‘Creepshow’ Showrunner Greg Nicotero On His Decision To Lean Into “Dark Humor” During This Season Of The Hit Shudder Anthology Series

If he wasn’t there exactly when it all started, he was essentially there when it all started. Greg Nicotero, one of the founders of effects powerhouse KNB EFX group, befriended George Romero after a chance meeting and found himself apprenticing on the director’s Day of the Dead. In the thirty-seven years since, he’s worked with all the modern genre greats on films like The Evil Dead 2, Aliens, The Faculty, Inglourious Basterds and on and on. The history of the modern horror film would look very different without Nicotero and the wizards at KNB. He’s directed several episodes of The Walking Dead while serving as the show’s make-up effects director, and added a few more hats as the showrunner, director, general creative motivating force behind Shudder’s Creepshow anthology series. He pays tribute to his own work on the Creepshow 2 film in the last episode of the just-wrapping third season as a border guard played by Michael Rooker pops a can of “Old Chief Woodenhead” beer.

Echoes of Nicotero’s storied career are everywhere in Creepshow — actors and other creatives he’s met along the way, eager to work again with a man about whom I’ve never heard a cross word nor, really, even a critical one. He’s a rarity, someone who is as kind and warm in stories told about him as he appears to be in person. I worry, though, that Nicotero’s extreme focus on aesthetics over the substantive issues horror has always been so adroit at handling, has led Creepshow astray a time or two during its first three seasons. That hyper-focus on how something looks is the most important thing a special effects master must possess, but tunnel-vision can perhaps be a detriment for a showrunner responsible for guiding thematic principles over the course of three seasons and a couple of holiday specials. I say this with affection. I don’t know that many people could juggle all the plates Nicotero juggles and maintain the relationships he maintains. If there’s something I wish for him, it’s better role clarity (should Creepshow get greenlit for a fourth season).

I was blessed to be able to chat with Nicotero over Zoom on the eve of the last episode of this season’s Creepshow dropping. I started out by asking him what Creepshow meant to him:

GREG NICOTERO: Creepshow really provided the porthole for me to go from my meager Pittsburgh existence and find my way stepping across the threshold into the world of horror filmmaking. You know, Creepshow was the first movie set that I had visited. It was the first job that I was offered when I was 17 and it made me realize that you didn’t have to live in Hollywood to get into the film industry and introduced me to Tom Savini. All of these things all happened because of the original Creepshow, so for me to be able to continue the legacy and to collaborate with great writers and great actors and great directors and continue that spirit. It makes me proud.

DECIDER: Had you been familiar with EC Comics?

Yeah, my dad was the oldest of four and they were big into comic books; they were big into movies; they were big into Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, so I knew of EC Comics when I was a kid. I was exposed to them through my uncles and through my dad, but I started getting into more Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and stuff like that.

What was the appeal?

Well, George [Romero] and Steve King did it so well in the original movie: taking the colorful backgrounds and the turning of the comic book pages and things like that, but for me, the most arresting imagery from those comic books was the covers. The covers. And it still to this day, you can go into Forbidden Planet on Broadway in New York, you can go into any comic book shop and you walk through and you see a cover and you grab… you’re buying it because of the imagery on the cover. So for me, I knew that we needed to be able to capture arresting imagery and use the same concept of luring people in with the promise of something horrific, something grotesque, something sexy, something scary. So that’s what we do when we step into the world of Creepshow. I always felt that the tagline for Creepshow, which is ‘The most fun you’ll ever have being scared,’ really epitomizes everything that I want for the show because some of them are scary, some of them are dark, some of them are twisted, but I feel like when we got into Season Two and Season Three, we really did lean more into the dark humor of it. And that really resonated with me. When I wrote and directed the episode “Shapeshifters Anonymous,” that was much more of a Tim Burton-esque, outrageous, crazy monster story, and then you have [Season Three’s final episode] “Drug Traffic” which definitely has a completely different feel. You know, every story feels different.

You worked very closely with George Romero. Can you talk about what you see as his legacy and what of it you’re seeking to honor of it through your work?

Well, the filmmakers that found their footing in the horror genre in the late ’60s and early ’70s were renegades. Tobe Hooper, Sean Cunningham, Wes Craven, George Romero, John Carpenter: These guys were all rebellious. Any time somebody said they couldn’t do it, they found a way not only to do it, but to put it in your face in a way that was at times taboo and at times controversial. But all of these guys, they’re really affable and they’re funny and they’re engaging. Between George and Wes and Tobe, I’ve worked with all of them. I’ve had the greatest opportunity, and I just love their sense of humor.

Humor.

There’s always humor in horror, and I think a lot of times when you look at the films that these guys have done, and then you wonder if they’re sick and twisted and they probably do all these horrible things, and the truth is that they’re just having fun. And they’re having fun telling these crazy stories. The more I worked with George, the more I realized he had that sort of late ’60s rebellious nature, but it had his good humor and his gift of being able to look at the world in a very satirical way, and that’s, again, one of the things I’m trying to keep going with the Creepshow series. George was really, really funny, and I think that’s one thing a lot of people don’t realize. And so the Creepshow movie gave him an opportunity to really kind of play with that side of what he was interested in doing.

I’ve always found him to be extraordinarily socially conscious as well. Very principled in that way, a hippie.

Oh, yeah. And they all were. They all were. If you look at Tobe, or Wes, or John Carpenter, John Landis… I mean all of those guys were those kind of renegade hippie guys. There’s a great book that Peter Biskind wrote called Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. I want the horror version of that book, because that book talks about the way Hollywood changed from 1969 to 1979 or 1980, I think, when Raging Bull came out. And it just talked about how cinema changed and how those directors, Spielberg and Scorcese and Paul Schrader and Coppola, how they evolved as the film industry evolved. And I want the horror directors version of that book to see what those guys did, and especially when you get into the mid-’70s where every single film that came out — like Friday the 13th, Maniac, and Dawn of the Dead — those movies that came out completely changed the direction of horror.

Why horror? Why is it still so important to us as a culture?

GN: Well for me, it’s escapist. It’s funny, I went to a haunted house in Atlanta last night called Netherworld. And I walked through and it was one of the most exciting haunts I had ever been to. Everywhere you go, you see something different: ‘Oh, there’s a flying demon,’ ‘Oh, there’s a corpse coming out of the grave,’ ‘ Oh, there’s a Frankenstein,’ ‘Oh, there’s a Wolf Man,’ ‘Oh, there’s a zombie.’ And I loved every second of it, and I feel like with horror, it’s escapist. It’s coming to grips with your own morality. It’s the adrenaline rush. It’s using your imagination. You know, the fact that your brain tells you that you saw something that you didn’t see, and how your brain fills in the gaps. There’s so many attributes to it. There’s the, ‘Could this really happen to me? Could this ever happen to me? How am I going to die? What are the last few seconds of my life going to be? Would I survive in a zombie apocalypse?’ It’s such a uniquely thrilling and thought provoking genre that allows you to really sort of look at yourself in a unique way and in a fun way. I’ve done a lot of interviews about Creepshow and talked about social commentary in horror and my opinion is, social commentary is much more palatable in horror because of the ingredients. The meal that you’re eating, because you’re getting all of these other elements in it, doesn’t feel as forced. You tend to be more accepting of social commentary in a horror setting just because of the world that’s being created around it, and I think it’s more successful that way.

DECIDER: As we’re looking on the precipice of maybe a fourth season of Creepshow, what would you stop doing? What would you start doing? What would you carry forward?

GN: The show grew exponentially from Season 1. That season, I felt like I was just kind of holding on for dear life because I had never done anything like that before. For the second and third seasons, I think we bit off a little more than we could chew by shooting two seasons back to back because we didn’t have time to prep. We were shooting and the studio loved what we were doing, and said, ‘Hey, what do you guys think about shooting six more episodes?’ And we kind of went, ‘Yeah, sure. Why not?’ And now I can finish up and go back to Walking Dead. I feel like that put a lot of extra pressure on the creative team and the production that I probably, in retrospect, would not have wanted to do. You know, the crew on the show really is dedicated. They follow me into battle, and they’re talented. The production designer Aimee Holmberg and Rob Draper, the director of photography, and Lucas Godfrey, props, and Addison Foreman… Everybody that works on this show — Gino Crognale, Jake Garber — everyone that works on this show really shared my vision and followed me into battle. And so I feel very protective, so going forward I want to be protective of the process and make sure that I’m creating a very collaborative environment to continue to make the show.

DECIDER: What’s impeding that?

GN: At this point in my career, Creepshow has really given me a crash course in understanding genre, in writing, directing, producing. It’s a very low budget anthology series, so that forces us to be creative. And if you go back and you look at some of Sam Raimi’s earlier movies — you know, Evil Dead 2, which I worked on — you take the ingredients and make the most amazing souffle out of it. I love that element of what I do; it’s what I did in makeup effects and still do in makeup effects and have done for decades. But with Creepshow, you know, I think sometimes the challenge is when you pull it off, and when you pull it off over and over again, it gets harder to get people to understand how with a few more resources, the show could improve exponentially. So it’s like, ‘Oh, you got six weeks to do it,’ and you do it in six weeks and it turns out pretty great, and then the next time they’re like ‘You got five weeks.’ Then you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, we had six weeks last time.’ You have a certain work ethic that you fight for and that you believe in. But I love the challenges and I love the collaborative nature and the collaborative spirit of what Creepshow has given me, and that’s what I ultimately take away from it. And I feel like it’s made me a better filmmaker.

The final episode of third season of Shudder’s Creepshow is now available to stream, just in time for Halloween.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Creepshow on Shudder