Creepshow: Night of the Living Late Show

 

Cody checks out the Creepshow season 2 finale, which has some Horror Express and Night of the Living Dead in it.

In the first season of the Shudder anthology series Creepshow, an expansion of the franchise George A. Romero and Stephen King started with the '80s classics Creepshow and Creepshow 2, Dana Gould had an acting role in the story Skincrawlers. Gould returned to Creepshow for the show's second season, this time not as an actor, but as the writer of the season finale, Night of the Living Late Show. Most episodes of Creepshow are split into two separate stories, but this episode tells one long 41 minute story, just like the holiday special Shapeshifters Anonymous did.

Directed by the series' creative supervisor Greg Nicotero, Night of the Living Late Show stars Justin Long as Simon, a man who has used the inherited wealth of his wife Renee (D'Arcy Carden) to invent a virtual reality machine - which looks like a tanning bed - that will allow people to fully immerse themselves inside their favorite movies, so much so that they will even be able to interact with the characters. Simon tries this machine out by entering the 1972 Eugenio Martin film Horror Express - and Gould and Nicotero were able to insert Long into stock footage from Horror Express in a clever way, having Simon make his way through scenes of the train-based horror movie, which brings him into contact with the likes of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

At first, I was concerned that the episode was going to spend too much time inside Horror Express, that it would be nothing but a replay of the movie that just happens to work Simon into the mix. There is a lot of Horror Express in the episode, but thankfully there's an interesting story happening outside the movie, too. When Simon takes breaks from being inside the movie, it's clear to us that he is not happy in his marriage with Renee, and that Renee's father was probably right when he warned her that Simon only wanted her money, not her.

Simon has his eyes on someone else, someone he has had a major crush on ever since he was a kid: Countess Irina Petrovska, the Horror Express character played by Silvia Tortosa. As he continues entering the world of the movie, Simon sets out to seduce the Countess, because his machine makes the experience so immersive that he's even able to have satisfying sex with the movie character. Simon's scenes with the Countess did require some new footage to be shot, and for those scenes the character is played by Hannah Fierman from V/H/S and Siren. This isn't an entirely unnoticeable switch, but Fierman is similar enough to Tortosa that it works okay. It's close enough for Creepshow.

And so at that point, we're in traditional anthology territory. It has a virtual reality twist and the Horror Express gimmick, but at its core Night of the Living Late Show is another take on the familiar "wronged spouse" horror story.

Night of the Living Late Show is a really good addition to the Creepshow franchise, and ranks up there as one of the best stories that have been told in the Shudder series to date. The Horror Express stuff is fun, and Carden does a great job playing the wife who begins to realize that her husband is not the man she thought or hoped he was.

Making the episode an even more fun viewing experience is the fact that it doesn't just pay tribute to Horror Express, but also another public domain horror classic, and one that I love as much as Simon loves Horror Express (although I don't want to enter the movie, or have sex with any of the characters), Night of the Living Dead. There's a fun nod to Night of the Living Dead in the opening sequence with the Creep, and more nods to the film at the end - with the references even segueing to Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead. I was very happy to see this.

It is a bit disappointing that Creepshow season 2 has ended after just five episodes when the first season was six, but we did get the holiday special and an animated special between the two seasons, so Shudder has been giving us a good amount of Creepshow anyway. And season 3 has already been filmed, so I'm looking forward to that.