Despite King's plodding prose and facile characters, he's managed to concoct plots multilayered enough to sustain the length, and sometimes the scrutiny, a feature film demands. At his best, he puts everyone in touch with the nightmare anxieties of youth….

[Creepshow] is a salute to the cult-beloved EC horror comic books of the early Fifties. As a movie, Creepshow is negligible, but as a cultural indicator, it's terrific—a big clue to what even the most skillful and likable schlock-horror purveyors have been up to in all those years since 1957's I Was a Teenage Werewolf. They want to make an enormous catharsis for hundreds of thousands of slobs and to make slobs out of nonslobs. To them, the lowest common denominator isn't a term of derision but an admirable goal.

In the only relatively benign episode of Creepshow, "The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill," King makes the...