Director: Various
First Aired: 2019
Contains spoilers
Ahead of the airing of Creepshow Season 4 on Shudder, Creepshow Series 1, 2 & 3 are available on Blu-ray, DVD & digital from 25 September 2023 in the UK and I have been lucky enough to get the three seasons on Blu-ray to review.
I have previously reviewed individual vampire episodes and, in honesty, this season did not contain a vampire related episode but it was a damn fine anthology series in its own right and there were passing moments of vampires in the Creepshow comic graphics that layered between episodes. These were in the form of adverts for various masks, models and LPs that readers of the fictional comics could send off for. Nevertheless, we have vampires mentioned in passing in these ads and also mentioned in the episode 2 segment – the Finger (which I will come back to).
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| the Creep |
The series is made up of 6 roughly 45-minute episodes, with animated moments of Creepshow mascot, The Creep, and comic stills related to the story (the comic bookends each episode, the inference being that the episode is the comic brought to life). Each episode contains two stories and they run the gamut from monsters to killers and all sorts of horror tropes in between. A cursed head that appears in a girl’s dollhouse is one of the stranger segments, entitled The House of the Head. Incidentally one of the carpets in the dollhouse matches the Overlook’s in the Shining.
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| giant Venus vampire |
One of my favourite segments of this season was in episode 2, the aforementioned The Finger. Before it came Bad Wolf Down, a wholesome tale of werewolves killing Nazis during World War 2. The Finger follows a character Clark Wilson (DJ Qualls) who is a divorcee, living in a run-down house, barely getting by as a web designer and who likes to take walks and collect things (mostly useless junk). On one such excursion he finds a clawed finger – one which seems to absorb beer he spills and then grow into a whole arm. Eventually it grows into a demonic creature – he calls it Bob – who likes to please Clark by going out and killing people he dislikes… such as the “f*cking vampires” at the debt collection agency that keep ringing him, or his ex-wife. Qualls breaks the fourth wall as he tells the tale to camera (in a story explained way) and the story itself can either be read as Bob being real or a figment of homicidal delusion, perhaps even (as it grows through spilt beer) an expression of alcoholic rage.
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| vampire mummy mask |
Episode 4’s the Companion has a neatly gothic atmosphere to its take of a scarecrow come to life and Night of the Paw (episode 5) is an interesting reworking of the Monkey’s Paw. Not every segment works as well as others and I think it’s a shame that the execution of Times Is Tough in Musky Holler (also episode 5) was not as good at the denouement as the concept itself, which was pretty fun. The Blu-ray set presents in widescreen over 2 discs and the transfer is lovely. This season is a bit light when it comes to the variety of extras – with the only extras being an audio commentary per episode, bar episode 5 with a director’s commentary from John Harrison and then a separate screenwriters’ commentary with John Esposito during Night of the Paw and then co-screenwriter John Skipp during Musky Hollow. I love anthology series and this one did hit the mark for me much more than it missed and as a Blu-Ray set I think a strong 7.5 out of 10 is fair.
The Season’s imdb page is here. Note that it lists an episode 7 and 8 – both specials and both appear on the season 2 Blu-ray set.
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US (contents may vary to UK edition)
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK
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