Welcome to King’s creepy carnival!

Creepshow kicks off with a smack in the face – not to the audience, but to a kid caught reading horror comics. It’s a petty little bit of moral policing from a cartoonishly awful dad, and it sets the tone perfectly: this is a film that knows exactly what it’s doing and delights in doing it. Spooky, silly, and gleefully macabre, Creepshow is horror with a cackle, an EC Comics come-to-life showcase of bad people getting exactly what’s coming to them, and the rest of us enjoying every gooey second of it.

It marks Stephen King’s screenwriting debut, and he came out swinging like a kid finally let loose in the Halloween aisle. Directed by George A Romero, and bolted together like a funfair ride, Creepshow is a five-part anthology (plus wraparound mischief) that plays like Tales from the Crypt with a sugar rush. Everyone’s awful, everything’s over the top, and the only thing scarier than the monsters is the interior decor.

Father’s Day lurches out of the grave first, like a drunken uncle in a party hat, full of corpse cake, family resentment, and light homicide. The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill slows the pace to an oozing crawl but gives us King himself in full hayseed mode, turning alien plant infestation into a green-fingered tragedy. The source story – Weeds – hadn’t been published at the time, but it’s straight from the same pulpy gene pool. Something to Tide You Over is a beachside murder fantasy with Leslie Nielsen playing it mostly straight – although there’s still that twinkle in his eye, and Ted Danson doing his best to look dignified with sand in his eyebrows.

The Crate, based on a short story King had published in Gallery magazine in 1979, is a riot of academic repression and monster-in-a-box mayhem. Hal Holbrook finds a novel solution to his wife problem (Adrienne Barbeau, turning volume up to 13), and the creature effects, courtesy of Tom Savini, are gloriously rubbery. It’s a perfect blend of monster movie and marital stress relief.

They’re Creeping Up On You rounds things off in style: a sterile white apartment, a miserable old man, and a cockroach uprising worthy of a punk protest. It’s the only tale written specifically for the film, and Romero shoots it with precision and sadistic glee. Whether you laugh or squirm will depend entirely on how you feel about insects bursting out of kitchen appliances.

Through it all, the comic-book stylisation stitches everything together; garish lighting, lurid panel transitions, and a colour palette that looks like it escaped from a haunted sweetshop. This isn’t horror that creeps under your skin so much as one that knocks on the door dressed as Death and yells “Trick or treat!”

Savini’s practical effects are the real MVP. From crumbling corpses and bubble-wrapped zombies to the crate creature’s blood-soaked buffet, it’s all delightfully physical; gloopy, crunchy, and filmed with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for school science experiments gone wrong.

The wraparound story (with King’s son Joe Hill) playing the horror-loving kid, neatly inverts the old moral panic. Creepshow doesn’t see horror as something to protect children from; it’s something to protect them with. It’s permission to be weird, to laugh at fear, to throw a pie in death’s face and run cackling into the night.

A modest hit on release, it’s since become something of a cult cornerstone, not just for fans of King or Romero, but for anyone who grew up thinking horror was meant to be fun and a little bit filthy. It’s gateway horror in the best sense: five stories, no filler, and not a po-faced moment in sight, although not every segment works equally well. Jordy Verrill leans a little too hard into hayseed slapstick, and Father’s Day is barely more than an amuse-bouche, but that’s part of the charm. Creepshow isn’t aiming for prestige. It’s going straight for your Halloween-loving, ghost-story-telling, horror-comic-devouring heart – and it’s quite happy to go through your rib cage to get there.