George A. Romero’s Creepshow holds a special place in the history of Stephen King adaptations. In addition to being just the fourth instance of the author’s work being translated into live-action, it’s the first film ever to be produced with a screenplay that King himself penned. Given this significance (let’s also not forget “The Raft” segment of Creepshow 2), it should hardly be a surprise that the beloved literary icon was sent a special email in 2018 when filmmaker Greg Nicotero was starting to develop a new Creepshow anthology series for the horror-centric streaming service Shudder.
Nicotero – whose King-related credits as a special makeup effects artist/supervisor include Creepshow 2, Tales From The Darkside: The Movie, Misery, The Green Mile, Desperation, and more – first became involved with the project while doing a press tour for The Walking Dead. According to an interview with SlashFilm, he was flying back from a trip to Australia and purchased an e-book copy of Nights Of The Living Dead: a collection of short stories all written to be concurrent with the events in George Romero’s classic Night Of The Living Dead. Despite the fact that he had spent more than half of the previous decade neck deep in zombie lore, Nicotero was so taken aback by one story that he decided to reach out to the author about making an adaptation.
The writer was named Craig Engler, and Greg Nicotero was surprised to find out that he is the General Manager of Shudder… which happens to be owned and operated by AMC Networks (the same company that produces The Walking Dead). Engler revealed that the streaming service was in the process of putting together a Creepshow series, and he asked if Nicotero would be interested in a position as a creative executive. It was an opportunity that he jumped at, and one of the first people he contacted after was Stephen King:
I actually wrote Stephen King and said, 'It can't be Creepshow without a Stephen King story. What do you think?' And he's like, 'I got just the story!' Like, within twenty minutes... Stephen had two different stories that he had proposed. Once we got into production and started to see how we were landing, I kind of felt that there was one that was actually perfectly suited, which was ‘Grey Matter,’ which is the story that I directed.
“Survivor Type,” the other story Stephen King suggested, was put on the back-burner to eventually be included as part of 2021’s A Creepshow Animated Special, but “Grey Matter” was given special prominence and was adapted as the first half of the episode that launched Creepshow when the anthology series premiered on Shudder in 2019. It clearly wasn’t made with a massive budget, and there are some notable changes from the source material, but between the cast and its Easter eggs, it’s very much a love letter to the author and a fun subject for this week’s Adapting Stephen King.
What “Grey Matter” Is About
Originally published in the October 1973 issue of Cavalier magazine before being featured as the seventh story in 1978’s Night Shift, “Grey Matter” is a short story that coincidentally shares a lot in common with Stephen King’s “Weeds” – which was printed about two and a half years later and was adapted as the “Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill” segment of the original Creepshow (starring King himself as the titular character). They have their own individual settings and setups, but have similarities in their subjects of horror – namely boozers who get exposed to some kind of parasitic alien substance that destroys its host before becoming a threat that may end the human race.
“Grey Matter” begins in a very grounded place, however, as its initial spike of terror is delivered with a real-world horror: child abuse. On a dark and snow-hammered night in a small Maine town, a group of locals are gathered in the general store and are surprised when young and panicking Timmy Grenadine comes charging in the door. It surprises nobody to learn that Timmy’s father, Richie, has “been on a drunk,” but the kid exasperatingly explains that circumstances are far more dire than normal. The owner of the store, Henry, takes him into the back to learn the full story, and when he comes back out, he asks a couple of his customers (including the narrator) to brave the blizzard for a trip to the Grenadine household.
As the men trudge through the snow, Henry recounts what he learned from Timmy to his compatriots – explaining that the trouble was traced back to a bad beer. While throwing back a can a couple months prior, Richie complained of a terrible taste, but he swallowed the bulk of the liquid before recognizing it, and was unable to retch it up. A couple days later, his son began to recognize changes in his behavior, as he would insist on total darkness (even objecting to the light used by Timmy to do his homework) and wouldn’t do anything but sit around watching television.
Over time, the changes become much more severe, and as Henry and his troop arrive at the Grenadine house, they recognize the full extent of it. They discover not only that Richie has physically changed into a slime-covered monster, but one that has the ability to divide itself in two.
How Creepshow's “Grey Matter” Differs From Stephen King’s Short Story
Following “Weeds,” “The Crate,” and “The Raft,” “Grey Matter” is the third Stephen King short story to be adapted as a part of the Creepshow legacy, and it can be said to be on the same level as far as faithfulness is concerned. The majority of what’s on screen comes from what’s on the page, particularly when it comes to plot, but there are small changes (like the events taking place during a hurricane instead of a blizzard) and some major ones – the most significant being the alterations that teleplay writers Byron Willinger and Philip de Blasi make with the main characters.
Timmy (Christopher Nathan) and Richie (Jesse C. Boyd) still play their respective roles in the adaptation, but the former encounters a very different group of people when he arrives at the general store looking to pick up a case of beer for the latter. Instead of the Nite Owl being owned by Henry Parmalee, Dixie (Adrienne Barbeau) is the proprietor of the shop in the Creepshow premiere, and while the shop in the King story is occupied by “five or six” regulars, the show features only two: Doc (Giancarlo Esposito) and Chief (Tobin Bell).
With Henry taken out of the story, the structure of Greg Nicotero’s “Grey Matter” operates differently than the source material. Instead of Timmy’s story being told to the Nite Owl owner and then later relayed while the protagonists move through stormy weather, the adaptation has the two parts of the story play out in parallel: while Doc and Chief go to give Richie a visit only knowing vague details about what’s been happening, Dixie stays with Timmy at the store and learns the horrible truth of what he has been going through with his father.
The tale that Timmy tells Dixie is basically the same as what’s in the short story, though it does have a more sinister twist at the end. In King’s version, the boy is an innocent victim of his father’s monstrous changes and is only a witness to what he does. In the show, Timmy is revealed to be a forced participant, as it’s revealed that he has been abducting neighborhood pets to feed to his father, and has also kidnapped a pair of twin girls (a newspaper article identifies them as the Grady twins from The Shining).
Lastly, there is the very end. Like the narrator in the short story, Doc runs back to the Nite Owl after his encounter with Richie Grenadine, but Stephen King’s version leans into ambiguity and terror instead of the straight horror that is featured in the Creepshow episode. While the adaptation has the grey slime monsters attacking the store and presumably killing Doc, Dixie, and Timmy, the original version simply has the narrator sitting and waiting in silence to learn if Henry survived, or if the creature’s exponential growth will eventually allow it to kill everything on Earth.
Is It Worthy Of The King?
If one hits the pause button at around the 2:45 mark in the first episode of Creepshow, one will instantly be able to recognize just how much Stephen King love went into the adaptation of “Grey Matter.” Looking at all of the missing pet posters (foreshadowing the reveals later in the story), there are a lot of names that will be familiar to Constant Readers, including cats named Church and Klovis (references to Pet Sematary and Sleepwalkers) and dogs named Cujo and Kojak (references to Cujo and The Stand).
Even before we see the aforementioned Grady twins newspaper article, hear the proto-IT reference that comes straight from the short story, and we remember that Adrienne Barbeau and Giancarlo Esposito are both Stephen King veteran actors (Creepshow and Maximum Overdrive), it’s clear that “Grey Matter” is in friendly and loving hands, and it’s all the easier to appreciate what the show does with the material.
Tight camera angles and limited sets suggest that the production didn’t have abundant resources, but Greg Nicotero and his fellow filmmakers make a lot of smart choices in telling the story – principal among them being the concurrent narratives separately following Doc and Chief and Timmy and Dixie. The twist with Timmy going the “extra mile” out of love for/fear of his father is a great, scary add, and the special effects work done to bring Richie Grenadine’s final form to life is extraordinary. If you know Nicotero’s history going into watching, it’s something that you very much expect and anticipate, and it in no way disappoints.
Like pretty much any anthology, Shudder’s Creepshow has peaks and valleys, but the show certainly got off to a strong start with a debut that is both a fun watch and a terrific way of honoring the Creepshow legacy. The series has now finished its third season, and sadly they have not yet done another live-action Stephen King adaptation, but my column about the Creepshow Animated Special will be here on CinemaBlend on December 28.
How To Watch Creepshow’s “Grey Matter”
As a Shudder original, the Creepshow TV series, has a permanent home on the streaming service, and you get instant access to it with a subscription, but that is not the exclusive way to watch Greg Nicotero’s adaptation of “Grey Matter.” Individual episodes and full seasons are available to purchase digitally at major online retailers including Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Apple, and Vudu. If you’re a physical media collector/working to build the Ultimate Stephen King Collection, you’re going to want to pick up a copy of Creepshow Season 1 on Blu-ray.
Next week’s Adapting Stephen King will be sticking around in the CinemaBlend Streaming section, as I’ll be doing a deep dive into Vincenzo Natali’s In The Tall Grass – the Netflix movie based on the novella of the same name co-written by King and his son, Joe Hill. Look for the column on the site next Wednesday, and meanwhile you can click through the banners below to discover all of previous features.
