The best and funniest Stephen King movie is 1982’s Creepshow.
By Nathan Kamal | Posted
Stephen King is one of the most famous authors to have ever lived, without exception of format. He has had immense success with his novels, short stories, screenplays, movies, TV shows, and just about anything you can think of, as long as it’s horror. This is somewhat unfair; While Stephen King is undeniably the modern master of horror, he’s also written in many other genres throughout his career and can be extremely funny, dark and acidic when he wants to.
All this to say that the best and most representative of all Stephen King films is also his funniest: the anthology film horror show, which was released in 1982 to moderate box office returns and mixed reviews. However, horror show occupies a unique place in the works of Stephen King; not only is it the first screenplay he’s ever written and a long and loving homage to the horror comics he consumed as a child, it’s actually quite hilarious. The humor can be mean and gory and quite cheesy, but no one can deny that it doesn’t hit as hard as the dead.
horror show is essentially five short stories by Stephen King (two adapted from existing stories, three written for the film), accompanied by live-action sequences and separated by animated transitions showing glimpses of old-fashioned commercials for the x-ray glasses and “actual voodoo dolls. It makes a lot of sense when you realize the film is an elaborate homage to 1950s EC Comics, which published many macabre comic strips until the moral panic and complacency are pushing the industry into the superhero genre.The most famous of these comics, Tales from the Crypt was eventually made into a famous HBO series and a little-known movie, horror show is Stephen King’s love letter to the gruesome genre, often tinged with morality as a whole.
Fortunately for the cinema neophyte, Stephen King was not the only one to have an affection for the horror comics of his youth. horror show is directed by George A. Romero, the filmmaker behind the greatest zombie movie of all time, and the animated sequences were directed by Jack Kamen, one of the main artists of EC Comics’ glory days. Long before the idea of building visually Pontoon like a comic book was a glint in Ang Lee’s eye, the three got together, recruited horror cinematographer Michael Gornick and an incredible cast of actors, and made a truly unique film.
Stephen King’s First Story horror show is the delightfully over-the-top “Father’s Day,” in which a family of wealthy fools await the arrival of the family’s possibly patricidal matriarch, only for the father she bludgeoned to death on Father’s Day. fathers come to life and murder horribly while demanding cake. It is extremely representative of horror show that there’s no explanation for the dead coming back to life, or why a young Ed Harris dances to loud disco music like such a weird jerk, but that’s part of the movie’s weird charm.
“The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” stars Stephen King himself as a dumb farmer who becomes infected with some kind of disgusting interstellar plant virus after opening a meteorite and dreams of selling it to the local university for the princely sum of $50. We’ll never say that Stephen King is really an actor, but this grotesque close-to-man piece allows him to be a goofy cartoon of a peasant, which suits him well.
“Something to Tide You Over” stars Ted Danson and the delightfully wicked, cast-against-type Leslie Nielsen as a young lothario and the vengeful, wealthy psychopath he recklessly cuckolds. Suffice it to say, everyone in this Stephen King story suffers a terrible, watery fate, and Leslie Nielsen has the time of her life playing an alternately buddy and terrifying villain. That’s before the waterlogged zombies even appear and he loses his mind.
“The Crate” stars Hal Holbrook as the sweet, secretly murderous academic and Adrienne Barbeau as his contemptuous, alcoholic wife. Their lives would probably go on as some corny version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, except a college janitor discovers a fanged arctic beast that’s been trapped in a chained crate for over a hundred years and is very, very hungry. More than the rest of the stories in this Stephen King film, “The Crate” contains an ominous streak of misogyny, which can be traced to decidedly non-PC EC Comics, but which remains evil decades later.
Finally, “They’re crawling on you!” is about the world’s worst man, his airtight, sterile apartment in New York City, and a bunch of filthy bugs. Suffice it to say, the legendary Tom Savini’s makeup skills are more than enough to make a human body look like it’s literally being torn from the inside out by cockroaches.
But really, Stephen King’s key horror show are the opening and closing live-action sequences, which feature a young boy (King’s real-life son, author Joe Hill) being scolded by his ogre father for reading that “horror shit “. In the opening, the wretched boy bursts into a wide smile when he sees the quasi-incumbent Creep, a strange floating monster outside his window, waving at him. Then, in the epilogue, the boy happily takes his horrible and ironic revenge for having his comics taken away. That’s Stephen King (and his sense of humor) for you.
