When Bloody-Disgusting stepped foot on set of Shudder’s new series Creepshow, director Rob Schrab was getting settled in for another long night of shooting one of the series’ most ambitious segments in “Bad Wolf Down”. Also penned by Schrab, this segment takes place during WWII and sees history’s most infamous villain fend off horror’s most primal beasts; werewolves. He’s not just content to feature one design for the creatures either; he’s assembled what he dubs an Avengers of werewolves that pays tribute to all the horror movie greats. That he’s insisted on adhering as close as possible to practical effects in an extremely short window to shoot the segment only compounds the difficulty level involved.
“I had this story brewing in my head for years. Even long before Creepshow,” Schrab tells us of the genesis of this segment, “I’ve always had a love for werewolves and I always had a love for war/action and I just wanted to mash them up. And when I was working with Greg [Nicotero] and pitching this story, I said, ‘Hey, we’ve got an opportunity here to not only pay an homage to horror and war comics, but also we have an opportunity to pay homage to all the werewolf stories.’ Greg’s a big werewolf fan too.
“So, I wanted to see what would happen if like The Wolf Man, Rob Bottin’s Howling werewolf and Rick Baker’s An American Werewolf in London, what would happen if they were all in the same story together.
“There’s a lot of werewolf references in there,” he continues. “And I would even say there’s a lot of Tarantino references. This is a kind of Reservoir Dogs-esque kind of story, guys on the run, forced in a corner make almost like this pact with the devil to survive. And there’s a lot of Inglourious Basterds in there. Originally, the story was set in more of a contemporary world but it was Greg that was saying, ‘We set it too contemporary, it starts to become really political, and that’s not what this is about. Let’s make it more of the EC Weird War-time, make it like World War II,’” Schrab explained of the additional influences shaping his script.
Above all, though, he kept Creepshow at the forefront, “I found the original script for Creepshow online and just read it over and over and over again. And I actually would transcribe scenes, I just wanted to feel, what was it like to write “Father’s Day.” I just wanted to get into that mode when I wrote the script, because it’s a very visual script. And it’s a very fun script. There’re times when Stephen King just puts in parentheses, ‘I think this would be fun if we did it like this, you know, totally like an EC comic.’ And you’re watching half of a conversation with Stephen King to George Romero, and just saying, ‘Hey, look, this will be fun.’ It was really, really great to kind of just get really absorbed in that world that they created. I was watching so much director’s commentary and also behind the scenes stuff where Tom Savini‘s making Fluffy and just working on “Father’s Day” and how they lit everything. I really, really tried to get into that headspace.”
His extensive study paid off; one of the scenes observed featured a Nazi leader mourning the loss of his son and vowing revenge. It’s punctuated by vivid green key lighting at the forefront, and bright red claw mark lines behind him, emulating that bright EC Comics-inspired lighting of the original film. “Well, to me, it’s not Creepshow unless you have that lighting,” Schrab insists, “Type Creepshow into an image search, and you’re gonna get Adrienne Barbeau with the black and red zigzag shapes, with the blue key lighting. That to me is what makes it a comic book. Is having those lighting moments. So, I really wanted to have that in my episode, because I wanted it to feel like it was made with the same spirit as what George and Stephen were doing back in the day.”
The Nazi character in this particular scene? That would be horror fixture, Jeffrey Combs.
Combs explains of his character, “It’s the first time I have ever played a Nazi, let alone a Nazi general. That’s a first. That’s why I accepted. I like a challenge; new territory. I tell you, it’s kind of chilling to be in that uniform. The whole look of it came out of discussions with Rob, and the costume kind of takes care of itself, but I said, ‘Listen, let’s crop my hair. Let’s shave and cut it off.’ That’s what these guys would be like. The one thing I really hate is a period piece and people’s hairstyles are not even accurate. I felt like this was a Nazi who wasn’t a thug, but was probably of German aristocracy. And therefore, he only went to the finest military academy.”
In the second scene observed, Combs’ character was flanked by other Nazi solders and under siege by a massive Howling-style werewolf. With effortless ease, it swiped its large clawed hand across a soldier (a dummy) and knocked his head clean off. With showrunner Greg Nicotero on hand to offer advice and support, Schrab shot this first without blood effects to make sure they had what they needed. Then, they shot the gnarly decapitation scene again, this time with crew members tirelessly pumping copious amounts of fake blood up through the gaping neck wound. We got to witness even more glorious werewolf carnage, but to share would be venturing into spoiler territory.
We’ll just say that this is one grisly battle of life and death, and it’s going to be very satisfying to watch.
Gore and makeup effects maestro Tom Savini was also on set of Creepshow, prepping to direct his segment based on Joe Hill’s By the Silver Water of Lake Champlain. This included a massive plesiosaur being forklifted into position onto the manmade beach within the sound stage. They’re not kidding around when they say Creepshow is practical effect-driven, though with Savini and Nicotero involved, no one should be too surprised either. Of his segment, Savini shares, “It’s about a sweet little family terrorized by a monster, and it’s not the dinosaur in the story, it’s the stepdad. So, when the kids leave the house just to run away from all this and they bump into what? This thing, it looks like a boulder. But walking around it, they see it becomes Champy, the thing that the stores in town are selling souvenirs and T-shirts of. Like the Loch Ness Monster, it’s this myth that nobody has ever seen, but people swear it exists. But this episode is sweet and sad, and then heroic. And it’s a feel-good episode, so I don’t know if any of the other ones are feel-good episodes”
Savini played the Creep in Creepshow 2, but don’t expect him to reprise that role or even cameo. When asked he said, “I was going to be one of the Nazis [in “Bad Wolf Down”] because they’re wearing gas masks. It would be like Daniel Craig playing a Stormtrooper, but I’m not even doing that. And there are no cameos, they were talking about putting one of my tattoos in as a cameo, but that’s not even going to happen.”
Cameo or not, it’d be difficult to conceive of a new Creepshow series without his involvement. The special makeup effects creator on the original 1982 film, Savini was also a close friend to George A. Romero. And Nicotero as well, as Savini shares, “I’ve known Greg since he was 14; he was the little kid that visited the set of Dawn of the Dead. He was my assistant on a couple of movies I did. He was gut-boy on Day of the Dead. He handled the pig intestines for us. Unfortunately, they had to unplug the refrigerator while we were in Florida for three weeks, the stench, and we had to use them, you can’t go buy new pig intestines at 3:00 in the morning when we did the effect. But the stench was unbelievable.”
“None of us would have a career without George. For me, anyway. If there wasn’t a Dawn of the Dead, I wouldn’t have gotten Friday the 13th, and that one-two punch is what catapulted my career,” Savini reflects on what Romero means to him.
That sentiment is shared by Nicotero, “I was there, I was on the set when they did the original Creepshow, I visited. George gave me my first job, so it was like my Creepshow. So my goal was, I wanted to honor the spirit of writers, in terms of I wanted some old school writers, and some new writers, and people that inspire me. I love short stories, and short horror is the greatest, because there’s no rules.”
“I’ll be really honest, I wanted to tell as many stories as I could. And I just thought, if you’re going to do Creepshow, it’s not one story, one hour. It just didn’t feel right. So, we really jumped into the whirlpool deep, but thank god, the crew that we had, and Aimee Holmberg, the production designer, and makeup effects guys, and everybody, it’s been amazing.”
With three-and-a-half days to shoot each segment, and an emphasis on practical effects, it’s been a whirlwind for Nicotero. “I was pretty greedy at first, because I was like, ‘We should three stories per episode, and each story should be like 17 minutes, and we should do three.’ And then we got into production, I was like, ‘What the fuck was I thinking? We should do two.’ And now we’re at two, and it’s literally three-and-a-half days an episode to shoot.”
Arguably his most ambitious project to date, it’s clear he’s given every fiber of his creative being over to this new series. From homages and honoring both his childhood and Romero’s memories, to bringing in new talent to the fold, Creepshow is his baby through and through. Every aspect of this series bears his fingerprints. As if showrunning wasn’t enough of a Herculean task, Nicotero is also directing segments.
“I actually wrote Stephen King, and said, ‘It can’t be Creepshow without a Stephen King story, what do you think?’ He’s like, ‘I’ve got just the story,’ within 20 minutes. It was really, I was blown away,” Nicotero said of King’s involvement. “Stephen had two stories, two different stories that he had proposed. And then once we got into production, and I started seeing where we were landing, I felt there was one that was actually perfectly suited, which was Gray Matter, which is the story that I directed.” As for what that second proposed story was, Nicotero was tight lipped, “I don’t know, can I say that? I might use it for season two though.”
We like the sound of season two. Creepshow premieres on September 26 on Shudder, and a new episode airs every Thursday through Halloween.