This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas.
Audiences at Austin’s annual genre festival Fantastic Fest got an eyeful on Sept. 25 at a preview screening of The Creep Tapes, Shudder’s upcoming horror series about a serial killer who tricks people into shooting footage of their own murders. Indie filmmaker and horror buff Mark Duplass, who stars in the series and the two movies that began the franchise, shows a lot of skin throughout the three episodes previewed at the festival, including both a lingering, loving, slow-zoom-in shot of his bare ass, and full-frontal nudity. At a Q&A after the screening with Duplass and longtime producer-partner Patrick Brice, the focus on Duplass’ body led one audience member to ask whether Duplass demanded to appear naked on the show.
“Do I insist on the nudity?” Duplass laughed. “OK, so I have a very strong opinion about male nudity, and on male nudity in horror films, and that’s an hour-and-a-half conversation, but my feeling is the kind of nudity you want to see is not, Oh my God, everybody wants to see this person naked, and they don’t want to be naked. How do we convince them to be naked so we can please the audience? That’s the worst kind of nudity there can be. The best kind of nudity is Nobody wants to see this person, and they’re gonna do it anyway. That way, there is zero exploitation — except for Patrick, who I’m totally comfortable exploiting.”
“The only question has been, like, what parts can we show that are new?” Brice added.
“I mean, I’m fine with it,” Duplass said about the full-frontal image in particular, “because most people [will be] watching this thing on a 42- to 55-inch screen. But [points to the movie screen behind him] this is really big. It’s like — we’ve all shared something here.”
The Creep Tapes premiered during one of Fantastic Fest’s secret screenings, where audiences are seated for a showing of an upcoming movie or TV series without knowing what they’re going to see. The series was the fifth secret screening at the 2024 Fantastic Fest, after showings of Jason Reitman’s comedy Saturday Night, Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Hugh Grant-starring religious escape-room drama Heretic, and Michael Gracey’s radical Robbie Williams biopic experiment Better Man.
The Creep franchise focuses on a serial killer with a constantly changing name (Duplass) and a complicated relationship with a shaggy, snarling werewolf mask known to the fandom as Peachfuzz, for reasons revealed in the first movie. The movies and show are shot found-footage style, with an on-screen character handling a diegetic camera. The series reveals more about Peachfuzz’s background, and finds him new victims to torment.
“Creep was the first film I made out of film school,” Brice said at the Q&A. “I was thinking no one would ever watch it. It’s been so great to have this to go back to, because it truly feels like we’re going back to, like, being little children making movies. This was the same freedom I had with my friends when I took my mom’s High-8 camera and was making films with that.”
Duplass agreed: “This is what [Mark’s brother and filmmaking partner Jay Duplass] and I were doing in the suburbs of New Orleans. Now I just get to do it with gray hair. It’s fucking awesome.”
Asked why they’ve returned to the Creep franchise again, Duplass joked that it’s because his serial-killer protagonist is uplifting to see on screen: “I mean, he’s such a good guy. The world needs more heroes,” he laughed.
“This is a very liberating character for me to play, for a number of reasons,” Duplass said. “A lot of the work I’ve done before are nuanced dramedies where I’m making sure I don’t push too hard, making sure it’s credible and natural. And this is just Take everything off and do whatever the fuck we want to do. It is so liberating. […] I go and do a show like The Morning Show that’s got a crew of 300 people, and everything’s so measured. And I love that world, I really appreciate it. But [The Creep Tapes] is never more than, like, five or six of us on set, and we stay in these houses that we shoot in, and we shoot in sequential order, and we come up with new scenes at night, and we eat our meals together. The magic of that is just very important to the other things I do.”
Season 1 of The Creep Tapes debuts on Shudder and AMC+ on Nov. 15. The first two episodes of the six-episode season will drop simultaneously, with subsequent episodes premiering weekly. Creep and Creep 2 are streaming on Netflix and are available for digital rental on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and similar services.
