‘Creepshow’ Season 3: Greg Nicotero Talks ‘Dark’ Details, Creature Folklore of Season Finale (Exclusive)

The Creepshow Season 3 finale is finally here, giving fans of the Shudder horror anthology two final frightening features before Halloween. To celebrate the big episode, series showrunner Greg Nicotero sat down with PopCulture.com to talk about both segments: “Drug Traffic” and “Dead Girl Named Sue.” While both are incredibly terrifying and powerful in their own ways, the former is a brilliant spin on a creature feature horror story, with the latter being a “dark” side-window into an iconic horror film from decades past.

In “Drug Traffic,” which Nicotero directed from a story by Mattie Do and Christopher Larsen, Michael Rooker (The Walking Dead, Guardians of the Galaxy) plays a U.S. border security guard who is forced to stop a desperate mother from keeping the excessive volume of medication she bought for her daughter in Canada. However, Rooker’s character later ends up having to work with a performative politician, played by Reid Scott (Veep, Venom: Let There Be Carnage), to fend off a monster unlike any ever seen before. Nicotero says that when Do originally pitched him the idea he instantly thought, “There’s something there. I really like this idea.” He called up Do, who comes from Southeast Asian heritage, and encouraged her to “really, really lean into your heritage in terms of what this creature is.”

Nicotero knew he didn’t want the “Drug Traffic” creature to be a werewolf, vampire or zombie. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew he didn’t “want it to be something that we’ve seen before.” After a couple of weeks, Do and her husband, who is her writing partner, called Nicotero back and explained that they’d come up with something really compelling. “There’s this folklore that still exists today of this creature called the Krasue that lives in the forest in Laos and is a head with the lungs and the heart and the intestine. And it glows. And it floats around,” he shared.

“While she’s pitching this to me, of course, in my head, I’m like, ‘That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard,’” Nicotero continued. “She’s like, ‘No,’ people still believe in it in her culture. There are people that [believe] it’s like Bigfoot or Loch Ness or chupacabra… They’re like, ‘Yeah, this thing’s real.’ So we ran with that idea.”

Switching gears to “Dead Girl Named Sue,” Nicotero explained that the “dark” story is adapted from a short story in Nights of the Living Dead, a collection of “short stories that all took place the same night as Night of the Living Dead,” the legendary horror movie by the late great George A. Romero, who also directed the original Creepshow film from 1982. “There was just something about the story that I absolutely fell in love with,” Nicotero said. “I liked the idea that you had this sort of vigilante policemen and group of people that are unable to get justice for this despicable person. And so, they take advantage of this particular moment that the zombie apocalypse is breaking out, to get revenge.”

Nocotero confessed the segment is “dark, and it is pretty twisted,” but added, “I felt like the punishment needed to fit the crime in that particular instance.” Creepshow Season 3, Episode 6, the season finale, is now streaming on Shudder. Subscribers of the horror streaming service can also catch up on the rest of the season, as well as revisit Seasons 1 and 2.