Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Creepshow’ Season 4 On Shudder, More Scares And Laughs In The Anthology Based On The Comics Classic

The fourth season of Creepshow, produced by The Walking Dead‘s Greg Nicotero, again presents episodes that each contain two stories that are at once scary and darkly funny, inspired by the classic comic series and the 1982 movie based on that series.

CREEPSHOW SEASON 4: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We flip through an issue of Creepshow and land on the opening frame for “Twenty Minutes With Cassandra.”

The Gist: In “Twenty Minutes With Cassandra”, directed by Nicotero and written by Jamie Flanagan, a woman named Lorna (Samantha Sloyan) comes home late from a crappy day at work, orders a pizza and sits down to relax. She hears a pounding on the door and sees a scared woman begging to come in. She lets the woman, named Cassandra (Ruth Codd), in the house; Cassandra immediately tells her that she’s being chased by a monster and that in 20 minutes the monster will kill Lorna and anyone else who comes to help.

Lorna understandably scoffs, but then a package delivery person comes by, and she ends up getting just what kind of danger she’s in. But when she eventually sees the monster (Carey Jones), she gets a bit of a different picture of his relationship to Cassandra.

The second story is “Smile,” written by Mike Scannell and directed by John Harrison. James Harris (Matthew James Dowden) is receiving a photojournalism award for a photo he took at a contested border crossing. His wife Sarah (Lucie Guest) takes him out to dinner; during the dinner, someone walks up with an Polaroid and takes a picture. But the photo that comes out looks like it was taken from across the street. As the couple looks into it, photos pop up that seem to predict scenes that will happen in the next few minutes. All of it leads James to admit that the way he got that photograph has always haunted him, given the choices he made that day.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Creepshow is a slightly funnier version of Tales From The Crypt.

Our Take: As we saw from the first episode of this season, not every Creepshow story is going to have a sense of humor. But when the show goes for straight scares, it becomes a lot more predictable. Without giving anything away, “Smile” was the less-developed of the two stories in the first episode, with an outcome involving the Harrises and their son Max (Max Archibald) that could be seen coming about five minutes before it happened.

“Twenty Minutes With Cassandra” was definitely the better of the two stories, especially the moments when Sloyan’s character Lorna is determined to not just be another victim of the monster following Cassandra. There are predictable moments in this episode, especially in a scene involving a very optimistic pizza delivery guy (Franckie Francois), but in those cases, that predictability is funny. The longer the delivery guy waxed philosophical, knowing what was in store for him, the better the scene got.

The end of that story also got very philosophical, and we find out some of the inner thoughts of a monster that in a normal show or movie wouldn’t be doing anything but killing. So while there was a bit of an anticlimax at the end of that story, it was also a refreshing ending, given the genre we were watching.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Kind of hard to talk about the ending of “Smile” without spoiling things.

Sleeper Star: Ruth Codd was funny as Cassandra in the first story, especially as she immediately dropped her scared facade and started asking Lorna personal questions about her house and life.

Most Pilot-y Line: Lorna asks the monster “why do you do it?”, referring to killing people. “It’s complicated,” he replies. Is it though?

Our Call: STREAM IT. While, like most anthologies, the stories are uneven, Creepshow still has good stories that combine creepy, scary and funny in the right proportions.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.