Cody watches the last episode of Creepshow season 4.
In some ways, it feels like the fourth season of the Shudder series Creepshow – which is a continuation of the horror anthology franchise George A. Romero and Stephen King started with the classic 1982 film of the same title – was sort of an afterthought. The fact that two years went by between the third and fourth seasons and then, for the first time in the show’s history, every episode of the new season dropped online on the same day in a binge release makes it seem like Shudder didn’t really care about Creepshow season 4 and decided to just toss it out into the world after a delay. It also seems like the show’s creative supervisor, legendary FX artist Greg Nicotero (who visited the set of the original Creepshow and worked on Creepshow 2) was too busy with other projects to give much attention to Creepshow season 4, which would explain why there are no longer any live-action moments with the Creep character and why Nicotero only directed two of the season’s twelve stories, when he directed more in previous seasons. The season turned out well despite seeming like an afterthought, but it makes me concerned for the show’s future. Six months after the episodes were released, there’s still no word on a Creepshow season 5.
But before we can worry about the chances of a season 5, we have to wrap up season 4. After directing the first story of the season’s premiere episode, Twenty Minutes with Cassandra, Nicotero returned to direct the first story of the season finale episode... and this one pays tribute to Romero in a way I never expected to see.
Written by Todd Spence and Zak White, the duo that was also behind the stories in the previous episode (Something Burrowed, Something Blue and Doodles), the story George Romero in 3-D! is packed with references to Romero movies and is set in a Pittsburgh bookstore that’s in danger of being shut down because the owner, Sarah (Kyra Zagorsky) refuses to take online orders... and therefore is having trouble paying the rent she owes to the landlord, Mr. Cooper (Peter New). Her son Martin (Graham Verchere) works at the store alongside Sarah and employee Dawn (Megan Charpentier), and he thinks they have something special on their hands when they come across an old wooden crate filled with issues of a zombie comic book series called Brain Rot, which appears to have been written by Romero. Unearthing a previously unreleased series of Romero comics probably would be good for Sarah’s bank account, but unfortunately, these books are more “special” than anyone could have imagined.
When Martin puts on a pair of the specially designed 3-D glasses that come with the 3-D first issue of Brain Rot, it causes a zombie from the comic book to emerge into his reality and start munching on a customer – but this zombie can only be seen when someone’s wearing 3-D glasses, so to the naked eye it looks like the victim is being torn apart by an invisible force. Soon more invisible zombies have emerged from the comic book... but luckily, George A. Romero himself was illustrated into the book, so Martin decides to use a pair of 3-D glasses to bring the creator of these ghouls back into the world to deal with the problem. The real Romero passed away in 2017, but Sebastian Kroon does a fine job of playing the filmmaker, presented as a living black and white drawing.
Romero is my favorite of the “masters of horror” and one of my cinematic heroes, so I found it heartwarming to see Nicotero pay homage to him the way he does in George Romero in 3-D! It’s a fun story that involves zombies and a voodoo curse, and appears to take place in a bizarre alternative reality where a teenager in the age of the internet and online orders was also somehow using a fake I.D. to see Dawn of the Dead in the theatre in 1979 and watched episodes of the Chiller Theater horror host show, which ended on January 1, 1984. Things didn’t play out entirely to my satisfaction, but this was an entertaining story nonetheless.
George Romero in 3-D! was a tough act to follow, and the story that had to take on that challenge was Baby Teeth, directed by John Harrison – whose connection to the Creepshow franchise goes back to the original film, which he composed an iconic score for – from a script by Melanie Dale, who previously wrote the Creepshow animated special story Twittering from the Circus of the Dead (which was based on a story by Stephen King’s son Joe Hill) and the season 2 story Sibling Rivalry. The story centers on troubled teen Shelby (Alison Thornton), whose mother Miranda (Rochelle Greenwood) is extremely sheltering and overprotective – maybe because her mom and husband both disappeared from her life, or maybe for some other reason. We are shown some disturbing behavior from Miranda, who has kept Shelby’s nursery preserved as was while the years have gone by and even has a collection of all the baby teeth the kid lost as she grew up – a collection she adds her extracted wisdom teeth to as the story begins.
Eventually we come to understand that there are strange things going on in this household, which explains why Miranda would be off-balance. Some bizarre events play out, and – after we witness some interesting special effects – it all wraps up with a very weird and troubling ending. This story wasn’t trying to come off like it was set in any other time than the modern age, but something about the overall vibe and the special effects used to bring the supernatural creature featured in the story to life made Baby Teeth feel like something I would have caught on TV when I was a kid in the late ‘80s or early ‘90s – like something out of, for example, the John Harrison-directed Tales from the Darkside: The Movie. So it was nice to see something that could bring that feeling back in 2023 / 2024.
So Creepshow season 4 comes to a dark, unnerving ending – and the wait for Creepshow season 5 begins. Will it happen or not?
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