The movie is Creepshow [directed by George A. Romero] and the script is by Stephen King, whose novels Carrie and The Shining became stunning films by Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick, and whose second novel, Salem's Lot, was a CBS mini series. That's the connection between King and Romero: a studio executive saw Romero's 1977 vampire movie, Martin, at a Utah film festival and asked him to direct Salem's Lot, a project from which Romero eventually removed himself.

Nevertheless, Romero and King remained in contact, for the match of talents was irresistible. "What Stephen King and George Romero have in common is a lack of inhibitions," says Kirby McCauley, an agent who specializes in science fiction and fantasy. "Other writers and filmmakers dance around horror—those two plow right into it." (p. 72)

[It took King two months to write] Creepshow, a conscious and affectionate imitation of William M. Gaines's horror comics of the Fifties, screamers like Weird Science and Tales from the Crypt, of which King was an avid reader as a child. Like them, Creepshow consists of five short stories interleaved with advertisements for Grit newspapers, Joy Buzzers, X-ray glasses, and novelties to "Amuse and Amaze Your Friends."

Wrapped around these five stories is a sixth, situated on Maple Street, in Centerville, U.S.A. A boy named Billy … is in his room at night reading a comic book called Creepshow. When Billy's cruel father discovers his son's secret vice, he slaps the boy, snatches the comic book, and stuffs it into a garbage can in the street. Lightning flickers as the camera seeks out the book in the can. The cover is blown over, and we see Crayola-colored artwork: a family in a sitting room beneath the title, "Father's Day." Then the lettering vanishes, the splash page becomes a freeze frame, the actors move, and Creepshow the comic becomes Creepshow the $8 million film.

The situations in the stories are classic: an autocratic father returns from the grave after seven years to chasten his errant daughter; a shirttail farmer … unearths a meteor that seeds his land and his face with weeds; a janitor and a student are both slaughtered by a ravenous monster inside a cobwebbed crate. Says King, "The comic-book form allowed us to pare the motivations and characterizations down to a bare minimum and let us just go for scares."

The texture and mood of a creepy comic is likewise being imitated with the camera work and production design. Scrolled borders indicate flashbacks, scrims behind an actress make the camera frame flare with her scream, titles indicate time passage: "Soon," "Later," "Meanwhile." (pp. 72-3)

Romero's are the sort of movies that some critics execrate, but they've earned him a cult following. For Michael Gornick, director of photography on Creepshow, as well as on Romero's Dawn of the Dead and Knightriders, only the script has changed; the ironic treatment of fantasy material was there ever since Night of the Living Dead. (pp. 73, 76)

And then too there is that recovered sense of childhood's certainties, of what's good and what's evil and of just desserts, producer [Richard P.] Rubinstein concurs. "I think George has always regarded fantasy and horror as basically allegorical, and that's something he has in common even with Grimm's fairy tales. He says it's a way of doing morality plays and still remaining commercial. You look at these stories in Creepshow, and it's sin and retribution in almost every case."…

Creepshow isn't like one of those hackabout horror films currently making the rounds. Romero's scenes are mitigated by what Rubinstein calls "violence so stylized that the audience can't forget they're watching a movie." (p. 76)