With horror industry heavy hitters already in place from the 1970s, the 1980s built upon that with the rise of brilliant minds in makeup and effects artists, as well as advances in technology. Artists like Rick Baker, Rob Bottin, Alec Gillis, Tom Woodruff Jr., Tom Savini, Stan Winston, and countless other artists delivered groundbreaking, mind-blowing practical effects that ushered in the pre-CGI Golden Age of Cinema. Which meant a glorious glut of creatures in horror. More than just a technical marvel, the creatures on display in ‘80s horror meant tangible texture that still holds up decades later. From grotesque slimy skin to brutal transformation sequences, there wasn’t anything the artists couldn’t create. It Came From the ‘80s is a series that will pay homage to the monstrous, deadly, and often slimy creatures that made the ‘80s such a fantastic decade in horror.
Show of hands if you’re pumped for the upcoming Creepshow series on Shudder? The anthology series by showrunner Greg Nicotero, who has personal ties to the original film, has assembled a Murderers’ Row of horror talent. It matches the style of the original film, too, judging by the trailer. That five-segment anthology, 1982’s Creepshow, was an homage to the EC Horror comics of the 1950s, combining the talents of horror master George A. Romero and prolific horror author Stephen King.
Connected by a wraparound story that sees a young boy, Billy (played by King’s son Joe Hill), getting disciplined for reading horror comics by his mean dad, The Creep from the comics beckons him to enact revenge. Until Billy finds his revenge, tales are spun from the comic; “Father’s Day”, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”, “Something to Tide You Over”, “The Crate” and “They’re Creeping Up on You”.
Being that Romero had worked with special makeup effects creator Tom Savini on numerous projects and had developed a close friendship, it was almost default for Savini to be involved with Creepshow. Savini also wanted to expand beyond the gore effects that he’d earned a reputation for, and Creepshow gave him the opportunity to create creatures and try new effects. That also meant that a lot of the film’s effects were brand new inventions at the time – Savini had to create and develop them completely anew.
For The Creep, that meant mechanizing an actual skeleton ordered from India. One that was rigged to beckon, move, wink, and float away outside Billy’s window. Most of what Savini and team accomplished with The Creep was trimmed as the scene transitioned to animation.
Perhaps the most complicated effect of the entire film, though, was the fully articulated creature dubbed Fluffy from “The Crate”. The man-eating beast didn’t have much of a description in the script to work with in terms of design, so multiple options were presented to Romero and King. Once that had been settled, Savini had to figure out how to go about creating a fully articulated creature from that design. Something he’d never done before. He called up Rob Bottin (The Howling, The Thing), who spent an hour and a half on the phone explaining how to build it. Savini nailed it, and Fluffy became a fan favorite character.
But, if you’re like me, the most terrifying segment of them all is “They’re Creeping Up on You”. E.G. Marshall plays Upson Pratt, a wealthy but cruel businessman with a serious aversion to germs. So much so that he lives in a hermetically sealed apartment in New York City. Karma rears its ugly head to punish him for his misdeeds by way of hordes of cockroaches.
Production sought out purchasing live cockroaches for this segment from New York. The problem is that to purchase them, it’d cost 50 cents a roach, which would add up fast for the 20,000 roaches they needed. Instead, entomologists Ray Mendez and David Brody went to Trinidad, waded waist-deep in a cave filled with them and brought back around 18,000 roaches. The roaches received their own trailer to be kept and bred for more. And if you haven’t already heard this story, that went about as well as you’d expect. “Roaches don’t take direction,” Romero astutely and humorously pointed out. They hate lights, so as soon as it came time to film, they’d flee into the nearest object they could find. To compensate, nuts and raisins were used as on-screen stand-ins for roaches.
For the scene that sees the roaches pouring out of the vent toward Pratt, the entomologists and roach wranglers poured a barrel full down a funnel so that they’d come rushing out of the vent. But in one take, they just ran back the other direction, covering the wrangler instead. Savini created a dummy of E.G. Marshall for the segment’s finale, in which the roaches burst forth from his dead body. Underneath, the entomologists pumped plungers full of roaches into the dummy until they burst forth from the other side. These roaches, of all shapes and sizes (some massive), were to be exterminated at the end of production, but because it was impossible to wrangle them back up after a scene, the roaches had gotten into everything. Furniture and props that people took as mementos after still had roaches, and the building probably still has descendants of those roaches living in them. It was probably far more likely for the cast and crew on that set to develop katsaridaphobia than viewers watching the film.
Often, we celebrate practical effects over digital and for good reason. But sometimes, just sometimes, digital offers up the saner solution. In the case of 20,000 live roaches that ran amok on the set of “They’re Creeping Up on You”, I bet some of the crew would’ve loved to have been able to go digital had it been available. But it gives a whole new layer of fear to an all around classic horror anthology to know that those roaches were real, does it not?
