Thursday, August 29, 2013

Squirm by Richard Curtis (1976): Crawling All Evil

Began reading this rather, uh, eye-catching UK paperback Squirm the other night, started off okay enough but then I discovered that author Richard Curtis had only novelized the screenplay for the "cult classic" 1976 movie of the same title. I'm not too into novelizations so I only skimmed through it; yer typical gross-out creature-feature fest. And yep, that cover happens:

The worms sank their teeth deep into the intruding mass of human flesh. 
Which happened to belong to Roger's face. 
Roger's scream was the most ghastly, unearthly sound Geri had ever heard. At first she didn't understand. Then, as Roger leaped to his feet, she saw. 
At least a dozen worms had burrowed into his face. 
One had punctured his cheek and was squirming into his mouth. 
Another had penetrated his temple and was insinuating itself into his skull. 
Still another had crawled under his eyelid. 
Still another had burrowed through his nose. 
There were two more near his chin. 
And one inside ear.
Worms were half buried in Roger's face, inching their way into the muscle and cartilage and brain beneath the skin...
 

Take that, James Herbert!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

That film had a good nude scene, Patricia Pearcy starts to take a shower and worms come out of the showerhead nozzle.

Will Errickson said...

Ah yes, the one scene that lives in infamy.

Unknown said...

If she'd done some scenes like that in One Life to Live, I might have become glued to the soaps.

Cabbitwocky said...

Digging through your archives, apologies for the very late comment. The first thing I thought of on seeing this cover was the "Trilobite Terror" card from the Topps "Dinosaurs Attack" card series from the late 80's. Looks like we found their inspiration!