‘A Creepshow Animated Special’ is a hauntingly good time

Greg Nicotero’s A Creepshow Animated Special is edgy, gritty and utterly terrifying

Creepshow has a legacy of providing thrills and chills, but every now and then those thrills and chills are served with a side of cheese. Humor, after all, can be a powerful asset in horror. There is no cheese here. A Creepshow Animated Special embraces the creative freedoms afforded by the animation and goes all out with two spine tingling stories from executive producer Greg Nicotero based on work from Stephen King and Joe Hill.

Creepshow fans are getting quite the Halloween treat from Shudder with this animated special that fills the void while production slowly resumes on the show’s second season. Animation and voice work can be done remotely and A Creepshow Animated Special makes the most of a talented group of animators and the voice talent of Kiefer Sutherland and Joey King in these two haunting stories.

The animation, done by Octopie Animation Studio, is reminiscent of an issue of The Walking Dead comics come to life. It flows from scene to scene, revealing just enough to set minds into motion, as every good horror movie should do. There’s no need to pile on the gore because the two stories do the job with ease.

As a refresher, here’s a rundown of the two stories featured in the special:

"“Survivor Type,” based on the short story by Stephen King and adapted by Greg Nicotero, stars Kiefer Sutherland (24, Designated Survivor) as a man determined to stay alive alone on a deserted island no matter what the cost.“Twittering from the Circus of the Dead,” based on the short story by Joe Hill and adapted by Melanie Dale, stars Joey King (The Kissing Booth, The Act) as a teen whose family road trip includes a visit to the gravest show on earth."

“Survivor Type” asks an important question: What would you do to survive? If your answer is “anything” then you might want to give the special a watch and come back to your answer afterwards. No spoilers here, but Sutherland manages to become instantly endearing and terrifying as a man whose ambition helps him find unique ways of staying alive in the face of insurmountable odds.

Thanks to being animated and not live action, “Survivor Type” doesn’t have to hold back when it comes to jarring moments that wouldn’t be possible in real life without a boatload of CGI. I love that Nicotero chooses to leave most of the horrific moments out so that they’re left entirely to your imagination. Don’t let that fool you – these moments are sandwiched with plenty of moments of anxiety-inducing buildup followed by jaw-dropping “I can’t believe they just did that” recovery.

In other words, a tension sandwich. It’s a classic Stephen King story that was adapted through the Greg Nicotero lens, and it was brought to life to perfection by taking full advantage of a medium that doesn’t have to balk at some of his more macabre flights of fancy.

Similarly, Joe Hill’s “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead” plays on the theme of social media and its role in our lives. When a teen ends up on the family road trip from hell, she doesn’t expect to actually end up in hell, and she live tweets the whole thing. In a clever moment of foreshadowing, her mom scoffs that no one ever live tweets their own death, and that “dead” isn’t available as a status. She’s so right…

The story builds slowly, filling in the details through the teen’s Twitter narration. As the little Twitter birds float off into the world to her 40 followers, things take a dark turn during a detour to the Circus of the Dead. It’s too dark to see what’s going on, but the makeup work on the zombies is incredible, she decides. Things get more and more intense until she realizes that nothing is what it seems.

Melanie Dale does a fantastic job adapting Hill’s story, which is a slow burn laced with social commentary and innuendo. There’s no mistaking the irony of someone live tweeting something so terrifying only to have followers either clamoring for more or scoffing that it’s not actually real. That’s the chilling part, knowing how people have become numb to what they see on social media even when the red flags are waving in their faces.

The Walking Dead fans know Greg Nicotero’s penchant for Easter Eggs, and there is a whole carton of eggs in A Creepshow Animated Special, from cameo appearances from King and Hill (and Nicotero himself) to blink-and-you’ll-miss-them nods like a zombie dressed like Evel Knieval. They can be hard to spot because the animation is so distractingly gorgeous, which means a second and third watch will be necessary because you won’t want to miss them.

By the way, as an aside I will say this: I would love to see a whole season of The Walking Dead done in this animated style. Animate the story and use the actors’ voices. It would be perfectly splendid, truly, because the visuals in A Creepshow Animated Special allow for some incredible zombies and levels of grotesqueness that isn’t possible with a hefty dose of CGI.

Make sure you add A Creepshow Animated Special to your Halloween viewing list. If you love Creepshow, horror, Greg Nictotero or King and Hill, then this checks all the boxes in the best of ways.

Available on Shudder and AMC+ on October 29.