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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