Creepshow (1982)

Creepshow arrives from 1982, a collaboration between George A. Romero and Stephen King, and it wears its influences like a cheap rubber mask. Five tales, framed by a boy and his confiscated comic book, all soaked in the palette of EC horror titles from the 1950s. Tom Savini's effects mimic ink and panel borders. The cast is a repertory of familiar faces doing silly things with conviction. The film wants nothing more than to be a nasty little comic that a stern father would throw in the trash, and it achieves that ambition completely.

Measuring the film against contemporary cultural sensibilities is a brief exercise. The ensemble is white, the women are victims or harridans, the monsters are monsters, and nobody pauses to interrogate a power structure. One segment, "They're Creeping Up on You!", offers a businessman named Upson Pratt, who gloats over a takeover that drove a rival to suicide and is then eaten by cockroaches in his sealed penthouse. That is a comeuppance for greed, delivered with the subtlety of a falling anvil. It is the faintest possible nod toward economic resentment, and it lasts about as long as the swarm takes to finish him.

Everything else is pulp, and pulp has no interest in instruction. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no agenda beyond the pleasure of watching a shrewish wife get eaten under a staircase or a yokel turn into a shrub. The film predates the era when a horror picture felt obliged to explain itself, and it is better for the omission. Craft and appetite are what is left: the comic-book transitions, the waterlogged revenants, the twenty thousand cockroaches that were partly nuts and raisins. We can classify it, as we must, and find it nearly empty of contemporary meaning. Then we can watch it again, which is the more rewarding pursuit.