The Creep Tapes Creators Mark Duplass, Patrick Brice Tee Up Horror Franchise’s ‘Super Wild and Weird’ TV Follow-Up
Lock your doors: Peachfuzz is back.
It’s been seven years since we last saw Josef and his furry alter ego, but the Creep franchise returned Friday with a shorter, punchier TV series that delivers the same horrific social interactions only this time in bite-size packages. (Its first two episodes are now available to stream on Shudder and AMC+, with additional installments releasing weekly.)
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In the original found footage horror film (2014’s Creep), director Patrick Brice portrays a videographer named Aaron who is assigned to record an eccentric client played by The Morning Show’s Mark Duplass. Unbeknownst to him, Josef is an absolute psychopath, and let’s just say things don’t exactly turn out well for poor Aaron.
Since then, Brice and Duplass followed it up with a 2017 sequel (Creep 2), but stalled out on making a third movie due to scheduling issues and other creative delays. Now, the duo is back with The Creep Tapes, a six-episode series that “continues to unravel the mind of a secluded serial killer (Duplass) who lures videographers into his world with the promise of a paid job documenting his life,” according to its official description. But with shorter runtimes (each episode clocks in at slightly under 30 minutes), it doesn’t take long for the killer’s questionable intentions to surface, as his odd behavior flies off the rails and gets uncomfortably violent.
Below, TVLine talks to Duplass and Brice about the franchise’s segue to TV, their creative process and connection to found footage movies, and what viewers can expect from the terrifying Creep Tapes.
TVLINE | First off, why did you choose to make a TV series vs. additional film sequels?
MARK DUPLASS | We were going to make a third movie. That was the plan and we were having a hard time, creatively, coming up with the right concept for that wonderful 80-minute thing. And simultaneously, Patrick’s career was taking off with directing and my career was getting busier. So we thought, “Wow, what about the f–king tapes? We have this closet full of tapes.” I’d like to say we were smart enough to have planned that, but it was just really an accident. What if we just show the tapes? It’ll be great and that way it’s not only creatively fun, [but] we can just get super wild and weird because they could be 30 minutes.
Also, functionally, it allows for Patrick’s movies he’s editing. We can steal four days and rent a cabin and go out and make these little things with friends of ours. And so it was really a true return to feeling 12-years-old running around the woods with your friends and a camera, and looking at everything on a three-inch monitor and, “What do you want to see next? What should we do? Oh my God, that’s crazy!” And it’s just so f–king fun.
TVLINE | How much of the episodes is improvised or ad-libbed vs. sticking to what’s on the page?
PATRICK BRICE | It’s an interesting process with these because I wouldn’t say they’re fully improvised in any way. They don’t really feel like improvised movies, at least to me. This is something where, because of the found footage form and the fact that we’re such a small crew (usually five of us at the most, and most of the time it’s just three), it’s something where we’re able to shoot longer takes. We’re able to go through these scenes and we do take time to actually script them out on the day and rehearse that dialogue. But once again, it’s a situation where we want to allow ourselves the opportunity to pounce on any sort of creative spark or pivot that comes that might be fun. For example, in the first episode, it started snowing at the cabin we were at, so we wrote that into the episode. We were so delighted because there’s really no other scenario in which you’re able to adjust so wildly while making something.
TVLINE | Mark, Josef seems like such a crazy character to play. From an acting perspective, what excites you most about your character and this whole setup?
DUPLASS | I hesitate to say this, but it’s true and it’s how I feel. Because of the nature of how we’ve built what this guy is doing, it means that anything is possible. And when you play a character, like when I play on The Morning Show, it’s a narrow lane. We’ve defined him and what he does and what is credible for what he does. [On The Creep Tapes,] there are no lanes for this guy. He can be anything. And while he has a certain type of flavor and energy and pacing to his speech and things like that that I try to maintain, it’s wildly open. So we just kind of blew the lid off of what is quote-unquote relevant to character. Everything is relevant to character and the way I like to describe Josef is that almost everything you see is factually false and almost everything you see is true. And as long as I stick close to that, we tend to be OK.
TVLINE | Any favorite episodes? Which ones are you most looking forward to people seeing?
BRICE | There’s a few. I’m really excited about how we were able to pace the episodes. The first episode, you get sort of the traditional Creep scenario that’s very buttoned up and satisfying. But then we start to deviate almost immediately from that in a crazy way, finally ending with some truly heinous stuff waiting for you. I can’t wait to hear what people think about it. But yeah. I can’t pick one of my babies. I love them all in different ways.
DUPLASS | To me, it’s all about, “Stay till the end and you will be rewarded.”
TVLINE | One of the episodes takes place in a hotel room, which obviously had me thinking of Room 104. Mark, is there a particular reason why you’re so drawn to hotel rooms as settings for your work?
DUPLASS | Hell yes. So many things. First of all, they’re cheap to shoot in, which is great. But secondarily, I think to me, the thing about a hotel room — and maybe I’m just a little bit of a sociopath — is that everybody is just a slightly different version of themselves in a hotel room or in a motel room. They may be a little messier, or no one’s watching, so there’s a couple of things they do that they wouldn’t do around other people. They eat differently. You’re just put slightly askew and I love that as a starting point for stories.
TVLINE | The found footage subgenre has come such a long way over the years. What’s your relationship to it and what do you enjoy most about this storytelling method?
DUPLASS | I definitely was in the generation where I got to see Blair Witch in the movie theater when I was 21 or 22, and it really got me and it always stuck with me. But I’m also part of the generation that was put to bed by the endless terrible ripoffs. So, I think that we were a little bit nervous to do a found footage movie because at the time we made this, it was at the long end of a really exhausting string of uninspired found footage films and we were worried that people might not want to see it.
But my take on this stuff is: Found footage is just a form. There’s nothing wrong with a form. It’s all about what you do with it, and we had just as good of a chance to possibly… I don’t want to say reinvent it, but inject something a little bit different into it. And I think if I’m going to take a wild guess as to why people respond to these Creep films and this kind of found footage stuff more than some other found footage films, I think it’s because Patrick and I are not genre filmmakers. We came at this completely from empathy towards extremely strange individuals and uncomfortable interactions between strangers. It’s just what we love. We just had the premiere of The Creep Tapes recently and people were telling us how much they missed Peachfuzz and how much it meant to them, how much it warmed their hearts to be in the presence of him again. [Laughs] Which is a strange thing to say, but I think that’s oddly what people like about these movies. Long story short, you should never be afraid to tackle a form. Form is agnostic. It’s all about what you do with it.
TVLINE | Were there any found footage films besides Blair Witch that stood out for you or influenced the Creep franchise?
BRICE | It was less found footage movies for me and Mark and maybe a little more like documentaries. There’s a film called David Holzman’s Diary that’s actually the first found footage movie. It stars L. M. Kit Carson who wrote Paris, Texas, and he was this sort of Zelig-like figure in the ’70s and ’80s film scene. It’s a movie about a guy recording himself. It all feels very real, but it’s an actor playing a character. I think it was really helpful for me to watch a bunch of experimental films in college. I took classes on realism and stuff like that, so my background is definitely a lot more theoretical when it came to approaching this. I’d also seen The Blair Witch Project and loved it and endlessly admire that movie for what it is.
DUPLASS | You’re more of a MOMA, video diary installation guy. [Laughs]
BRICE | Yeah or like Robert Frank’s films that he made. That’s what I was thinking of when we were approaching this. But then in terms of character, like compromised characters or characters that had a sweetness to them but maybe couldn’t access that, Mark and I are obsessed with this film Stevie, the Steve James film. Stevie, which I think is one of the most brilliant films of all time in terms of being able to explore a deeply flawed person who has all the potential to be judged by society and by the viewer. But the challenge that Steve James makes is approaching this character with love. So that was a film Mark and I talked about a lot before going in to make this movie and thinking about characters like that who want to get there and want connection and want to express their love but don’t know how. And so this was like taking that to the extreme.
DUPLASS | Yeah, my character Josef deserves to be understood despite the fact that he lies about everything, including the fact that his name is not Josef at all. [Laughs]
TVLINE | That’s not his real name?
DUPLASS | It’s definitely not his name. We don’t know his name, but we will pick one up at some point and we will never tell you what it is. [Laughs]
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