Silver Key” is not only a Lovecraft story, but it is an artifact that can unlock places between dreams and other realities. I see it as an analogue of that, though it uses sound to create wormholes through space-time in this narrative. Anyway, the Professor used it to manipulate time to when the Old Ones still lived, and believed they would punish humanity for destroying the world: that she would help them usher its destruction and return it all to the sea.

Zeller doesn’t want this, or to be framed for murder and when she summons another wormhole, he kills her. Now, this is where things are interesting. The expedition was a secret government one, which claimed to have them work for medical purposes. They know full well they were dealing with extraterrestrial elements, and they want Zeller to take the fall so that this incident will stay underwraps. It also helps that they genuinely don’t believe anything he says. Hell, even the lawyer claims to want to help him plead insanity, but really just wants all the rights and royalties to the book she will publish about his case. By the time we get towards the end of the story, Zeller’s had a lot of time to think about all of this. He is slated to be executed, which the governor or official along with Cartwright even talks to her about the insanity plea she decided not to pursue.

Zeller starts to see that humanity — its society, its hypocrisy, condemned him to this fate — and wasn’t listening to him when he says “they would come through the walls.” This is where it all goes down. For his last request, he asks for the alien instrument: which he blows. Zeller never gets that lethal injection, but everyone else gets grabbed and torn apart by tentacles from another dimension. What we realize is that Professor Trollenberg didn’t look into the past to find the Old Ones, but the future. And we see, as this paradox trope plays itself out — in which her own words “Time is an illusion” — come back to haunt her as she sees Zeller on the table and the Old Ones everywhere. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy as they both see each other between the past and the present, life and death.

Everyone has betrayed Zeller: from the security head, to the Professor, to the lawyer, to the government, to humankind. And he decides, instead of continuing to warn them, knowing they won’t listen and they will kill him anyway, that if he’s going to die he is going to take them all down with him. His last words are with him cackling, Lovecraft end-sentence style, “They are in the walls! In the walls …” And honestly, this is a story I can get behind, that when you disregard confusing temporal mechanics, it is humanity’s arrogance and abuse of power — and the hatred of one human that supersedes even that of an eldritch otherworldly species’ coming to destroy it all — everyone gets what they deserve. I … love it, frankly, Cartwright’s self-serving book Our Demons, Ourselves says it all.

Creepshow Commentaries Season Two: Episode 2 – Dead & Breakfast / Pesticide

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 2: Dead & Breakfast / Pesticide

I love how the beginning of this episode began with an animated bit, with the Creep taking a fly from his eye, and placing it into a spider’s web to eventually … die. There was an old lady, am I right?

And there was. Let’s look at “Dead & Breakfast,” directed by Axelle Carolyn and written by Michael Rousselet and Erik Sandoval. It begins in an old boarding house in 1939 where a guest is killed with an axe by an old woman named, fairly inaccurately, Spinster. For, as it turns out eighty years later, her adult grandchildren now run the house with which she committed her serial killings. 

Unfortunately, for all her granddaughter Pamela’s — the name and obsession of which reminds me of Jason Voorhee’s mother — pretensions to her grandmother having been the greatest American serial killer alive, she and her brother Samuel barely keep the boarding house running as a tourist attraction. And it’s too bad, for even as they encourage an influencer — a young social media personality by the equally pretentious name of Morgue — to stay at their property for free to get more exposure and potentially more bookings, even the Winchester Mansion-labyrinthine characteristics aren’t enough to keep her entertained or engaged, and Pamela decides to take rather drastic measures more out of a sense of twisted pride than common sense. 

I like how this one plays out. Morgue plays with the word “Spinster” as she makes fun of Pamela, as the older woman dresses up as her grandmother to scare her with an axe, only to seriously lose her already tenuous sanity, and kill the young woman after a lengthy chase and fall down the old stairs. And then Samuel, seemingly incompetent, always browbeaten, wanting to give up on the whole scheme altogether, constantly dressing up in a headless costume, kills his sister — revealing that he is just as much a grandchild of Old Lady Spinster as she is — to profit from the amount of social media Views and Likes that their “performance” of killing Morgue would bring. I have to hand it to him: making it look like it was staged, combined with the idea that an influencer can in fact disappear off the grid, or retire out of publicity reasons and making it look like his sister committed suicide really did add to his scheme: as convoluted as it is.

Of course, we find out that Old Lady Spinster had indeed been a successful serial killer. The problem, of course, with being a truly effective killer is that — even with her deathbed confessions — she was just too good at her job: at hiding the bodies. At the end of the day, there had been nothing to even prove that Spinister had even been a killer: that is how good she was, until Samuel goes back to the sealed room with the sewing machine and spindle. It turns out, Old Lady Spinster had a certain liking for either Sleeping Beauty, or Rumplestiltskin in that when he accidentally touched the mechanism of the machine, it opened a trap door for him to fall through: surrounding him with the old bones of his grandmother’s victims. He was pleased by this development too until, in EC Comics karma fashion, the trap door closed in on him: killed by a device his own grandmother installed ages ago. Even as Morgue gets to truly be involved in a serial killing she’s always investigated, as Pamela notes before killing her, Grandma Spinster’s whole line is destroyed by her own murderous legacy beyond the grave. I will say, however, that my only complaint — the only thing that took me, briefly, out of my immersion — was the fact that Morgue reconnected the modem Pamela unplugged that was she was so quick to get her Wifi connection back. That is just unbelievable, but in my mind still forgivable as I was entertained by this twisted circle of life in a story commenting on an America profiting off a history — and a reality — of murder. 

And then, speaking of murder and profitting off countless exterminations of life, we have “Pesticide,” as written by Frank Dietz, and directed by Greg Nicotero. This particular story reminds me of a story in the first Creepshow movie, “They’re Creeping Up On You!” Like that protagonist, we have the exterminator Harlan that calls himself the King — who despises insects, though he also enjoys killing other beings that are considered vermin — and, unlike the callous rich man in that 1982 story, he doesn’t have money until it is offered to him for … undertaking a whole other kind of pest control. 

His guilt, however, does plague him like Upson Pratt — or some kind of supernatural delusional event anyway — and the creature effects are fairly impressive,and gross. I do think that people living on the streets would be able to figure out that there is something off about their stew being poisoned, especially as the King — for all of his expertise in chemicals — isn’t particularly subtle, especially in how he kills that one homeless man with the knife. Street-smarts are a real thing, and the whole story makes me wonder if it truly happened at all, or if the exterminator just lost his mind. It has a whole dream-like quality to it, including another EC Comics karma ending that draws on a Kafkaesque “he found himself transformed into his bed into a monstrous vermin” moment. But The Metamorphosis reference aside, I truly appreciated Keith David as one Mr. Murdoch — the devil in the King’s ear — and that deep, baritone voice filled with casual satisfaction over the exterminations he received. I had some major Goliath from Gargoyles flashbacks hearing him speak again, and him appearing as an exterminator the end brought the whole Creepshow reference to “They’re Creeping Up On You!” full circle, which was the concluding story for the 1982 film as well.

I also enjoyed seeing Ashley Lawrence appear in her role as a psychologist and — just like her work as Kirsty Cotton in Hellraiser — she plays both victim and killer, with fear and disdain — extremely well. If anyone would see a blubbering would-be killer as beneath her, as someone on the other end of the counselling sessions this time, it would be Lawrence, and while the story itself is a bit disjointed at the end it is fitting that she ends King’s pathetic little life, with Murdoch offering to help her with “further pest problems.” 

Two stories, one with the descendants of a killer hoping to profit off of her deaths, and the latter of a killer of insects making the choice, foreshadowed by his uncle in jail for some unspecified crime — who taught him how make poisons, to kill “larger vermin” —  the legacies and actions come back to take them full circle, back to the spider and the fly at the beginning of the episode. And, after all, aren’t these stories just a microcosm of the horror cycle of life. Doesn’t death always come back to death? And isn’t that, ultimately, how these stories will continue, when everything is all said and done? 

Either way you look at it, I look forward to seeing more callbacks and familiar horror faces in the episodes that are still to come.

Creepshow Commentaries Season Two: Creepshow Episode 1 – Model Kid/Public Television of the Dead

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

So after my Iron Man Certificate Challenge escapade, I had a lot of a mess to clean up in my Dissections and Speculatives room. Certainly, I needed more energy and inspiration after such a self-inflicted punishment. Ominously enough, the next season of Creepshow has landed on Shudder, and I had the occasion to watch it. I’ve thought about what I would do once the Creepshow seasons started up again, as I had written a whole series of summaries and thoughts — micro-reviews — of the series’ episodes before I even began the Horror Doctor. What I have decided is that, instead of waiting to have them all compiled, I am going to do one a piece. I think that is fair, and digestible. As such, most of these Creepshow entries are my thoughts and impressions of the episodes with their twinned stories grafted together complementing and contrasting with one another. In other words, I will be horror geeking out most of the time, and hopefully something of substance will be said or gleaned from it. As such, here we go with the first episode. I hope you will enjoy it ladies, gentlemen, and other beings of the night.

Warning: Potential Spoilers for Episode 1: Model Kid/Public Television of the Dead

I wasn’t sure how Creepshow was going to top its first season, especially with its Animated Special. And so, here are the first two stories to start off the second season and … what can I say?

They tell us to think about the children when creating or enjoying controversial things. 

And they did.

That isn’t entirely accurate, of course. In fact, I would say that both of these stories, directed by Greg Nicotero and written by John Eposito and Rob Schrab respectively, are about nostalgia and the power of that sentiment even against the forces of darkness, and abuse.

Eposito’s “Model Kid” reminds me of all the old Universal and Hammer movies made in the early twentieth century that I would watch in my childhood, especially those involving Abbott and Costello. We even see a bit of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein as a young boy named Joe and his mother watch it on what the latter calls “their time machine.” And she even explains why she calls their projector a time machine: as it is a device that takes you back to a time, a fictional piece of space-time preserved forever, a silver piece of moving eternity, and simpler, perhaps even better times. It’s nostalgia all over again. I also love the fact that Joe creates a fight between the Gill-Man and the Mummy, his action figures, and especially when you consider that as of the release of this Creepshow episode, Godzilla Vs. Kong has just been released. These monster mashups and cinematic attempts at shared universes have existed for a long time, especially when you consider that Meet Frankenstein has “the Monster,” Dracula, and the Wolfman all in one film, whatever grief films like Batman Vs. Superman might have possessed for having more than the titular characters. 

You really feel for Joe, especially when you realize that his nostalgia takes the form of his “friends”: who are essentially the monsters in all the vintage horror films, some before his time in the 1930s and some contemporary Hammer — as he lives in 1972 and talks about Christopher Lee being the relatively new Dracula compared to Bela Lugosi, whom he dresses up as and imitates. For me, it had been the eighties and nineties where I would watch these tapes over and again on VHS, even renting them repeatedly, or recording them from Cable. I could relate to not having many friends, and consistently watching those films to remember the events in my life that happened around those films — my fleeting childhood, my grandparents, uncle, and time just getting away from me. But with Joe, the loss of time is even more poignant, and the people that don’t understand it far more cruel.

I could, as you can see, truly relate to Joe: especially in how even the most well-meaning people in his life didn’t understand why this “time-machine” and its assorted toys and posters were so important to him. And while the plot was fairly predictable, the way those monsters come to him, proving to be his friends, and the karma he delivers through some less than sympathetic magic with a figurine — a model — he orders, is fairly satisfying. 

Nostalgia and karma somewhat bleed out into the next story by Rob Schrab “Public Television of the Dead.” However, the nostalgia doesn’t centre on the early twentieth century, but rather the latter part of that epoch. We open up with a children’s show that reads like a combination of Lamb-Chop’s Play-Along and Reading Rainbow who has a character called Mrs. Bookberry teaching kids about “karma”: about how good deeds — and terrible actions — revisit themselves back on their doers. 

It continues on, with an Antiques Roadshow analogue, and even — honest to the happy little trees — a Joy of Painting homage to the point of plagiarism called The Love of Painting starred by a man named Norm. Norm is about to, unfortunately, lose his show due to the greed of Mrs. Bookberry, who is not nearly as benevolent as she appears to be on television, especially not in how she treats one of the few African-American television production members on staff. That last little detail about that element of racism, glossed over during that time, really added a gravity to the awfulness of that character.

But there is another aspect of horror nostalgia. We see Ted Rami, yes that Ted Rami, on the antique show — one of the three programs run by one WQPS along with the reading show, and the painting one — showing a book he … found in his fruit cellar. I admit: I was swearing, goodnaturedly, at the screen as this went on. And I thought: there was no way they would mention its title. I believed they would just mention it in passing, and have a whole other story. But …

They went there.

They went there, and they went there hard. Not only did the motherfucker have the same twisted cover of flesh and screaming faces, albeit with a lock on its pages, but … it had the same effects. And they named it. They actually named it. 

And … I will just say it. Deadites were there. Fucking Deadites. Deadites somehow manifested, along with the Necronomicon Libre Ex Mortis, outside of Evil Dead into Creepshow.

And Norm, the Bob Ross analogue who is balding in contrast, shares the artist’s former military background and … I was so glad he wasn’t killed in the first part. He, the producer, and his assistant band together to fight the Deadites and keep the Necronomicon from being read on television. It was beautiful, this strange fusion of different aspects of my childhood that played in the background that … works, so well.

I still can’t believe they had the balls, or ovaries, or sheer metaphorical gall to introduce Deadites into another world, though given where they come from, and the other stories involved, it makes a lot of sense. After all, the Necronomicon gets around. Of course, the story has an … open-ending, as you would expect from an Evil Dead homage, that makes me glad I took the time to watch the core films this Pandemic. So while the monsters are not friendly in the latter story, they are a hearkening back to another time that, mixed with an earlier period of reassurance, shows us that the past was not always pleasant but like the past and its conflicts, the present will find its own equilibrium as well: or the very least, the stories will never end. And if either story in this first episode of the second season of Creepshow demonstrates anything, it’s that its stories have only just begun.