By 1982, the heyday of the ’60s and ’70s Amicus horror anthologies was long past, and even mainstream horror comic books (thriving at Marvel and DC since the early ’70s) were winding down. Ghost Rider was flaming out, and The House of Mystery was up for sale. Many of these concepts would later get revamped, recycled, and woven into prestige series like Swamp Thing and Sandman, but in the early ’80s, it was down to a few independent publishers like Eclipse to keep that spirit alive.
Anyway, just to set the stage: horror anthologies were mostly dead, and due to a market slump, horror comics were getting buried.
George Romero, Stephen King, and Tom Savini remembered a time before all that – back when a small publishing company called EC dominated the market from the late ’40s to the mid-’50s. They put out titles like Weird Science, Tales from the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror. Unfortunately, moral crusaders led by Fredric Wertham blamed these comics for everything from juvenile delinquency to communism.
The public outcry led to book burnings, Senate hearings, and, inevitably, the Comics Code Authority – that little white stamp you’d spot on every American comic book from the mid-’50s to the early 2000s – designed to defang and sanitize the industry.
But this isn’t a lecture on the history of horror comics – as much as I could blather on about it.
This is about Creepshow – A movie, but also a gushy love letter to the gruesome, ironic morality tales that once thrived in the pages of EC.
Creepshow feels like a rebuttal, and a middle finger to the 50s. It even opens with an angry dad snatching away a comic, convinced it’s warping his kid’s brain: the same kind of righteous outrage that once sent stacks of EC issues into bonfires.
By the early ’80s, the kids who grew up on those banned comics were finally in a position to fight back. That’s why Creepshow wasn’t simply a microwaved slice of monster nostalgia – it was revenge, delivered in the most EC way possible. Because in those stories, every terrible deed earned an even worse comeuppance, usually courtesy of something clawed, rotting, or recently unearthed. It could take decades, but the twist ending was inevitable: EC horror rose from the grave, taking hold of a new generation of kiddies.
Every carefully crafted frame of Creepshow recreates that lost four-colour world: the splashy, unnatural lighting, the Dutch angles, the exaggerated takes, the transitions, the comic panel frames, the page flips, the animated inserts – we’re constantly reminded that we’re watching a living, breathing horror comic.
It’s easy now to feel nostalgic for a 40-year-old movie that was itself nostalgic for 30-year-old comic books. But at the time, this was a deep cut. Romero and King wanted to recreate that forbidden thrill: the feeling of watching something your parents didn’t want you to see. Right down to the movie poster – a rotting skeleton usher, theater tickets in hand, leering at you from the video store wall. Like a heavy metal album cover, this was something we shouldn’t be seeing.
Creepshow was more than mere nostalgia. It was nostalgia for nostalgia. An ode to a kind of horror that got locked away in a moral panic.
But lock something in a crate long enough, and eventually… it gets out. -Pop