Creepshow – Dana Gould & Greg Nicotero

By: Maggie Stankiewicz

Q) The stars of the upcoming Creepshow episode, Justin Long and D’Arcy Carden, are adept at comedy and levity is an undercurrent of the show. Why do comedy and horror go so well together for you?

Dana: I had a show called Stan Against Evil, which was a comedy horror show and I addressed this question a lot. Comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin. Laughing and screaming are both involuntary reflexes that relieve tension. A great example is when you go through a Halloween night, on the jump scares some people scream and I always laugh. They’re cousins. When you’re filming them, when you’re working on them, it’s constructed around gags. What is the gag? There could be a scare gag or a joke gag. They’re all orchestrated and built. They’re two sides of the same coin to me. In addition to developing characters and telling a story, there is engineering involved. You have to orchestrate the audience’s expectations and then pay it off either with a laugh or a scare. It’s challenging and fun.

Greg: I think if you think about the world that George [Romero] lived in and how he incorporated a lot of this stuff. It goes hand in hand. I feel like after Season One, where we had some heavy topics like codependency and alcoholism, we had more heavy themes in the episode “Gray Matter’ and some of those episodes were pretty intense. I don’t know what it was, but I feel like I matured a lot as a filmmaker after Season One and realized the stories that I want to tell. They have to be entertaining. You need to be entertained. I don’t know if Creepshow is really balls to the wall scary, and it’s not intended to be. The original subject matter in the comics was never scary, but you were waiting for a twist. You were waiting to see how someone was going to get their comeuppance.

Dana: And the movies were funny!

Greg: They were funny. I had a script that I had pitched to the network last year, that was called “That Sinkhole Feeling” that was about these two sorts of redneck guys whose job is to guard a sinkhole that’s on this guy’s property because there’s creatures that live in there and come up every night. They go and they feast on cattle and then return to the sinkhole. That’s their job. I wanted Adam Sandler and Chris Rock to play these two guys, literally with a six pack of beer and a shot gun just watching these creatures crawl out of this hole and then crawl back in. It was really funny. It’s so out there. Something I embraced this year is letting things be a little more outrageous. I feel like I’ve pushed the boundaries in terms of the development of the stories.

The episode “Sibling Rivalry” is something I’m really proud of. I loved that it’s a teenage girls experience in high school. I was really happy with the fact that every story gives you a different experience. I saw one review that said Creepshow is really pushing the envelope and they need to reign it in a little bit. I thought it was interesting that the biggest criticism I got was that we are branching out into science fiction. The “Right Snuff’ was one hundred percent my homage to The Andromeda Strain. Even the organize corridors were right out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The director and producer walked on set and were shocked the walls were bright orange. Of course, they’re orange. They’re orange! Orange was the “it” color of the seventies. I love that we have a teen horror story and a science fiction story and Cthulhu story. There are no rules about an anthology needing to be just horror. We can start spreading our wings and I was excited about those stories and that the show gives you an entirely different experience with every episode.