Despite King's plodding prose and facile characters, he's managed to concoct plots multilayered enough to sustain the length, and sometimes the scrutiny, a feature film demands. At his best, he puts everyone in touch with the nightmare anxieties of youth….

[Creepshow] is a salute to the cult-beloved EC horror comic books of the early Fifties. As a movie, Creepshow is negligible, but as a cultural indicator, it's terrific—a big clue to what even the most skillful and likable schlock-horror purveyors have been up to in all those years since 1957's I Was a Teenage Werewolf. They want to make an enormous catharsis for hundreds of thousands of slobs and to make slobs out of nonslobs. To them, the lowest common denominator isn't a term of derision but an admirable goal.

In the only relatively benign episode of Creepshow, "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," King makes the most revealing acting appearance by a writer since his literary peer, Mickey Spillane, played Mike Hammer in The Girl Hunters…. King plays the title character, a Down East hick and screw-up who thinks his life problems can be solved when a meteorite lands in his yard. Dreaming of making a killing by selling it to the "Department of Meteors" in a local college, Verrill throws a bucket of water on the meteor to cool it off, only to end up catalyzing a weedlike growth that attaches itself to his grass, his house, his fingers, his cheeks—and, as he realizes in the bathroom—to just about everything.

What's fascinating is that King wrote and plays the character as a drooling, slovenly arrested-infant moron. Perhaps Jordy Verrill is King's own worst self-image nightmare. As Jordy Verrill, King's turned his Everyman persona into the Great American Slob. (p. 48)

The EC publications have long been revered for the unbridled brio of their artwork and the uninhibited savagery of their story lines. Indeed, in King's book-long analysis of horror, Danse Macabre, King admitted that, for him, the EC comic books are "the epitome of horror." To King, "terror" is the most refined of fearsome emotions because it centers on largely unseen forces. "Horror," according to King, "also invites a physical reaction by showing us something which is physically wrong." And King discerned a third, even cruder, level of fear in the EC comic books: "the gag reflex of revulsion," like the infamous comic-book story in which an evil minor-league ballplayer is punished by dismemberment—his body parts used as the bases, bats and ball.

What disturbed me in King's analysis, especially after seeing Creepshow, is King's frank admission that, though he tries to terrorize the reader, "if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud."

In Creepshow … he and Romero consistently go for the grossout. Their five episodes contain three walking corpses, one suicidal living weed, a Tasmanian devil who sinks her teeth into three victims, a few vivid deaths by drowning … and one death by cockroaches. Both Romero and King seem to be taking their quasi-comic-book formula simply as an excuse to be as broad as possible in their comedy and fear effects. The best comic moments are reminiscent of Airplane! no less—parodies of theatrical, movie and TV clichés … pushed to the outer limits of hysteria. The most effective horrific moments work mostly because of their undiluted viciousness—we're invited to share in the sadistic satisfaction that a henpecked husband takes in seeing his shrewish wife clawed and chomped to death.

Romero and King have created a rogue's gallery that looks like the hit list of a crazy, mixed-up kid: the heirs of a country-gentry fortune, college professors, a TV executive, a vaguely Howard Hughes-like tycoon. Along the way, there are some piquant touches—for example, the college professors seem to be teaching at Who's-Afraid-of-Virginia Woolf University…. But the movie doesn't have a pulp vision, only a snickering attitude. It's all in the spirit of the young boy in the framing story … who says he hopes his comic-book-hating father rots in hell.

Romero and King seem to feel that the purpose of horror is to bring out the crazy mixed-up kid in all of us…. (pp. 48, 54)

I'm not enough of a paranoid moralist to suggest that films as silly as Creepshow help encourage deviant behavior or lynch mobs, but I am enough of an aesthete to feel that the way these moviemakers transform an audience into a Pavlovian mob endangers the art of movies. The only way to enjoy movies like Creepshow is to get into the howling and screaming, and that turns movies from dramatic forms into audience-participation shows (The Slice Is Right, perhaps, or Name That Fright!). They want to prove that underneath our civilized veneer lie frightened cave children. They want to turn us all, for a time, into dumb clucks—Jordy Verrills. (p. 54)