The Creep franchise has served creator and star Mark Duplass well this past decade. The original Creep was released in 2014 and was followed three years later by Creep 2 (2016), both of which were critically acclaimed stripped-down works (the original is just 77 minutes) in the psychological horror and found-footage genres. Now we have The Creep Tapes, six episodes of 25 minutes’ duration each that purport to be videos from serial killer Josef’s (Duplass) collection, as he lures and entraps various men, many of whom are connected to videography and media, recording the cat-and-mouse games he plays with them.
The tapes are a good illustration of how a predator like this operates, vacillating between passive aggression, outright antagonism, and a sort of love bombing that he uses both to destabilise his victims—making them question their fear responses—and also perhaps to unsettle them as part of his murderous fetish. The show plays with sexuality in a way reminiscent of The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) too, with Josef using language and setting up moments that hint at a homoerotic quality to his entrapment of these men and the games he plays with them.
Unfortunately, The Creep Tapes also relies on jump scares far too much, and this dulls the more psychological and character-driven elements that you feel should be the centrepiece of such a programme. Aside from just the unpleasantness of having to anticipate loud noises on the soundtrack, it becomes monotonous in a TV series and calls attention to the artifice, the last thing you want in a found-footage product that’s built on tricking your brain into thinking that you’re seeing truly candid film.
The real centrepiece, perhaps, is Duplass’s performance between the cruder scares. The third episode, “Jeremy”, is intriguing because the other man has arrived at Josef’s lair thinking that he’s the predator, not in a murderous or sexual sense but to prank the man he thinks is a priest for an atheist film project. As he’s talking to Josef, you realise that the man he thinks he’s talking to doesn’t even exist. The spider is the fly, and vice versa.
Less successful is the whole religious hypocrisy/debate angle, which edges into teenage edge-lord atheism. I had to roll my eyes when I realised the angle that this episode would take. I think that The Creep Tapes is partially comedic, and some of the religious stuff could therefore be seen as parodic, but this kind of thing is still just so played out. It’s no longer all that provocative to be superficially iconoclastic about faith, hence why teenagers do it. You need to be saying something.
Nonetheless, Duplass shades the Josef character with goofy and awkward moments that make him almost endearing at times. You can see why he might seem harmless at first… Duplass’s performance is the reason to watch the programme; the problem is that it doesn’t sustain a show unless you’re totally and beyond in love with it. It certainly helps that the episodes are just 25 minutes long so you don’t have time to get bored as such; the tension of “when is Josef going to quit toying with and kill this new victim” is enough to carry you through.
I wonder if the audience for this was just fans of the films who felt like consuming some extra content from this world and character. In all honesty, The Creep Tapes plays like something that fifteen years ago would have been a bonus feature on an especially bougie DVD release of either Creep or Creep 2. (One of the things we lose in moving away from physical media is all of the bonus content that came with it, from deleted scenes to commentaries and behind-the-scenes documentaries.)
The show is well made, with competent style and pacing and some excellent performance. It’s very minimalist, though, and so sets itself a low bar to clear when the plots are the same thing again and again with superficial variation. It needed some extra element, like maybe if it was styled as a true-crime documentary with talking heads dispersed among the tapes, which would add a level of satire too. As it is, it’s a bit like if the TV show Hannibal (2013-15) was merely Dr Lecter killing someone and cooking their innards every episode. Or Bates Motel (2013-17) with Norman meeting and killing a new female guest for 25 minutes each time.
Also, I have to bring this up: do even this show’s biggest fans believe that Josef would get away with all he does across however many tapes are filling his collection in the credits? This is a flaw that’s kind of endemic to the genre, to be fair. Real serial killers aren’t generally charismatic geniuses (if they were, they likely wouldn’t be serial killers) and the ones who kill in great numbers get away with it as long as they do because… well, partly because they lived before modern forensics and social awareness campaigns online that mean fewer people fall through the cracks (look at many a famous case and you’ll be infuriated by how dismissive police often were of glaring evidence that a child hadn’t just “run away from home” or “fallen in with a bad crowd”).
But in large part, they escape notice for years because they target the most vulnerable in society. The second and first most prolific identified serial killers in US history, Gary Ridgway (48 or so murders) and Samuel Little (around 93), respectively, targeted mostly sex workers, addicts, and homeless women. In Little’s case, many of them were Black.
It’s not overly cynical to say therefore that if, like Duplass’s Josef, their tastes ran to relatively affluent white professionals, their careers wouldn’t have been as extensive. Ridgway wasn’t even of average intelligence, his IQ was recorded at 82. He just knew enough to know that the police were neither inclined nor required to follow up on transient women who they probably felt were nuisances to them anyway.
It’s fair to say, then, that although Duplass creates an intriguing and watchable character, as is often the case in the serial killer genre, he comes across more like a malevolent trickster god, and often his performance has the quality of an overzealous youth pastor. What is a little frustrating is how the show remains ambivalent about Josef’s motivations to a point where it’s not really “psychological” horror when we don’t know enough about his psychology.
His choice of victims and various references in the dialogue hint at homoeroticism, but Duplass and co-writer/director Patrick Brice seem unwilling to explore that beyond playing it for laughs. Instead, they take a middle ground where those who wish to speculate can and those potentially uncomfortable about explicitly stated gay desire aren’t put off.
The show doesn’t need to create a fully developed or realistic serial killer, of course. If the tapes were like what an actual psychopath would record, they’d just be sickening documents of frenzied cruelty. What I’m ultimately missing from The Creep Tapes isn’t realism, it just feels like it is because in the absence of a developed plot and characters—and in the presence of so much wandering around anticipating jump scares—the unreality stands out.
What I’m missing is a larger reason to care. It works best as a dark comedy, and some of the interactions are genuinely funny. Its closest relative in the found-footage genre is Be My Cat: A Film for Anne (2015), which was another auteurist psychological horror (also 77 minutes like Creep, weirdly) about someone making a film while killing people, in his case auditioning actresses. The Creep franchise bests that one for interest and self-awareness.
The best episode of The Creep Tapes is the second, “Elliot”, about a birdwatcher whose stalking of his subjects and obsession with them corresponds with Josef’s dark desires. This one raises an interesting theme about how the serial killer’s fixation isn’t all that different conceptually from any obsessive behaviour, just elevated (or degenerated) to evil. I award the series overall 2.5 stars because it does what it sets out to do and will be appreciated by franchise fans, though aside from some of the humour it doesn’t do much for me.
USA | 2024 | 6 EPISODES | COLOUR | ENGLISH
Cast & Crew
director: Patrick Brice.
writers: Patrick Brice & Mark Duplass
starring: Mark Duplass, Josh Ruben, Josh Fadem, Mike Luciano, Krisha Fairchild, David Nordstrom, Tai Leclaire, Scott Pitts & John Craven.
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