Last Updated on November 15, 2024 by Angel Melanson
Everyone's favorite wolf-masked psychopath returns to Shudder on November 15 in The Creep Tapes, a new found footage series from Creep director Patrick Brice. To celebrate, we sat down with star, co-writer, producer and Peachfuzz himself Mark Duplass to talk franchise lore, the future of Creep 3 and the importance of equal opportunity nudity.
It's been ten years since Creep introduced the world to the bizarre and brutal world of Josef/Aaron/whatever we're calling him at any given time. What made him such an irresistible character for you and Patrick to return to in The Creep Tapes?
Part of it is the process, this return to making movies and TV in a way that I used to do when I was 12 years old with my brother, and Patrick used to do when he was a little boy with his friends. Just running around the woods like idiots with a camera, filming something and then huddling around a little three inch monitor, trying to make it better. I deeply connect to that part of myself and the more I make shows like The Morning Show, which I love, but these are huge expensive shows that it's such a contrast to do [Creep].
As an actor, I love playing something that is completely limitless in terms of its potential and what I can do. I never thought I'd be making stuff in the horror genre, it wasn't on my dance card. We sort of stumbled into this so in terms of growing as an artist and not repeating myself, it feels really fresh and new to me.
Creep and Creep 2 both have this hilarious sense of dark humor, and The Creep Tapes leans far more heavily into that, feeling especially more confident with weilding this totally absurdist humor. Did the episodic format make that easier to play with?
There are plusses and minuses from moving from the film format to an episodic one, but something I have noticed is that a lot of the ideas we originally thought about for Creep 3 felt unsustainable for 90 minutes, whether they were too surreal or too zany, we were able to employ a lot of that for The Creep Tapes because you don't have to keep cashing those checks for 90 minutes.
I also noticed something when we had a premiere at Vidiots in Los Angeles a few nights ago. Some audience members were laughing like crazy, but some were terrified and they didn't find it funny at all. When I spoke to them afterwards they said “well I haven't seen Creep or Creep 2″ so people who have been with my character longer and are used to his rhythms, they can get a little more comfortable with it and it allows them to laugh a little more.
You’ve spoken before about struggling to find inspiration for a third Creep film. Has creating the TV show sparked any news ideas for a third feature, or are you happy to keep Josef’s story contained to The Creep Tapes from now on?
If I've learned anything with this – dare I say – franchise, it's never say never. I don't know what's coming for this, and it truly is one of the projects where we're completely allowing ourselves to follow our creative bliss. This isn't about money, it's just about pure creative fun and expression. I could see us making a hundred more episodes of this, for sure.
I could also see us stumbling on an idea where we feel like, oh we're gonna need more time to do this correctly, and make a Creep 3 out of that. I could see something entirely different happening to, like a whole other form. Who knows! We just love it and we're gonna try and continue to do this for as long as we can. The minute we start thinking critically about it or try to think how we can monetize it, I think it could kind of die on us.
Fans of tubby time will be very pleased to know that The Creep Tapes doesn't skimp on the Peachfuzz nudity. You said something really interesting at Fantastic Fest [where three episodes of The Creep Tapes played as a secret screening] about needing more male nudity in horror films, and I was wondering if you’d be comfortable expanding on that. FANGORIA readers are very much in support of this particular idea, by the way.
Coming into this, Patrick and I really weren't big aficionados of the horror genre, and what I think people are really responding to in the Creep franchise, is the fact that we're documentary filmmakers. We make movies about people's interpersonal feelings, so I think that adds a freshness to it. To that end, I think any time you've got nudity that borders anywhere near the exploitation of women, it adds a discomfort that is nowhere near the kind of discomfort we're hoping for.
For me, it was the idea that I would thrust my ageing, male nude body upon people and make them uncomfortable with it… that felt like the perfect use of nudity. I do believe there should be, at the very least, an equality of sorts. Any time a pair of boobs come out, let's whip out a pair of balls, you know?
I don't know if you know this but Peachfuzz has become something of a sex symbol within the horror community…
I'm so sorry! [laughs]
Each episode of The Creep Tapes goes to some really wild places. Which episode was most fun for you all to film?
Before I pick one, I will say that these episodes are equally terrifically fun and inspiring, but completely exhausting. It's not all just that we get out there and improvize it and it's fun and we figure it out – because it's found footage, everything has to happen in one single take. So you have to pace it all properly. What happens on set is that we have the outline, the first version of the scene, then we write a condensed version of that scene, THEN while you're doing that you have to learn the dialogue immediately and memorize it, and then pace it up like a play, because it's happening live. It's exhausting.
We had a lot of fun shooting the second episode [“Elliot”], that one was particularly fun. There was something almost Looney Tunes about that episode. But they're all fun because of the way we shoot them. We don't go into production and shoot them all back to back. Patrick's busy directing, I'm busy with my career, whenever we get four days we come together and stay in a cabin where we shoot. So over the course of the year we were shooting, it was almost like getting the band back together every month or so.
The final episode of The Creep Tapes contains a lot of Peachfuzz lore. Do you think you'll let audiences in more on the truth of his life story, or keep him an enigma?
We planned for the last episode of the first season to be the most mythologically important episode. While we do like him being a mystery, we also like dropping Easter eggs as to how this man became who he became. I think we'll do that more in subsequent seasons.
But that's the fun of playing this character. While almost everything he says is factually false, I do believe that everything he says is true. He just finds very strange ways to express himself. There's a lot of this character in me, and in people I know – the desire to connect, the people pleaser, that dark element in all of us that slightly shape shifts whenever you walk into a new room to win favor with people. He's just a really extreme version of all that.
