stories—they wrote them, too, and as it happened, they were both very good at it. My dad was so successful at it they put him on the cover of Time magazine. Twice! They said he was America’s boogeyman. By then Alfred Hitchcock was dead, so somebody had to be. My dad didn’t mind. America’s boogeyman is a good-paying gig.
Directors were turned on by my father’s ideas, and producers were turned on by money, so a lot of the books were made into films. My father became friends with a well-regarded independent filmmaker named George A. Romero. Romero was the shaggy, rebel auteur who kind of invented the zombie apocalypse with his film Night of the Living Dead, who kind of forgot to it, and who, as a result, kind of didn’t get rich off it. The makers of The Walking Dead will be forever grateful to Romero for being so good at directing and so bad at protecting his intellectual property.
George Romero and my father dug the same kind of comic books: the nasty, bloody ones that were published in the 1950s before a bunch of senators and shrinks teamed up to make childhood boring again. Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear.
Romero and my dad decided to make a film together—Creepshow—that would be like one of those horror comics, only in movie form. My dad even played a part in it: He was cast as a man who gets infected with an alien pathogen and begins turning into a plant. They were filming in Pittsburgh, and I guess Dad didn’t want to be lonely, so he brought me along, and they stuck me in the film, too. I played a kid who murders his father with a voodoo doll, after Dad takes his comic books away. In the movie my dad is Tom Atkins, who in real life is too affable and easygoing to murder.
The movie was full of big gross-out moments: severed heads, bodies swollen with cockroaches splitting in two, animated corpses dragging their way up out of the muck. Romero hired an artist of assassination to do the special makeup effects: Tom Savini, the same wizard of nasty who crafted the zombies in Dawn of the Dead.
Savini wore a black leather motorcycle jacket and motorcycle boots. He had a satanic goatee and arched, Spock-like eyebrows. There was a shelf of books in his trailer full of autopsy photos. He wound up with two jobs on Creepshow: doing special makeup effects, and babysitting me. I spent a whole week camped out in his trailer, watching him paint wounds and sculpt claws. He was my first rock star. Everything he said was funny and also, weirdly, true. He had gone to Vietnam, and he told me he was proud of what he accomplished there: not getting himself killed. He thought that revisiting slaughter in film was like therapy, only he got paid for it.
I watched him turn my dad into a swamp thing. He planted moss in my father’s eyebrows, attached shaggy brush to his hands, put an artful clump of grass on his tongue. For half a week, I didn’t have a dad, I had a garden with eyes. In my memory he smells of the wet soil beneath a heap of autumn leaves, but that’s probably my imagination working.
Tom Atkins had to fake-slap me, and Savini painted a hand-shaped bruise on my left cheek. The filming went late that night, and when we left the set, I was starved. My father drove me to a nearby McDonald’s. I was overtired and cranked up and hopping up and down, shouting that I wanted a chocolate milk shake, that he promised a milk shake. At some point my father realized that half a dozen McDonald’s employees were staring at us with haunted, accusing looks. I still had that handprint on my face, and he was out at one in the morning to get me a milk shake as . . . what? A bribe not to report him for child abuse? He got out of there before someone could call Child Protective Services on him, and we didn’t have McDonald’s again until after we left Pittsburgh.
By the time my dad had us heading for home, I knew two things. The first is that I probably had no real future as an actor, and neither did my dad (sorry, Dad). The second is that even if I couldn’t act to save a rat’s ass,