For the majority of its entire run, Creepshow usually mixes up its directors in order to gain as much variety it can when offering up another helping of its tongue in cheek horrors. However, every now and then, both episodes are helm by the same person and so the second episode of the fourth season of Creepshow has now become a showcase Kailey and Sam Spear, a pair of twin sisters who’s has helmed numerous shorts and a few episodes of Two Sentence Horror Stories.
Its heartwarming that the show is raring to give new talent a light, no matter how eerie, to shine in and the sisters acquit themselves admirably with a double bill of distinctly different stories that individually cover separate types of tone that Creepshow attempts to project.
Be it brain sucking hats or bloodthirsty loved ones, this episode positively revels in the dark side of compulsive behavior… assuming there’s actually a light side to compulsive behavior, that is.
The Hat: Jay Stratton is an aspiring horror author who fears that he’ll never measure up to his idol, the ludicrously prolific scribbler of fear fiction known as Stephen Bachman (sic). Despite having a supporting wife in the form of architect, Astrid, Jay is currently languishing in the living hell of writers block, but when he reveals this to his pushy agent, she takes him through her collection of horror author keepsakes that includes a good luck charm from H.P. Lovecraft and Richard Matheson’s pipe to reveal her prized possession: the fedora that once adorned the crown of the reclusive Bachman himself.
Once the hat goes on, the writers block not only vanishes but he finds himself wallowing out entire novels in a matter of days.
However, such a talent surely must come at a price and after Astrid leaves him due to the extreme, obsessive personality he starts to exhibit, he starts digging little deeper into what, exactly, makes the hat so effective.
Grieving Process: Loving husband Richard is a Michelin star chef who adores his loving wife, April, but one night, after she’s late home after starting a new position at work, he gets a call from the police that she’s been attacked. Thankfully, April is still alive, but she’s sporting a gruesome wound on her throat and there is no leads as to who her brutal attacker might of been.
After April comes home from the hospital, both Richard and April’s sister notice and immediate downward change in her demeanor that eventually leads to the tormented woman kicking out her “freeloading” sibling. With his Wife’s behavior getting ever more spiteful and vindictive, it’s obvious this is something way more serious than just simple trauma – especially when April starts craving flesh as part of her diet. However, the love starved Richard is a chef, and as we all know, chefs love catering to hunger…
If directing episodes of Creepshow was an audition, I guess it’s safe to say that the Spear Sisters have nailed their’s as the couple of stories they deliver are not only noticably different in content, a connecting theme concerning obsession links them together nicely. First on the cards is the wonderfully silly, The Hat, that takes Ryan Beil’s struggling author (who, in a nice touch, vaguely resembles Edgar Allen Poe) and gives him unlimited ideas for stories once he puts on the fateful fedora once owned by his horror idol. Creepshow isn’t exactly renowned for its subtlety when it comes to horror worship (it’s one of the reasons I love it so) but even so, “Stephen Bachman” is so on the nose I uttered an audible – if good natured – groan, in fact, it makes Sutter Cane from John Carpenter’s In The Mouth Of Madness seem positively crafty in comparison. However, this childish gushing concerning the world of written horror fiction sets the scene perfectly as Jay succumbs to the imagination enhancing head gear and finally starts getting the acclaim he feels he deserves even though it alienates his supportive wife (Sara Canning). The set up is great as it doles out the right amount of pulp as Jay sits at his keyboard, typing like lightning as weird, cloudy membranes slide over his eyeballs, however as fun as the build up is, with unscrupulous agents and a meeting with the desiccated Bachman himself, the payoff is fucking magnificent with the episode going full gonzo when its revealed that the hat actually contain football-sized, tick-like bugs that stimulates the imagination while they feed off the brain with a pulsating, leech-like protuberance. While some may roll their eyes at the full-on decent into brain snatching, mind controlling bugs, the Spear siblings embrace it wholeheartedly, having the effects unleash titanic waves of disgust as the slimy, chittering, little bastards scuttle across the floor on spikey legs with the fedor still firmly attached to it’s back like some unholy (yet devilishly stylish) shell. Add to that a classic twist ending (of course the fucking thing was pregnant) and you have the prefect balance of pulpy creeps.
Slightly less accomplished is their second effort, Grieving Process, which tries to offer a slightly more serious approach to its tales of dealing with the extreme personality change of a loved one after a traumatic event. The big twist here is that April’s attacker was actually not a some random thug, but is instead a vampire-like little girl whose injury she inflicted is turning her victim into whatever the hell she is. The problem here is not only the vampire thread ultimately too obviously signposted to be an effective twist, but the episode, in further attempts to be unpredictable, moves the goal posts a little too much to the point that we forget whose side we’re supposed to be on. We go from being empathetic to both Richard and April as they go from their ordeal to both of them becoming villains. However, April’s transformation into a yawning mawed monster is suddenly counteracted by Richard going full Hannibal Lector in order to feed his spouse after she finally shows him some affection. And then it changes again when the child vampire enters the picture and offers Richard the family he’s always wanted and while the idea would probably play like gangbusters if given the space of a feature in order to breathe, tightly wrapped within the constraints of a twenty minute episode, it feels too cramped to fully get its themes of loss and emotional abandonment across in a truly satisfying way.
Still, if Creepshow continues to give out full episode spotlights like this instead of sprinkling individual installments about the season, it may end up being the show to watch for up and coming talent as they stretch their wings.
Spear Sisters? I take my hat off to you – especially if there’s a brain eating insect lurking inside…
The Hat: 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Grieving Process: 🌟🌟🌟
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