Even with all the exciting upcoming horror movie premieres and spooky TV shows on the way, it’s impossible not to return to all-time classics and personal favorites that haven’t been seen in a while. To start getting into the All-Hallows spirit with my wife and 13-year-old daughter, I threw on the George Romero-directed, Stephen King-scripted horror-comedy Creepshow after realizing it’d been decades since I’d last seen it.
While I could never say with a straight face that the 1982 romp from Warner Bros. was faultless, top-tier cinema, I was morosely pleased to find that it was just as gnarly, jagged and gleefully gross as I remembered, if not more so. And it sparked a pretty specific wish in my brain for an upcoming Stephen King project (or more) that I honestly hadn’t given much thought during my many years as a fan.
Stephen King Should Write More Live-Action Anthologies
Despite being known first and foremost as a prolific horror novelist, Stephen King has worked directly on quite a few live-action projects, from his lone feature effort Maximum Overdrive (adapting his short story “Trucks”) to scripting all the episodes of Apple TV+’s Lisey’s Story to writing the beloved The Stand miniseries in the ‘90s and more. But to date, he’s only written the screenplay for one other anthology beyond Creepshow: Lewis Teague’s 1985 horror Cat’s Eye.
That low number is kind of shocking to me, considering there have been the same number of anthology series wholly devoted to King’s works that he didn’t write for: Nightmares and Dreamscapes, and Hulu’s Castle Rock. (To say nothing of one-off segments in Tales from the Darkside and others.) Obviously we’re talking about a writer notorious for penning tomes of 700+ pages, and anthology segments are a different animal, but Creepshow alone is proof positive that he can do it well with another horror master behind the camera.
Having special effects expert Tom Savini handling all the gruesomeness doesn’t hurt, either, so having him onboard this hypothetical future project is a must as well. He did direct an episode segment from Greg Nicotero’s Creepshow series on AMC, so the gore-soaked connective tissue remains intact.
Creepshow’s Segments Dig Directly Into Specific Fears Without Fluff
One reason why Creepshow works as well as it does both as a horror and a comedy is because we’re dealing with pretty clear-cut stories that spend little time on needless B-plots with forgettable side characters. Each story follows a simple-yet-effective format that lays out each story’s options for hero and/or villain, and the core thematic or visual threat that characters will be forced to deal with. And then it drills down hard on those fears.
For instance, Stephen King himself took the co-starring titular role in the segment “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill,” whose premise of a simpleton whose curiosity seals his plant-based fate is met in full without needing anything beyond the dread of seeing how terrible Jordy’s situation can possibly get.
Meanwhile, watching “Something to Tide You Over” in the modern age is almost surreal to watch, given its led by comedy legends Leslie Nielsen and Ted Danson. And yet it manages to provoke legitimately unsettling feelings in viewers for leaning into the innately harrowing fear of being buried alive, or up to one’s neck in sand to be super-specific here. As well, the increasing sense of dread Nielsen’s character feels ahead of that segment’s climax is successfully unnerving, even though he definitely deserves the worst.
But really, if we’re talking about extremely effective cinema, then there’s no need to look any further than the bug-filled “They’re Creeping Up on You!” Because holy farking shark, while I’m sure that segment is PETA-branded kryptonite, it is wildly shocking to see an intentional infestation on that scale. Who needs dense exposition when there’s the sound of thousands of tiny legs to pay attention to?
King’s Short Fiction Is Often Just As Powerful As His Epics
Stephen King has penned a dozen published collections of short stories and novellas to date, from 1978’s Night Shift to 2024’s You Like It Darker, not accounting for untold numbers of shorter works that exist outside such compilations. And for many, those less extensive creative endeavors can hit just as hard as his more massive efforts such as IT, The Stand, or his Dark Tower series.
Because even with his longer novellas that tackle more complicated storylines, King still tends to have a better batting average with nailing his endings than it goes with some lengthier tales. And he’s still able to carve out memorable characters in such settings often by pitting them directly against whatever scares them the most, without the need for narrative wiggle room.
Clearly, it’s been a while since Stephen King went down the anthology route to get his stories in front of fans’ eyeballs, so perhaps it’s simply not that enjoyable a way to work for him. Or perhaps he’s only interested in focusing on longer-form live-action projects at this point in his life and career. And that would be perfectly fine, obviously, since he’s created more epic works than anyone else could hope to match.
But if it turns out those ideas are wrong, and all King needs is for someone to nudge him in that direction and remind him just how great Creepshow and Cat’s Eye are, and how much anthology cinema could use a jolt of his talent, then allow me to do that with polite veracity.
