Spooky season may be so last month, but that is not stopping Shudder from adding more chills to the air…waves.
The must-have streaming home of all-things-horror has found its perfect new original in The Creep Tapes, a sequel series to the cult-fave horror movies Creep and Creep 2 that is part anthology, part character study, and all unsettling. Pulling from the VHS collection of a prolific serial killer (The Morning Show’s Mark Duplass, reprising his role from the features he co-wrote with director Patrick Brice), each episode reveals how the eccentric madman has lured unsuspecting videographers into games of cat-and-mouse that he’s had filmed for his entertainment. And trust us, like the “audition tape” storyline in TV Insider’s exclusive look at the two-episode premiere above, none of these home movies have a happy ending.
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“We had spent years racking our brains for a potential third movie in the series and over the course of that time, we’d come up with a bunch of different ideas, but we wanted to make sure that what we were doing would be honoring what we’d already created,” admits Brice. “And I think it was maybe two years ago or a year and a half ago that Mark called me and just basically said, ‘What about the tapes?’”
“And it was like, ‘Of course!’ We had created this conceit in the first movie, opening up this closet and revealing all these videotapes. What if each episode was one of the tapes?” Adding that “a closet full of videotapes is such a cliche when it comes to the serial-killer genre,” Brice realized that we usually “never get to see what’s actually on them.”
Not this time. Over the course of six wildly creative episodes, Duplass’ still-unnamed wolf-masked maniac is seen in various scenarios, bouncing between ominous and absurd, as he toys with the camera-toting subject of his ill-intent. And while it’s clear how each encounter will likely end (the guy loves an axe as much as he loves a remote location!), how they get there is the real ride.
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“It’s an odd process and it’s kind of hard to describe,” laughs The Morning Show standout. “We start woefully unprepared with a loose outline and then, depending on the actor that we cast, sometimes their comfort level is really high with improvisation or not as high. So we try to provide them a little bit more, but we always want to leave it loose enough and not nail ourselves down [to a set script].” Additionally, the found-footage format allows them to capture what Duplass refers to as “that childlike element of discovery you got when you were 12 years old and running around the woods with your friends… We shoot them all in sequential order, as well, so that we can build upon little accidents and little fun things that happen” throughout the filming.
“It is fun, but it’s actually terrifically exhausting because we are writing and editing and reshooting as we go,” continues seasoned multi-hyphenate Duplass, a former musician and alum of The League who is currently an EP on Hulu’s Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal and HBO’s tremendous Somebody Somewhere and co-created Netflix’s Penelope with brother Jay. “So we will rent a big cabin, we stay where we shoot, and I’m usually cooking the food. And we’ll have breakfast, we’ll be talking about what we shot the last night, we’ll be rewriting during the day, we’ll all try and jam in a nap, and then we crank throughout the night. After three or four days, some piece of chaos gets made.”
Helping them is Chris Donlon, the Creep franchise’s co-EP and editor whom Brice credits for honing on hell of a vibe for this chaos. “[He is] our third brother in this scenario,” Brice says of his longtime friend. “We brought him into the first movie after we shot the initial week and had him do the first cut of it. And he just had such a knack for the form and completely got the tone and everything in such a beautiful way.”
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A beautiful, often bloody way, that is. But The Creep Tapes is not just about the horror of watching these poor folks play into a killer’s traps. It’s also a dazzling showcase for Duplass’ seemingly bottomless reservoir of performance styles. Nimbly shifting from amiable everyman to comically oddball to churlish man-child to stone-cold maniac, it’s impossible to figure out who this person really is or why is he is doing what he does. We don’t even know his real name. And that is by design, Duplass notes.
“The way I like to describe the Creep viewing experience is that almost everything is factually false and almost everything is true. So he’s finding different ways to express what is real, what are his desires, all those things. He just likes to hide behind factual lies.” Duplass does confirm that the finale episode reveals “some things about him” that could be “the first of many Easter eggs we hope to be able to drop in subsequent seasons that give you a sense of the mythology of the man.”
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As for whether Brice and Duplass imagine an expanded Creep-inverse that could include a third movie on top of potential future seasons, “We’re definitely open to everything,” Brice readily acknowledges. “When we made the first movie, I think we thought, ‘I can’t believe we got away with this. I can’t believe people like this. Let’s never try and mess this up again!’ And now we realize that the more we just follow our bliss and the weirder we get, people really tend to respond to it. Just allowing ourselves to be free and completely stupid is the recipe for success.”
Related‘Out There: Crimes of the Paranormal’ Bosses Talk Search for Truth in Bizarre & Shocking Cases
And who knows, we could even see some familiar faces on some of these Tapes. When asked which of his past costars he’d love to terrorize, Duplass takes a moment to think. “This is a really tough question…I think the most interesting person that I can possibly think of to bring on to the Creep set would be Jeremy Irons, because I dunno what exactly would happen,” he decides with a smile. “I just spent some time with him on The Morning Show and all I can think of is this would be electric. [But] honestly, I think it would be Jen Aniston because she’s a natural improviser. She has such deep empathy and she loves the spirit of play. Despite The Morning Show being this massive mechanism, she still is a little kid who’s trying to find the fun in things. So I think she’d be incredible.”
The Creep Tapes, Series Premiere, Friday, November 15, Shudder
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