Another unexpected choice, but one that turned out neat. We're winding down here in the marathon, and when I wind down I kind of just pick esoteric whatevers for the final few posts to get us to the finish line. To that end, I literally just load up Shudder to find an esoteric whatever to blast through for the evening when I found this. Fresh content, recently released! And it's even something I'm interested in. A brief primer, since it's been probably four years since we covered this series. Creepshow started as a 1982 horror anthology movie, a homage to the old EC horror comics of the 50's. George Romero directed, Stephen King wrote, and Tom Savini did special effects. A true meeting of horror minds paying homage to the tales of terror from their childhoods. It's a pretty good movie. More in this vein continued to be made. You have Creepshow 2, which is okay. Then there's the Tales From The Darkside movie as well as Creepshow 3. Both are unofficial sequels, though the former's spiritual and the latter is fanmade. Again, they're also pretty good. I legitimately do not remember if I covered Tales From The Darkside on here or not. Finally, there's a Creepshow TV series I haven't seen. I gather this animated special is them cobbling together a quick spooky something for the season. You get two spooky animated tales of terror, so let's start off with a Stephen King tale that only took 40-odd years to get an adaptation...
SURVIVOR TYPE
We've been here before, actually. Not the animated adaptation, which is new. I mean the actual story. I covered this back in 2017, and I remember writing it in an absolute hurried fever pitch before I had to go on vacation. I don't remember what I said about the story itself so let me just go and peek really quick. Oh. Not much. Jesus, I really was pressed for time, huh? Anyway this is the narrated story of a guy stranded on a desert island, resorting to eating seagulls and later amputating parts of his legs so he has food to survive. The short story itself is an effective slow descent into madness on the part of its narrator, the final entries only growing more and more incoherent. As an animated adaptation, this one really gets to show the absolute visceral horror of what our narrator has to do to survive. The killing of seagulls, the amputation of his own foot, it's all real gross shit to witness. Special props go to Keifer Sutherland as well. We saw him as a vampire a few days ago, but he definitely gives this guy character with his performance. It really sells the descent to hell when you can hear it. Come to think of it, both these stories only have two voice actors in them. Did they actually put this thing together in quarantine? If so, that's impressive. I hope they played safe and animated from home and stuff, but impressive nonetheless. The final line about ladyfingers is just as spooky here as it was in the story, so let's move on to something a little more modern and unknown with...
TWITTERING FROM THE CIRCUS OF THE DEAD
All the snide snipes at bloggers in this one make things a little too real. This is indeed a story for the age of social media and the kids on their telephones. It's also written by Joe Hill, and I've never read a Joe Hill thing before but I know him by reputation. Joe Hill, you see, is Stephen King's son who also went on to become a spooky writer. Helpfully, he also has a cameo in the original Creepshow as the kid in the framing device of the movie. It's neat to see him come back, and it's really neat to see the generations of Kings getting adapted for a Creepshow cartoon. Anyway, whereas Survivor Type was presented as a rambling narrated journal entry, this story plays with the times and is narrated as a livetweet thread by a bored teenage girl on family vacation. In typical rebellious teenage girl fashion she complains about her mom a lot and shares some funny stories, all while livetweeting the drive. They eventually end up at the titular Circus Of The Dead, and this all gets livetweeted as well. It's incredibly clear that this place is employing actual zombies and keeping people as captives, but our livetweeter and her family don't see it until it's too late. We get absolutely wild shit like a zombie shot out of a cannon and exploding, zombies lit on fire, zombies mauled by lions, lions eaten by zombies, and pretty soon all absolute hell breaks loose and our livetweeter is trapped and crying. We're not even sure if she's really tweeting this shit any more, but eventually they come for her too. Some canny ghoul then swipes her phone and tweets promotion for the circus, stating our livetweeter will be the next act, and that's that. It's an interesting tale, to be sure, and the zombie circus is a ghoulish bit of dark comedy. I also kind of like how the livetweeting makes this like found footage, in a way. Livestreamed footage? Oh fuck, there's a horror movie idea. Either way, let's bail from this scene. Two more days till Halloween. This was good, it's worth a watch if you've got Shudder, and I may check out the series in my off time. For now, though, I've got just a few more things to talk about...
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