“Such unspeakable things I saw.”
Creep has become an inescapable recommendation. I’ve been doing 31 Days of Fright since 2016, and every year it’s come close to making the list. You can’t go down any rabbit hole of articles extolling underseen horror gems without reading about Patrick Brice’s Creep. It is both an arthouse indie and found-footage psychological horror film, so whatever Creep‘s faults are, you can’t deny: there aren’t any other movies like this.
The premise is simple enough. A camerman named Aaron (Brice) takes a job that pays $1,000 for a day’s work. He’s to follow Josef (Mark Duplass) and record him while he does this and that. It seems weird, but a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks. Right away, things seem off. Aaron pulls up to Josef’s house, only to find his employer is absent. The house is striking, kind of an Appalachian Gothic motif, all towering ziggurats of stairs, and, in a nice bit of visual incongruity, a bright yellow door afloat on a large grey expanse. There’s also an axe embedded in a tree stump. It looks sharp.
Josef seems like a nice guy, albeit an intense one. He hugs Aaron as soon as they meet, and doesn’t stop there with his aggressive friendliness. He reveals that he’s a cancer survivor, but now has an inoperable brain tumor that will see him dead before the birth of his child, for whom he is recording this video. Duplass imbues this monologue with the perfect cocktail of optimism and desperation, but something about him just seems…off. Right away, we doubt the story about the tumor. This early on, it’s hard to say why. There’s just something about Josef. Maybe it’s his propensity for jump scares. Maybe it’s the omnipresent sweats and high-necked jackets, zipped all the way up like he’s hiding something or smuggling something. Maybe it’s the fact that the first thing he has Aaron film is him taking a bath with his imaginary child. What begins as a sweet scene becomes more and more unsettling as Josef gets increasingly into it.
Aaron and Josef’s day seems weird, if innocuous. He seems like a harmless weirdo, but there’s something more sinister at work here, which makes itself disturbingly clear. Josef is a manipulator, and a good one. We’ve all met people like this. I knew someone like this in grad school, the type of person who disguises invasive questions as ice breakers, who takes pleasure in making people vulnerable and uncomfortable. So why wouldn’t Aaron leave? Therein lies the brilliance of Duplass’s performance: he taps into Josef’s loneliness and sadness, and beyond making Aaron feel bad for him, he makes himself seem almost reasonable, with his confessional honesty. Early in the film, Josef dons a terrifying wolf mask and sings a disconcerting song, and somehow Duplass makes it seem quirky, if more than a little strange.
Duplass is probably best known for his role on The League, but that’s actually an incongruous part for him. He’s more established in the mumblecore genre, along with improvisational directors like Joe Swanberg (who directed one sequence of previous entry VHS). Duplass is an experimental actor and filmmaker, which can be glimpsed in his work on HBO, like Animals and Room 104. Josef is a role to which he is uniquely suited, able to embody all facets of this anomaly at once. We never lose sight of Josef’s menace, nor his vulnerability. There’s a damnable sincerity behind his manipulation.
Creep takes its time becoming an out-and-out horror film, which might test some viewers’ patience. This is, somehow, a very languid seventy-eight minutes. We keep thinking the film is going to end, but it refuses to do so – and to the film’s credit, that mimics the unending nightmare to which Aaron is subjected. Josef’s forced friendship becomes more and more intrusive; at one point, he sends Aaron a locket containing pictures of both of their faces. On the back is etched: J + A FOREVER. Thankfully, Creep keeps the homoerotic subtextual and not textual. If Josef were just in love with Aaron, Creep would be a simpler film (and a trite one; that’s a plot we’ve seen dozens of times). Josef’s affection for Aaron is left ambiguous. There’s obsession at play, yes, but also a genuine plea for friendship.
Things end the way they must, with Josef killing Aaron. In the film’s best shot, Aaron waits on a park bench, oblivious to Josef approaching behind him. Josef dons the wolf mask, and buries an axe in Aaron’s skull. It’s the only on-screen kill, and the simplicity of the brutality makes it especially effective. But even now, things aren’t over. We see that Josef has done this before, with what looks like dozens of potential friends. The deceptive running time makes sense now. This has been going on for a long, long time.
10/1: Hellraiser / The Invitation
10/2: Splice / Banshee Chapter
10/3: Jennifer’s Body / Raw
10/4: Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist / Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
10/5: Kill List / A Field in England
10/6: Halloween II / Halloween III: Season of the Witch
10/7: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge / A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
10/8: Ginger Snaps / Creep
10/9: Cube / Creep 2
10/10: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) / The Ritual
10/11: Hell House LLC / The Taking of Deborah Logan
10/12: Re-Animator / From Beyond
10/13: Beetlejuice / Sleepy Hollow
10/14: Idle Hands / The Lords of Salem
10/15: The Ring / Noroi: The Curse
10/16: I Know What You Did Last Summer / The Monster
10/17: Night of the Living Dead / Train to Busan
10/18: The Devil’s Backbone / Southbound
10/19: Event Horizon / Dreamcatcher
10/20: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari / The Bad Seed
10/21: Eyes Without a Face / Goodnight Mommy
10/22: The Strangers / The Strangers: Prey at Night
10/23: In the Mouth of Madness / The Void
10/24: The Amityville Horror / Honeymoon
10/25: Gerald’s Game / Emelie
10/26: The Monster Squad / Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
10/27: Veronica / Jacob’s Ladder
10/28: High Tension / You’re Next
10/29: The Innkeepers / Bug
10/30: The People Under the Stairs / Vampires
10/31: Saw / Saw II
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