The movie Stephen King knew was doomed from the start: “I expected bad reviews”
In 1983, Stephen King was on top of the world. In just nine short years, the author had gone from a nobody to the most popular horror writer of all time. During this time, he published 13 novels, including Carrie, The Shining, The Stand, and the first instalment of his Dark Tower series. A couple of his books had already been adapted for the screen by that point, too, but King had ambitions in another medium. In 1982, his screenwriting debut hit cinemas but was torn apart by many critics.
Luckily, King had expected this because his frame of reference for the movie was something critics also dismissed as garbage decades earlier.
When King was growing up in Durham, Maine, he was a quiet boy who found solace in losing himself in the worlds of film and comic books. In fact, he once said that he first began telling his own stories when he was six or seven, and he did it by copying comic book panels, to which he added his own narrative. This love of visual storytelling meant he believed he always approached storytelling from a visual perspective first, even though he became a novelist. Fittingly, though, King has dabbled in writing comics a few times over the years – simply because of his love for the medium.
As with most kids in America, King’s first love in comics was superheroes – but he soon found himself branching off into darker fare. In the 1950s, EC Comics published a series of macabre and gruesome titles that brought horror to children with a sense of fun that belied the mature subject matter. Tales From the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, and The Haunt of Horror were three such titles, and each one was an anthology that featured short tales introduced by a monstrous host.
These comics weren’t popular with parents, who would have preferred their kids were still reading the adventures of Superman and Batman. King’s mum was no different, and in 2017, he told Full Bleed magazine, “My mother was dismayed. She never forbade me to read anything that I was reading, but she would say things like, ‘Those things are nothing but trash,'” and “If those comic books give you nightmares, don’t come crying to me.”
When it came time to write his first movie, King knew exactly what he wanted to do: pay homage to the grisly horror comics he grew up reading. He wrote Creepshow, an anthology of five short stories with bookends that featured the host – a decaying skeletal figure known as ‘The Creep’ – appearing to tell scary tales to a young boy named Billy, whose mother had forbidden him to read comics.
The movie – directed by Night of the Living Dead’s George Romero and starring Hal Holbrook, Leslie Nielsen, and Adrienne Barbeau – perfectly recreated the over-the-top, ghoulish tone of the comics it was paying tribute to. If you didn’t grow up with those stories, though – as many critics didn’t – it ran the risk of coming across as tacky or baffling. In that way, King had a feeling the movie was doomed critically from the get-go.
“I think the critical drubbing it got might have driven some adults away,” King lamented to Playboy in ’83. “I expected bad reviews, of course, because Creepshow is based on the horror-comic-book traditions of the ’50s – not a send-up at all but a recreation. And if the mainstream critics had understood and appreciated that, I’d have known right off that we’d failed miserably in what we were trying to do.”
However, King acknowledged that some critics – like Rex Reed of The New York Observer – did recognise what he was aiming for, “but that’s because they were brought up on those comics and remember them with affection.”
Ultimately, Creepshow must have resonated with audiences more than critics because it was the highest-grossing Warner Bros horror movie of the year. It also spawned two sequels and a modern TV series. It was a meaningful project for King in more ways than one, too. After all, the boy who played Billy in the bookend segments was Joe, King’s son, who would grow up to become ‘Joe Hill,’ a horror author in his own right who, like his father before him, writes comic books and novels.
