Creepshow: Skeletons in the Closet / Familiar

Cody questions some things about Creepshow season 3, episode 2, then goes along with it.

With few exceptions (like Scream, for one), I'm not really a big fan of horror movies - or horror TV episodes - having overt references to previous horror movies or shows. I may reference movies constantly in my own life, but something about seeing that happen in entertainment tends to be grating to me. Greg Nicotero, the creative supervisor of Shudder's anthology series Creepshow - an extension of the franchise George A. Romero and Stephen King began with the films Creepshow and Creepshow 2 - has the exact opposite feeling about references than I do. He clearly loves to pack his horror stories with references to past horror that he loves, as we've seen from the fact that Creepshow has featured a segment that was basically an Evil Dead fan film and another episode actually put Justin Long into Horror Express and Night of the Living Dead. Now comes the story Skeletons in the Closet, which takes place in a prop museum (I've heard the set was dressed with real props from Nicotero's own collection) and features characters throwing out reference after reference... and then takes the references and homages even further. While it's neat to see things like a Jason Voorhees' head, Michael Myers' mask, Freddy Krueger's glove, Ash's chainsaw, Dennis Hopper's chainsaw from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and Rosa Klebb's shoe from From Russia with Love in a Creepshow episode, it also feels like the show is going too far with this sort of thing.

That said, Skeletons in the Closet is decently entertaining. Nicotero directed the segment and crafted the story with John Esposito, who then wrote the script. The setting is Lampini's Prop Museum in Hollywood, where the owner Lampini (Victor Rivera) and his girlfriend Danielle (Valerie LeBlanc) are counting down the minutes until they open their new exhibit: a display of actual human skeletons that were used as props in movies like Poltergeist, Dawn of the Dead, and the original Creepshow (they don't directly state it's from Creepshow, but we know...). But before the exhibit can open, the museum is visited by Bateman (James Remar), a fellow prop collector who has always been a major rival to Lampini and his late father. Things go south during Bateman's visit, the guy ends up dead. And then it's time for the usual Creepshow "vengeance from beyond the grave" action, with the reference-heavy twist that the murders committed by Bateman's walking skeleton are homages to moments from horror classics.

Your reaction to Skeletons in the Closet will depend almost entirely on how you feel about references and homages, because the story is nothing but references and homages. It may be cool to see a Phantasm sphere put to use in something that isn't a Phantasm movie, but if that also comes along with a shot-for-shot recreation of the Psycho shower scene that's shot in black and white just because Psycho was black and white, I could have done without it.

The stop-motion skeleton effects are awesome, though. And it was heartwarming that Nicotero included a shot of George A. Romero's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Almost every episode of Creepshow is split into two separate stories, and the second segment in this episode, Familiar - which was directed by Joe Lynch from a script by Bird Box author Josh Malerman - also features some obvious references... but they're more subtle, in that we don't have characters name-checking previous horror stories. In fact, the references here are to elements from the first Creepshow and Creepshow 2.

The story is not connected to any previous Creepshow stories. It centers on a couple named Jack (Andrew Bachelor) and Fawn (Hannah Fierman, who previously stood in for Horror Express actress Silvia Tortosa for some scenes in the Night of the Living Late Show episode), who are introduced as they stop by a place called Boone's Third Eye for a psychic reading. It's during this reading that Jack finds out he's being stalked by some kind of supernatural entity - and it doesn't take long for him to realize there really is some kind of demonic creature lurking around him. So he has to get rid of this treat somehow, and as it turns out the way to do it involves a crate much like the one Fluffy was in in the first Creepshow. Jack has to suspend a crate from the ceiling and trick the demon into standing under it so he can drop the crate onto it. Then he'll need to dump the crate into a body of water with the demon trapped inside. 

The episode just skips giving any explanation for how Jack is supposed to close the open end of the crate while the demon is inside of it. We're not supposed to question that, because if we do it no longer makes sense. But when Jack does drop the crate onto the demon, he yells "I got you!" just like a character yelled "I beat you!" in the The Raft segment of Creepshow 2.

Familiar is as predictable as an anthology story can get, we've seen this kind of thing time and time again, but it's an okay version of the same old thing. As long as you don't think too much about the open end of the crate.