A Creepshow Animated Special (2020)

Movie: A Creepshow Animated Special (2020), directed by Greg Nicotero

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 6.74 miles, 8’54”/mile, 59:57 (recovery run)

 

Oh man, folks, getting old really bites the proverbial wax tadpole. Once you hit a certain age you can put yourself in traction just turning three degrees too far on the couch while reaching for the remote control, so it comes as no particular surprise that those tiny overuse injuries I incurred by running too many nights on the pavement just kept getting worse, and these days I’m hobbling around the house like an NPC that took an arrow in the knee.

 

Now, I know I pretty much only review horror movies over here and not TV shows, but Arrow-Knee-Me wanted something on the shorter side and easy to swallow, and when I saw A Creepshow Animated Special pop up on Shudder, it didn’t immediately occur to me that it’s technically a “very special episode” of the new Creepshow TV series. I mean, it’s a Special—that’s kind of a movie, right? And it’s animated instead of live action like the rest of the series, and not part of the regular season, so it’s a standalone thingy. C’mon, work with me, here.

 

Anyway, the real reason I jumped all over ACAS is because the first of the two stories it adapts is “Survivor Type,” my favorite Stephen King short story ever—still one of my models for effective narrative structure in short fiction, and honestly one of the things that got me into horror in the first place. Plus, it’s a man-vs.-himself story about a guy whose body is betraying him and who’s betraying his body in turn, which, for obvious reasons, resonates kinda hard with Arrow-Knee-Me right now. Count me in!

 

ACAS sticks to the format of the Creepshow TV series, to wit: a 45ish-minute episode comprising two tales of the macabre ostensibly lifted from the pages of a horror comic, with a menacingly jovial Cryptkeeper-style corpse-dude as your host. We see the opening frames of the comic as the camera pans past them, and then a still frame transitions into full motion, and away we go. The only difference here is that the stories are animated cartoons instead of live action. Got it? Nice.

 

The first story is, as I mentioned, King’s “Survivor Type,” a tale originally told in the form of the recovered journal entries of Dr. Richard Pine, a crooked doctor who was smuggling drugs when his ship sank and who wound up marooned on a tiny island. The journal alternates between a recounting of Richard’s earlier life and the day-to-day horrors of being stranded alone with only the occasional seagull to kill and eat raw. He injures himself trying to signal a plane flying overhead, and winds up needing to amputate his own foot while anesthetized with smuggled heroin. Since he’s starving but can’t kill gulls anymore, he resolves to survive by eating his own foot. And then the other foot. And a few other body parts. How far will he go to survive?

 

It’s a grim and gruesome tale, to be sure, and tough to watch, even animated. But I felt it lacked the impact of the original short story, most likely because imagining cutting off and eating your own infected limbs is so much worse than seeing it happen to someone else. Also, Richard is voiced by Kiefer Sutherland, and something about his performance kept pulling me out of the story. It’s by no means awful, but I wish it were better.

 

The other story is “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” by Joe Hill, King’s son—apparently this special is a family endeavor. And the narrative device is the same, albeit modernized: teenage Blake’s “journal entries” are her Twitter feed as she live-tweets from the back seat of a dire family road trip. The family makes a pit stop at—where else?—the Circus of the Dead, where they’re treated to a big-top circus show in which zombies chase humans, devour live lions, and fire themselves out of cannons into the audience in showers of gore. Blake continues to tweet throughout the show, even as her brother volunteers and gets axed in the neck before joining the show as a zombie himself. It’s a preposterous premise; the notion that the show could progress for so long without the few live human attendees (turns out they’re seated amongst corpses) twigging to what’s really happening just beggars believability, but if you’re willing to go the extra mile to suspend your disbelief, it’s a fun yarn.

 

The stories themselves are fair-to-good in these adaptations, but the animation is… pretty much what you’d expect these days for a project like this. It’s computer-generated and Flash-style, which is cheap and quick to crank out, but far too slick to evoke the feel of the old EC Comics pulp horror funny-books that inspired Creepshow in the first place. I know it’s unrealistic to hope for hand-drawn cel animation like a freakin’ Disney feature from the ’30s, but a boy can dream. In lieu of that, even something as simple as a comic-style halftone filter and faded CMYK color palette might have helped. Or it might have ruined it utterly. Who can say? After all, it’s not like you’d find a story about a Twitter account in a 1950s horror comic anyway.

 

So, stylistic dissonance be damned: ACAS is a fair-to-middling way to pass three-quarters of an hour. The “Survivor Type” adaptation was a bit disappointing, but I suspect that the source material doesn’t really lend itself to this sort of medium. “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead,” on the other hand, felt right at home in a new-media adaptation, and I do intend to seek out the original short story at some point to compare. Overall, it’s not your father’s Saturday morning cartoon, but pour yourself a bowl of Count Chocula and settle in for a nice for a change of pace.