Shocktober 2025 - Creepshow 2 (1987)
“Welcome, kiddies, to another edition of Creepshow. It's amazing that you bores and ghouls keep coming back for more. You must be gluttons for punishment, eh? Well... I guess you bloodsuckers enjoy being repulsed, eh? You're loyal to the gore. Well, that's good.”
– The Creep
When I was putting this year’s selection together, I’d intended to finish off with Rosemary’s Baby, thinking it’d be a strong finish. You know by now, that’s not happening, because I couldn’t resist bookending with Creepshow 2, having opened the proceedings with Creepshow. (It satisfies my OCD.) Besides – Stephen King, right?
Although overall Creepshow 2 isn’t as memorable as the first, it’s a pretty good anthology movie. Like the first, it draws its inspiration from the EC comics of the ‘50s, which featured graphically lurid tales of horror, introduced by the Crypt Keeper, the Old Witch or the Keeper of the Vault in titles that included Tales from the Crypt, Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear. Speaking of inspiration, watching and writing up the Creepshow piece gave me the idea to seek out the reprinted volumes of Tales from the Crypt, and I’m spending the summer (I’m writing this in late July) enjoying reading them. Sadly, the titles didn’t survive the backlash against comic books in the fifties and the entire EC line was quickly discontinued.
As before, Stephen King’s stories lend themselves well to this format, as it’s well known that King was a fan of EC comics in his childhood. Creepshow 2 has three of his stories, each packing an EC style gut punch, with the intro and outro showing a live action sequence of a young boy eagerly buying his copy of the comic book from our host The Creep (Tom Savini). The pieces inbetween the stories feature the boy in animated form buying giant carnivorous plants from an ad in Creepshow to deal with some bullies. To be honest, they’re not on the level of the first film and don’t add to the film at all. Luckliy, the tales themselves, though cut down to three this time, are pretty good.
First up…
Old Chief Wood’nhead
“Now... may your spirit rest, old warrior.” – Ben Whitemoon
A small, rundown town in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by desert. Most of the people have gone, most of the money has gone. The only shop is a general store, run by a kindly elderly couple Ray Spruce (George Kennedy) and his wife Martha (Dorothy Lamour). They’ve been running at a loss, by extending credit – particularly to the native American tribe nearby. Ashamed of this debt, their Chief, Ben Whitemoon (Ben Salasedo) offers their tribal treasure, turquoise jewellery worth thousands as security.
Outside the shop, stands Old Chief Wood’nhead - an old fashioned wooden carved Native American Chief, whom Ray has been maintaining, touching up his war paint and talking to him for all these past decades.
When a trio of thugs arrives, led by the Chief’s grandson who has plans to rob the store, take the tribal treasure and head to Hollywood where he’ll become a star, things get out of control. The thugs murder the elderly couple. Chief Wood’nhead comes to life to avenge their deaths, ending with the scalping of the grandson before going back to his plinth outside the store.
It's a short, rapid-fire story with no waste, no filler – which is true of all this trio of terror tales.
The Raft
“It looked like it was going after the girls.” – Randy
Two college couples have found a desolated spot to swim. There’s nobody around for miles. In the middle of the lake is a raft, so they swim to it and become trapped by what looks like a large oil slick – except it follows them and attacks as if it has an awareness of them. When it catches a victim, it literally corrodes their flesh away.
The last man standing swims to shore as it devours the last of the girls and gloats as he reaches the shore ahead of it. He didn’t know it can go on land as well. The story ends with the reveal of a partially hidden “No Swimming” sign.
This is the least impressive of the three. As I mentioned, the thing is supposed to resemble kind of an oil slick; in reality it looks like a plastic sheet being dragged along. This is definitely a story that worked better as text.
The Hitch-hiker
“Thanks for the lift, lady” – The Hitch-hiker
Mrs Lansing (Lois Chiles) is late going home from an appointment with her male prostitute. She’s worried her rich husband will suspect something, though she undoubtedly loves his money more than she does him. She loves the trappings, the money, the Mercedes and so on.
Negligent and speeding, she runs over an innocent hitch-hiker, killing him – and drives away in a selfish panic. Her drive does sharply downhill from there – he keeps appearing, and she keeps running him over, practically writing her precious Mercedes off in the process. At one point, there’s a cameo appearance from Stephen King as an inquisitive truck driver. At the end of the story, the hitchhiker is nothing more than a flattened, wet, bloody rag, mumbling “thanks for the lift, lady” through a broken face.
Arriving home, and convinced she’s finally rid of him, she parks the car in her garage, only to find what’s left of the hitcher is under the car. He crawls out, dragging himself along on smashed fingers, and he gets his revenge. Incidentally, her husband was also late home, so he wouldn’t have known about her infidelity anyway.
And that, my friends, is about it from me. Thank you for reading.
All that remains is for me to wish you all a happy and safe Halloween. And as Boris Karloff said; "May all your nightmares have a happy ending in the last reel".
