A young boy named Billy Hopkins (Stephen King’s son Joe King) is disciplined by his father Stan (Tom Atkins) for reading a horror comic called Creepshow. Stan throws it in the garbage. Billy retires to his bedroom, wishing his father in Hell, and hears a sound at the window which turns out to be the Creep, the host of the comic book, who beckons to him and opens the lid of the trash can, revealing the first story.
1.FATHERS DAY
Sylvia Grantham (Carrie Nye) meets her nephew Richard (Warner Shook) and niece Cass (Elizabeth Regan) and her new husband Hank Blaine (Ed Harris) at the Grantham Estate for a dinner. Tey tell Hank about the family matriarch, Great Aunt Bedekia (Viveca Lindfors), who had murdered her late father, the miserly Nathan Grantham (Jon Lormer), who made his fortune through bootlegging, fraud, extortion, and murder.
Bedelia had spent her life putting up with his emotional abuse and then had to nurse him after he suffered a stroke. He had set up a fatal hunting accident that killed his daughter’s fiancé Peter Yarbro (Peter Messer) that Father’s Day. Bedelia bashed in her father’s head with a marble ashtray.
Now, Bedelia arrives at Grantham Manor, stopping by the family cemetery. She reminisces about the murder and its pretence of an accidental death. She spills her whiskey by the headstone. Nathan’s putrefied corpse emerges from the grave, still demanding the Father’s Day cake he never got. He strangles Bedelia and uses telekinesis to kill the whole rest of the family with various gruesome methods and presents them with a Father’s Day cake—sylvia’s severed head covered with frosting and candles.
2.THE LONESOME DEATH OF JORDY VERRILL
Jody Verrill (Stephen King himself), a dim-witted yokel, watches a meteorite land on his farm. He burns his hand touching it, which he imagines selling to the local college. He douses it with water, and it cracks open, spilling a blue liquid. Trying to glue the two halves together, he allows the liquid to touch his skin.
Grass seems to be growing on his fingers, and he considers calling a doctor but fears that will result in amputation. After a while, the strange substance covers his body and his entire farm, so he drinks vodka and falls asleep. When he wakes, his house is filled with the stuff, and he has grown a green beard.
He is visited by the ghost of his father (Bingo O’Malley), who warns him that the plant is seeking water, but the stuff on his skin becomes so unbearable that he climbs into a bath. The next day, his farm is covered with alien vegetation, and he is a human-shaped plant. He grabs a gun and blows off the top of his head. A TV weathercast announces moderate temperatures and heavy rains as the plant spreads to other towns.
3.SOMETHING TO TIDE YOU OVER
Richard Vickers (Leslie Nielsen) is a heartless and cold-blooded millionaire. He visits Harry Wentworth (Ted Danson), who is having an affair with his wife Becky (Gaylen Ross). Rather than assault Harry like a man, he plays a recording of his wife in which she begs him to help her. Both men travel to Richard’s isolated beach house. He forces Harry to jump into a hole and bury himself.
When Harry is buried neck-deep at low tide, Richard sets up a VCR to record Harry’s death. He also sets up a VCR showing Becky buried in the same way. If they can hold their breath long enough to live until the water loosens the sand, they will live. He watches them drown, sipping a cocktail. Before dying, Harry promises revenge.
Returning later, Richard finds no sign of Harry and assumes his body was carried off by the current. In the night, he hears voices calling his name. It is Harry and Becky, water-logged and covered in seaweed. Later, the undead lovers bury Richard neck-deep on the beach and vanish into the surf. Richard screams that he can hold his breath for a long time.
4.THE CRATE
Mike Latimer (Don Keefer), janitor at Horlicks University, drops a quarter and it rolls under a basement staircase. Trying to retrieve it, he comes across a wooden crate marked, “Ship to Horlicks University via Julia Carpenter—Arctic Expedition. June 19, 1834.” He calls Professor Dexter Stanley (Fritz Weaver), who is at a gathering with Dexter’s best friend, Professor Henry Northrup (Hal Holbrook) and his drunken, obnoxious wife Billie (Adrienne Barbeau). He’d like to kill her but is too timid.
Stanley meets Mike the Janitor at Amberson Hall and both men move the crate to a nearby biology lab. Opening it, Mike sticks his hand in the crate and shouts in pain. The crate opens to reveal a shaggy, ape-like creature with sharp fangs. It kills and devours Mike, leaving one boot. Dexter runs away and bumps into grad student Charlie Gereson (Robert Harper). They return to the lab and find np sign of the creature or the crate, but the lab is covered with blood. The crate is back under the stairs. Charlie examines the crate but the creature pounces on Charlie and kills him.
Hysterical, Dexter runs to Henry’s house and tells him what has happened. Henry realizes that this is a good way to get rid of his wife. Henry spikes Dexter’s drink with sleeping pills and writes a note stating that Dexter assaulted a female student. Billie comes rushing to Amberson Hall, where the bloody lab has been cleaned up. Henry lures her under the stairs. The beast awakes and proceeds to eat Billie. The next morning Henry tells Dexter that he dumped the crate into a nearby quarry and it sank into the depths. As they set off to the authorities to report Billie’s disappearance, the creature tears the submerged crate apart.
5.THEY’RE CREEPING UP ON YOU
Upson Pratt (E.G. Marshall) is a cruel businessman who suffers from mysophobia and lives in a hermetically sealed penthouse with locks and surveillance cameras. He only contacts the outside world through the telephone. One stormy night, he receives a call, informing him that his company Pratt International has taken over the Pacific Aerodyne Company, whose owner has committed suicide. Pratt is happy about that.
But he begins to see cockroaches in his apartment and arms himself with bug spray. He receives a call from the suicide’s distraught wife (Ann Muffly) who curses him. He finds cockroaches in his food processor, then in a box of cereal. There is a blackout, and hundreds of thousands of cockroaches pour out of their hiding places. Pratt locks himself in a panic room and discovers that the room is already infested. He has a heart attack. They find his body and cockroaches burst out of it.
EPILOGUE
The next morning, two garbage collectors find the Creepshow comic book on the curb. In the house, Stan complains that he is suffering from a stiff neck. Billy stabs a voodoo doll of his father with a pin. His image appears on the cover of the next issue of Creepshow.
The film was directed by Gorge A. Romero from Stephen King’s first screenplay. “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” and “The Crate” are based on published stories by King, and the others were written just for the film. King and his son appear in two sequences. The entire movie is an homage to the E.C. Horror Comics of the Fifties—-Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and the Haunt of Fear—the comics my generation devoured and our parents despised, along with Mad Magazine. Special effects wizard Tom Savin created a comic-book feel for the visuals. It was followed by a sequel by King and two more without King. There was also a TV series.
Most of it was filmed in and around Pittsburgh and in an empty girls’ school outside Greensburg. David Brody and Ray Mendez, an entomologist for the American Museum of Natural History, produced 20,000 cockroaches for one episode, though many of them were played by nuts and raisins. It was the highest grossing horror film for Warner Brothers that year. It received 65% on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert praised its humour and appreciation of the macabre. Later, an actual comic book was based on it.
There was a remarkable collection of first-rate actors in this. The performances ran the gamut from Stephen King’s, which proved that he really should stick to writing, through Hal Holbrooke and E. G. Marshall, to Leslie Nielson, who like many very funny men, was chilling as a heartless murderer.