Creepshow: The Crate

The movie "Creepshow" - is one of my all-time favorite films. I saw it at the age of ten, when it first came out in 1982. I was instantly obsessed with it. Here was a horror movie with an old-fashioned graveyard zombie, a plant monster, a furry maneater, water-zombies, and a million evil bugs. It also had crazy bright colors, an exaggerrated comic book visual style, and one of the spookiest musical scores ever recorded (by John Harrison).

On top of all that, Creepshow also played an important role in my horror education.

It was the movie that first exposed me to Stephen King (who wrote it), and fired me up to start reading his novels, no matter how long they were.

It was the movie that introduced me to George Romero (who directed it), though I knew about "Night of the Living Dead" before that, it was "Creepshow" that really got me addicted to his films.

It was the film that taught me who Tom Savini was (because he made the monsters and did all the gore special effects), and made me start following his work.

But most importantly of all, Creepshow was the movie that introduced me to Bernie Wrightson (who illustrated the comic book adaptation). Oh, I'd seen Wrightson's work in the "Swamp Thing" and "House of Mystery" comics by that point, but the "Creepshow" comic book was the thing that made me memorize his name and start paying attention. (Which is ironic, because when I look back at this same material today, I actually find his "Swamp Thing" work to be far superior...) But anyway, once I made the connection that this was the same illustrator from those other books, Wrightson instantly became my favorite artist, the guy I looked at and said, "THAT'S how I wanna draw when I grow up!"

Well, I'm still nowhere close to Bernie, but I try.

To this day, Creepshow is still in my top ten all-time favorite movies list. Anybody who has seen it will of course remember "Fluffy", also known as "The Monster From The Crate". So, here is my loving tribute!