‘Creepshow’ Season 4 Episode 1 Recap: “Twenty Minutes With Cassandra” + “Smile”

The fourth season of Shudder’s Creepshow anthology series launches with a bang with Greg Nicotero and Jamie Flanagan’s superlative “Twenty Minutes with Cassandra.” In it, beleaguered Lorna (Samantha Sloyan) settles in for a night by herself with a warm blanket and pizza delivery when rumpled goth Cassandra (Ruth Codd) comes knocking, begging for help. Lorna hesitates for a moment, then lets her in to use her cell phone, but Cassandra doesn’t want to use her cellphone, she wants to give Lorna some of her baggage so it isn’t as heavy for her to carry around. The conceit reminded me immediately of Harlan Ellison’s short story “Try a Dull Knife,” in which charisma vampires try to drink to the dregs the energy given freely by extroverts, but Flanagan takes it a little farther. Cassandra’s “baggage” is the manifestation of an awful incident involving a glue trap she’s set and the mouse that chewed off its own foot to get out of it. Unable to shake the guilt of it, it’s now a hideous monster (Carey Jones) that follows her around like the ghost of a murdered albatross might follow an Ancient Mariner.

What really makes this short film soar is not its very clever take on trauma horror, but a wry sense of humor that sells the gore as not so serious – the teller of the misfortune rendered a little ridiculous for making a mountain from a mouse hole. It’s a farce, but one leavened with some real truths about how for as much as we want to have empathy for the broken down, there are times when a nothingburger is a nothingburger. I love an interlude here, too, where unassuming delivery driver Okwe (Franckie Francois) chats with Lorna as though her dire warning about a mutant rat-thing in her front yard was just a nice person having a bad moment and needing someone to talk her down.

If you’re looking for the series-hallmark Stephen King reference, by the way, the coffee cup Lorna sets on her counter is from a joint called “Stillson Coffee” suggesting to me that in this timeline, Greg Stillson (from The Dead Zone) doesn’t become the last President of the United States, but Howard Schultz which… you know, same same. Lorna proves tough to kill because she’s resilient, sure, but also because she’s worked through her own damage in a reasonable, empowering way. She has a monster of her own, born of trauma of her own, but she’s learned to live with it without inflicting it, or herself, on others. “Twenty Minutes with Cassandra” is brilliant.

So brilliant, in fact, that anything following it would have a tough time living up to the standard it’s set for this season — and so it is with John Harrison and Mike Scannell’s “Smile,” the second half of this season’s opening night doubleheader. With nothing to do with Michael Ritchie’s 1975 beauty pageant movie nor Parker Finn’s more recent horror breakout, it tells the tale of award-winning photographer James (Matthew James Dowden) who, on the night of winning an award for a particularly timely picture of a man drowning while trying to save a child, finds himself being taunted by an invisible paparazzo. With strong echoes of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone ethos, it’s a tale of ironic comeuppance in which James is forced into an empathy transference. It’s… well, I wouldn’t say it’s got nothing to say, but it doesn’t feel urgent in an environment where questions of spectatorship and responsibility have largely been answered by the cinema of the ’60s and ’70s. Its ending is telegraphed, then, from the moment we get a good look at James’ prize-winner and a clever gag involving polaroid pictures taken, it seems, by someone able to see the future. Why not let the handsome white journalist continue to profit from his exploitation of suffering? Why not have him staging dramatic tableaux for fame and fortune. It’s no less played out, but at least it doesn’t introduce the notion of justice into a time and place where we just don’t believe it much anymore. My Creepshow is about feeling bad. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.