Comfort Food, Served Bloody

I grew up on horror movies. I suppose most kids who came of age in the ’80s did, in the heyday of Starlog and Fangoria and video nasties erupting just as a new generation of filmmakers started to take the genre in all sorts of fascinating new directions. Dante and Landis made horror comedies without any of the camp condescension that made it okay to snicker at B-movie monsters; Carpenter, Craven. Cronenberg and Hooper drilled into the vulnerability of the human body and mind, and Raimi just fucking went for it.

I owned my first VCR in 1984, but for a couple of years before that I’d rent one every weekend from the local Videoflicks along with three or four movies, gorging on whatever I could grab. And sure, the selection was limited at the beginning of the decade – and horror fans in Ontario were further frustrated by the fact that stores in the province had to carry censored versions of certain films, like The Brood and later Day of the Dead and Re-Animator – but as the years went by the catalogues grew rich and deep, and once laserdiscs got into the mix you could count on getting the complete version of a given movie. It was a glorious time, even if everything was in standard definition.

Now, of course, everything’s available in glorious HD or UHD, and the films I grew up watching are regarded as classics and celebrated with expansive special editions at the rate of one or two a week. And nobody is doing horror restorations like Shout! Factory, with their nigh-bottomless Scream Factory line of beloved titles. Just last month, they brought George A. Romero’s Creepshow and Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs to 4K … and honestly, that’s the Lord’s work right there.

Pitched as a tongue-in-cheek homage to the gleefully lurid horror tales of E.C. Comics, Creepshow was basically just an excuse for Romero and Stephen King – buddies whose love of disreputable pulp runs through all of their work – to tell scary stories with a studio’s support. An anthology picture that puts the old Amicus spook-story format through an American four-color lens, with a distinct visual style and an occasionally grandiose musical score that let you know exactly how the filmmakers feel about all of this, Creepshow hits a sweet spot of nerdy hyper-focus; like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8^th Dimension or Big Trouble in Little China, it’s an attempt to create a future cult movie that actually succeeds at its task.

Four decades later, in a landscape where The Twilight Zone was just rebooted for the third time and Black Mirror is regularly delivering a season’s worth of the ironic-comeuppance narratives Rod Serling perfected – Creepshow feels almost simplistic in its storytelling. Maybe it always did; certainly King and Romero were aiming for quick, high-concept stories of revenge where bad people come to bad ends, as in the shorter segments “Father’s Day” (shitty kids get murdered by even shitter parent, who’s now a zombie), “Something to Tide You Over” (adulterous lovers are cruelly drowned by sadistic husband, only to return from their watery graves to give him the same treatment) and “They’re Creeping Up on You” (bug-phobic tycoon is trapped in his own hermetically sealed penthouse with many, many cockroaches).

The short ones are just plain fun, each one giving veteran performers like Leslie Nielsen, Viveca Lindfors and E.G. Marshall – as well as up-and-comers like Ed Harris and Ted Danson – the chance to trade insults and arch comic-book dialogue as the stories inch up the slope of roller coaster, then exploding into cheeseball retribution. Everybody knows what kind of story they’re telling, and King’s setups feed into Romero’s Borscht Belt sense of humor; we’re just here to watch a bunch of jerks get theirs.

But there’s something deeper at work in the two longer segments. “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” – which casts King as a hapless farmer who picks up a green thumb, and a lot more besides, after an encounter with a meteor – spins a genuinely sad story about a dumb guy who makes bad choices because he doesn’t know any better, and despite King’s subsequent mockery of his performance here, he knows exactly when to cut through the hayseed flailing to find notes of sorrow and self-awareness in Jordy’s suffering. (It’s also striking to realize how much the young King looks like Bill Hader from certain angles, and I’ve been wondering what Hader and King might do with a Creepshow project ever since.)

And then there’s “The Crate”, which was designed as a showcase for Tom Savini’s creature work with its gruesome tale of a dusty old box that contains a hungry monster – but which also plays into King’s touch for domestic characterizations with its tale of a henpecked academic (Hal Holbrook) who sees the beast as the solution to his marital woes. Yes, it’s broad as hell and Adrienne Barbeau is way, way over the top as Holbrook’s innuendo-dropping, martini-swigging spouse, but her bilious Billie has walked straight out of the Pepsi-stained pages of The Vault of Horror; she’s monster food from the moment we meet her, and Holbrook’s clenched-jaw turn as her long-suffering husband is oddly sympathetic – especially when it looks like his plan might not have worked as he’d hoped.

There’s also some genuine pathos in Fritz Weaver’s performance as the professor who discovers the beast, and whose haplessness gets two people killed; again, the character only exists to set events in motion, but Weaver plays him as a tweedy, panicky mess (“and – and I could be blamed for it!”) straight out of a Lovecraft tome. It’s really fun to revisit a movie like this and find it richer than I’d remembered; what could have been a throwaway project, a quick buck for all involved, now feels like something special.

Yeah, the wraparound segment is pretty broad, but it gives us Tom Atkins as an asshole dad and Tom Savini somehow channeling Kevin Smith as a garbageman; honestly, it gets us from A to B to C, and what more can anyone ask.

I was a little more leery about returning to The People Under the Stairs, honestly, since I’d long considered Wes Craven’s 1991 thriller one of his lesser projects, made in the post-Nightmare On Elm Street, pre-New Nightmare period where he threw a lot of stuff at a lot of walls to see what might stick. Remember the cutting-edge conceptual horror of Shocker? No? Lucky you.

At the time I considered it a disappointment – a pretty broad Reagan-era satire about the depravity lurking underneath the façade of the respectable American family with little going for it beyond some inventive production design and the stunt casting of Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, who’d played the upstanding Ed and Nadine Hurleys on Twin Peaks, as the raving villains. And … yeah, that’s pretty much it: A kid plays lookout for a friend as he breaks into the house of the local landlords, who are said to be hoarding a fortune, only to find himself trapped in the booby-trapped manse while the owners hunt him for sport.

Like a lot of Craven’s movies, the story doesn’t really hang together if you think about it for two seconds; he was always more interested in memorable images than in narratives, and you can feel him getting as stuck as his protagonist here and there, struggling to move various characters through a fairly limited shared space without tripping over each other until the exact right moment. There are a lot of near-misses in this movie, and eventually you just have to assume everyone’s ears are ringing so hard from shotgun blasts that they just can’t hear each other coming.

Further, the frenzied pacing keeps Craven from establishing a consistent tone, with Brandon Adams’ terrified young Fool sent pinballing from one awful situation to the next, losing a friend (Ving Rhames!) and gaining a new one (A.J. Langer!), while also meeting some zombies in the basement, sort of? And also McGill has a gimp suit? And a dog gets electrocuted for comic effect? Kinda?

It’s a lot, is what I’m saying, and Craven wasn’t exactly subtle with the story’s allegories or racial dynamics … but viewed in proximity to Creepshow, The People Under the Stairs finally came into focus for me. The vile Robesons – who are revealed as even more grotesque, but also somewhat pitiable, when the truth about their own relationship finally comes to light – are straight out of E.C. Comics themselves, representing a rotten capitalist culture that’s become parasitic, feeding on both the labor and literal blood of their community. They steal children! Who grow up to be the cannibalistic creatures in the basement! Which is a horrible idea if you take it seriously, but in the context of an old comic book – say, the sort a young Wes Craven might have paged through at the drugstore – it makes a little more sense. Maybe this should have been part of an anthology, too.

Shout’s new 4K discs of Creepshow and The People Under the Stairs are love letters to their respective movies, with the garish colors of the former and the grotty murk of the latter lovingly presented in new Ultra High Definition masters scanned from the original camera negatives. (Creepshow adds a new Dolby Atmos soundtrack, for good measure.)

The companion Blu-rays also include the new remasters, as well as all the extras from Shout’s previous BDs … and this release of The People Under the Stairs also includes additional supplements previously only available on the Arrow Films disc in the UK, like a commentary track with Adams and Calum Waddell, interviews with Craven, Langer and co-star Sean Whalen and a fun reminiscence of the film from Final Destination screenwriter Jeffrey Reddick. (The featurettes are on the 4K platter, while the Adams commentary appears on both discs along with Shout’s earlier tracks with Craven and the cast.)

Creepshow does a similar supplemental split, shifting some of the special features from the Blu-ray over to the 4K – presumably to make room for the new master and its Atmos track on the smaller-capacity BD. (I’d heard about the pitch issues on the 2018 DTS-MA 5.1 track; the Atmos has no sign of them, and the 5.1 track on thisedition sounds fine as well.)

Both platters offer all four of the audio tracks included on Shout’s earlier release – obviously, the one featuring Romero and Savini should be your first stop, but the compilation track of interviews with DP Michael Gornick, zombie performer John Amplas, props master Bruce Alan Miller and makeup effects assistant Darryl Ferrucci from Second Sight’s 2013 UK release is a treasure trove of nuts-and-bolts anecdotes that makes you feel like you were right there beside them on the set. This movie sounds like it was a delight to make, and the glee of being part of it comes right off the screen. To borrow a phrase, Big Norm says check it out.

Creepshow and The People Under the Stairs are now available in 4K/Blu-ray combo editions from Shout! Factory. It doesn’t get any better than this.

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