Creep 2 (2017)

The opening sequence of Creep 2, a sequel to Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass' found-footage psychological horror hit that lives on Netflix, plays like the opening of your standard horror sequel, suggesting a rehash that treats its predecessor like an understood iconic phenomenon. A young Indian man named Dave (Karan Soni) is alone in his home one night when he receives a mysterious package in the mail from a recent stalker. Clearly, Dave is assuming the role of Aaron Franklin, Brice's ill-fated protagonist from the inaugural Creep. Having become the latest unsuspecting target of prolific serial killer Josef (Duplass), Dave opens the package, which, unbeknownst to him, is equipped with a camera hidden inside a stuffed baby wolf. Straight out of the gate, Brice and Duplass, both resuming their capacities from their original creation (Brice as director, co-writer, and co-cinematographer, Duplass as co-writer), load this cold open with clever callbacks for fans, transporting us right back into this world. In addition to the stuffed baby wolf with a camera inside, Dave is gifted a DVD revealing that his stalker invaded his home.

 

Alarmed, he welcomes in a friend to provide comfort and support. As soon as said friend sits on the couch, in a case of the utmost dramatic irony, we see that it's none other than Josef. In Dave's mind, Josef is a friend he's been rendezvousing at coffee shops recently and for whom he's developing romantic feelings. In our mind, we remember this man as the titular creep who lures cash-strapped videographers to various locations under the pretense of making a documentary before hacking them to pieces with an axe. 

And so we wait with bated breath for Dave to become the latest addition to Josef's library of past victims. In the original film, it was strongly implied that Josef, despite claiming to be a married man of six years to Angela, the expectant mother of their first son, Buddy, was a latent homosexual, evinced by his effeminate mannerisms and childlike, devil-may-care flamboyance, along with his use of child-friendly terms like "tootsies." Here, the filmmakers double down on his homosexuality, revealing Josef and Dave to be in the early stages of a decidedly nonprofessional relationship. As if to amuse himself and poke fun at Dave's willful ignorance, Josef urges him to call the police and report these ominous packages, but alas, Dave is a stereotypical horror-movie dum-dum who doesn't take his own stalking seriously and would rather let it go than go through the trouble of getting the police involved (even though he has evidence of his stalker breaking into his home!). 

Once Dave stands up and exits the frame to grab the two of them a beer, Josef looks into the camera with a knowing smile, as if to wink at both himself when he re-watches this snuff film and the audience, thereby breaking the fourth wall. As the would-be lovers sit at Dave's kitchen table knocking back cold ones and shooting the breeze, Josef ratchets up a sense of dread by solemnly confessing to be Dave's stalker and installing a camera within the baby wolf. Before Dave can process what he's hearing and stand up, Josef, who has surreptitiously taken out a knife, climaxes his confession with a swift, shocking, unexpected slashing across Dave's throat, splattering the wall behind him with blood. As Dave leans over, facedown on the table, Josef puts a consoling hand on the back of his head and strokes his hair, feigning guilt as if he didn't want to do it, but acted out of obligation. 

When it comes to making a sequel to a great horror film, filmmakers are provided with essentially two approaches: retrace the narrative beats of their predecessor in an attempt to emulate its success while sneaking in a satisfying number of twists to differentiate it, or take the story and characters in a completely new and radical direction. In the former category, a very good representative is Scream 2, which reintroduced the surviving protagonists from the original, transferred them to a different setting, shaded their personalities with fresh colors, surrounded them with a gallery of colorful new supporting players, and confronted them with a nearly identical dilemma. In the latter category, the greatest representative would be The Devil's Rejects, Rob Zombie's masterful follow-up to his directorial debut, House of 1,000 Corpses, which made the daring choice to position its antagonists -- a family of irredeemably evil sadists -- as the protagonists of their story, altering the tone from that of a Halloween-night/haunted-house homage to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to a grittier, more grounded exploration of the most depraved dimension of human nature, with shades of an outlaws-on-the-run Western. 

When Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass sat down to write Creep 2, it's evident that, from the get-go, they resolved not to make a lazy carbon copy of the original Creep. Rather, they wanted to take the ingredients that made the original so terrifying and unpredictable -- Josef's creepy personality, his Peachfuzz mask, the jump scares, the put-upon videographer in way over their head -- and weaponize those expectations against the audience. The result approximates to an amalgamation of the aforementioned horror sequels. Creep 2 takes its single remaining character in a radically original and unprecedented direction that fleshes out his complicated backstory, but consequently, the pervading atmosphere of heart-stopping, muscle-clenching suspense that made the original the second scariest found-footage horror film after The Blair Witch Project has almost entirely abated. Like Scream 2, Brice and Duplass aren't even trying to make their sequel scary. While they succeed in differentiating Creep 2 from its predecessor, they forget that "different" doesn't automatically translate to "better."

Following the deceptively conventional cold open, which provides the only murder and instances of suspense-building and jaw-dropping bloodshed in all of the movie, Creep 2 introduces its new protagonist, Sara (Desiree Akhavan), a struggling YouTuber who runs an unsuccessful web series called Encounters, in which she visits the most eccentric and troubled clients on Craigslist in a vain attempt to locate the core of their souls. With a pitiful nine views on her latest video, Sara has grown discouraged and disillusioned with her hobby and has resolved to put an end to her series. That is until she receives an email from an unidentified client offering to pay $1,000 for one day's worth of filming. Desperate for the money and her curiosity piqued, Sara drives to the mystery client's secluded home and is acquainted with none other than Josef, who has "absorbed" the name of "Aaron" from his previous victim. No longer content to beat around the bush or hide his intentions with a fabricated cancer story, Josef (which is revealed to be his real name by his sister, Angela, on the phone) instantly spills his guts to Sara: he's a prolific serial killer who has murdered 39 people, both men and women, and as his 40th birthday rears its ugly head, he's experiencing a midlife crisis, no longer deriving joy from the shedding of blood.

 

Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola's embrace of his creative standstill, Josef presents Sara with a compromise: she is to make a documentary about his life, and in exchange, he promises not to kill her over the next 24 hours. Thinking that his confession and proposition have already scared her off, Josef grants Sara permission to take her money and leave if she isn't up to the challenge. To his astonishment, she calmly obliges. What Sara hasn't yet been made aware of, however, is Josef's end goal: by the end of the night, he intends for her to assist him in a suicide, concluding his "career" as his own final victim.

From the moment Sara enters Josef's choice of temporary residence -- different from his original rented cabin -- Brice and Duplass abandon the atmosphere of suspense, tension, and cringe-inducing weirdness that suffused their first movie in favor of a twisted, unpredictable, pitch-black take on romantic comedy. More so than a horror film, Creep 2 plays like a tragic and darkly comic love story between two psychologically disturbed individuals united in their quest to produce art. In a more cynical, profit-driven sequel, the protagonist would be another average Joe who finds themselves ensnared in the web of a manipulative psychopath, unable to break free before finally being reduced to the latest addition to the body count. Fortunately, Brice and Duplass are smarter and more ambitious than that, taking their story, inspired by unsettling real-life encounters with Craigslist clients, in a direction as fresh as it is daring. 

What made Josef one of the most terrifying human villains in modern horror was the contradiction between his external presentation and internal motivations. On the outside, he presented himself as an open book, eagerly willing to divulge every last detail of his life, from his tubby time with his father as a baby to his six-year marriage to Angela to his fatal cancer diagnosis. As expected, every word of that was revealed to be a lie. By the end of Creep, that's all Josef was: a creep, a liar, a manipulator, a serial killer who prefers to tenderize his targets with fear, stripping them of their security before moving in for the kill. Despite his larger-than-life personality and inability to stop talking, the real Josef remained an enigma. 

In the most worthwhile twist of Creep 2, Brice and Duplass elect to shed a little more light into their titular murderer's depraved soul, parceling out fascinating tidbits of backstory that elucidate his motivation for killing. In the process, they prompt a measure of sympathy for Josef without ever compromising his ingrained passion for the senseless murder of innocents. In this sense, their treatment of Josef bears a resemblance to Rob Zombie's of his Firefly clan in The Devil's Rejects: they humanize Josef via delving into the core of his psychological makeup without fundamentally altering the monster he's grown into. By the end of their sequel, Josef hasn't achieved redemption or renounced his murderous ways. If anything, his bloodlust and misguided self-assurance are renewed. 

The filmmakers parody the concept of a midlife crisis and extract black humor out of Josef's failed suicide attempts. On his first attempt, he lies facedown and instructs Sara to decapitate him with an axe, wearing his Peachfuzz mask to spare her the trauma of seeing his face. On his second, he hangs himself from a stairwell, and when Sara grabs his legs to lift him up, the rope snaps off, causing him to fall to the floor. In the most wryly funny scene, Josef sits cross-legged in the middle of a lake, and his numerous attempts at filming an intro about 1978 are thwarted relentlessly by the hum of a slow-moving plane and the incessant chirping of birds. "It's like a bad joke," Josef says with a smile of grim incredulity. 

While the original film contained sequences of nerve-shredding suspense -- Josef's disappearance from the hearth, Aaron's nighttime awakenings in his home -- Creep 2 only generates unease on two occasions: when Josef reveals to Sara his awareness of her web series and, therefore, her lie of working as a wedding photographer, and his reveal of having stolen her protective knife from her boot. Beyond that, Brice neglects to recapture the horror with a single petrifying sequence. The scenes of Sara searching for Josef outside the home at night or in the daytime woods after he runs off fail to generate suspense because he's already promised not to kill her, eliminating any sense of danger. 

Slipping effortlessly back into his career-defining role as the mascot of the franchise, Mark Duplass is as captivating and delectably demented as in his first go-around. With the exception of his initial scene opposite Soni, Duplass changes his unassuming appearance to reflect the conflict brewing within Josef's tortured soul. His once-short hair has now grown to the allowance of a ponytail. His light, scruffy facial hair has been left to expand into a thick, heavy beard, interspersed with sporadic bald patches beside his chin, a peculiarity enriched with a shocking explanation later on. He trades the black tracksuit for a black turtleneck sweater. Duplass maintains his customary impish smile, flashed directly into the camera in the cold open, but unearths hitherto concealed vulnerabilities, no longer experiencing joy in killing and racked with insecurity and discontent over approaching his 40th birthday.

Here is a man who considers his career as a serial killer to be a legitimate career, something he takes pride in, was born to do, and does it better than anyone else. A legend in his own twisted mind, Josef regards himself as the world's most prolific serial killer, his ego boosted by his seeming inability to get caught. That's why he lures strictly videographers into his web of deceit and mayhem: their cameras allow him to record their murders so he may watch them any time. He's like a director, improving on his past work with each killing and basking in his finished products as though they were his movies. 

But at 39 murders and with middle age around the corner, Josef has grown tired of making the same movie again and again. Cutting into the stomach of another victim and emptying out their innards just doesn't bring him the same level of exhilaration it once did. (Get the violins going, right?) Duplass is savvy enough to acknowledge that the only person who sympathizes with Josef's plight is Josef. Returning editor Christopher Donlon once again films Josef in extended takes during his confessionals to accentuate his depression, uncertainty, and quiet astonishment at Sara's bravery and stone-faced endurance. As he did in the original, Duplass delivers monologues on serious topics -- his confession to his career as a serial killer, his abduction and near-death experience as a teenager which culminated in his first murder -- in a deadpan tone that injects a note of black humor into the absurdity. 

In the most revealing glimpse into Josef's tragic past that seemingly accounts for his present, he reveals that, at 15, he was picked up by a strange man after hanging out with the members of his favorite band. In a reference to his ominous first line in Creep 1, the stranger looked him straight in the eye and said, "Oh my God. Oh my God. This is gonna be a good day. You have a really nice, kind face." Offering to drive him back to town, the man instead drove Josef to a remote part of the woods, where he beat him within an inch of his life, forced him to dig his own grave, and tied his hands behind his back. Fortunately for Josef, the man wasn't skilled at tying knots, so he undid his ties, and when the man returned, Josef strangled him, watching with pleasure as the life drained from his eyes before stripping him naked and burying his nude corpse in the grave he dug for himself. If this confession is intended to be truthful, then Josef has revealed a shocking new color of himself. He began his "career" as a lonely adolescent searching desperately for acceptance, only to have his innocence robbed by a man who preyed on the naivete and blind trust of children. In a case of evil begetting evil, the death of one inhuman monster gave birth to another. 

However, Josef subsequently reveals that from the age of 14 to 19, he was locked up in a mental institution. If that's true, then he couldn't have committed his first murder at 15. He would have been protected from his alleged attempted murderer by his confinement. So even with his soul-bearing "confessions," Josef remains a blank slate, incapable of fully telling the truth about who he is and what he's endured. 

He's intimidated and challenged by his inability to scare Sara, and Duplass shows both frustration and desperation for her to stay by his side. And not necessarily so he can renege on his promise and kill her, but because he's craving for affection, someone to talk to and hold hands with, and for the first time, he feels he may have found that missing piece in his life. Duplass calls out her lies with the soft-spoken compassion, patience, and empathy of a father who isn't mad, just disappointed, which proves more dreadful than a frothing-at-the-mouth rant. He switches from the world-weary melancholy of a man realizing his life hasn't amounted to anything to the youthful exuberance of one suddenly experiencing a renewed sense of purpose. 

In one of two instances of heartfelt honesty and tenderness between Duplass and Akhavan, Josef confesses that he's a virgin who's never even had his first kiss, and Duplass, with his shoulders hunched and his arms clasped around his legs, smiles abashedly with the sincerity and innocence of an emotionally stunted, lonely man-child reconciling his lust for murder with his deep-seated longing for companionship.

As the latest recipient of Josef's invitation, Desiree Akhavan provides the perfect match for Duplass. Her YouTuber isn't a murderer, but neither is she altogether there. After all, how could she be? She travels to the homes of unbalanced adult men she meets online and indulges their harmless but disturbing desires, which include lying them on her lap and cradling them like a baby in need of a mother figure. Her interest doesn't lie in monetary compensation, which is good because she doesn't make any money. Rather, by shining a spotlight on the weirdest among us and providing them a platform to express their innermost desires and insecurities, Sara believes she's making a distinctive form of art. So when Josef stands across from her butt naked, explaining his intention to break down the gender barrier between them, her response isn't to run out of the house faster than lightning; it's to return the gesture. Rather than zero in on her privates, however, Josef zooms the camera in on her face, either out of genuine admiration for her soul or embarrassment at ogling a woman's nude body.

The polar opposite of Patrick Brice's everyman, Akhavan plays Sara as a less lethal version of a creep. For the majority of her screen time, she intentionally plays with one color, keeping her face and voice emotionless so her motivations and thought processes remain shrouded in ambiguity. Driven primarily by a desperation for increased viewership, Akhavan's greatest accomplishment is bringing credibility to Sara's steadfast resolution to stay with Josef despite his numerous red flags. Outwardly, Sara is what Josef refers to as "a tough nut to crack," remarkably undeterred by his alarming confessions to murder and instantly immune to his childish jump-scare attacks. Every bit the blank slate her subject is, it's hard to ascertain whether Sara is developing a genuine affection for Josef, determined to win in his battle of wills, or just desperate to finish the documentary and make the finale to her failed web series one that will put her on the map. 

Akhavan gives her screen partner a run for his money, freaking the freak out at every turn. As Josef searches for Sara in his basement, she jump-scares him from outside a window. When he attempts to ambush her in the shower a la Norman Bates, she emerges with her face covered in tape. Though she's confident that Josef lied about being a serial killer, Sara isn't an idiot, concealing a knife in her boot just in case. While Aaron couldn't wait to get as far away from Josef as humanly possible, here the roles are reversed. Josef implores Sara to leave, but she flatly refuses. Akhavan exhibits compassion for Josef's alleged childhood trauma, climbing into his indoor pool in her clothes, clasping him to her chest, and massaging his neck and shoulders, much to his confusion, relaxation, and appreciation. 

Only after Josef's attempted hanging, in which he sought to make her complicit, does a fuller picture emerge of Sara's personality, showing an anger not yet provoked. As Josef apologizes for putting her in that position and expresses gratitude for her friendship, Akhavan's steely eyes well with tears that hint at an underlying loneliness. Her perpetually blank Michael Myers mask of a face widens into a giddy, irrepressible schoolgirl smile as Josef opens up to her about his virginity. When Josef and Sara reach the final stage of their life-changing day deep in the woods, Akhavan's carefully cultivated veneer of composure shatters to pieces, unveiling a terrified young woman who realizes, perhaps too late, that no amount of online fame is worth the cost of your life.

Speaking of said final stage, the ending of Creep 2 is a cataclysmic dumpster fire: preposterous, incoherent, slapdash, insulting, and just plain stupid, negating the reality of the world constructed by Brice and Duplass and the humanity of their characters by supplying them with an inhuman level of plot armor. The saddest part is it begins with promise. As Josef and Sara venture deep into the nighttime woods to film the coda of their documentary, Josef announces a change of plans. Under his direction, Sara pans her camera to a freshly dug grave, and Josef extracts the knife he stole from Sara's boot when he fell on top of her. The implication is that Josef is going to kill Sara, but Brice and Duplass confound that expectation by having Josef suddenly turn the knife on himself, stabbing his stomach repeatedly. Rather than have Sara assist him in his suicide, he has decided for the both of them that they will stab themselves to death and crawl into the grave together a la Romeo and Juliet. This marks the moment just before the ending flies further off the rails than Josef himself. 

While the preceding hour and eight minutes, and the entirety of its predecessor, remained mostly tethered to reality, the filmmakers throw logic completely out the window, producing a climax with the sloppiness of primates throwing their own feces around. It's farcical without being the slightest bit funny. It makes you second-guess what you're watching as you're watching it, as though your eyes may be deceiving you. After Sara runs off into the woods, not willing to die to make a career-defining documentary, Josef summons the strength to walk, then crawl, while holding the camera, without even momentarily losing consciousness from blood loss. Josef is supposed to be a flesh-and-blood serial killer, but all of a sudden, he's gifted the boundless resilience of a half-mortal/half-supernatural slasher.

After showing intelligence, clear-headedness, and self-preservation just seconds earlier, Sara charges at Josef and wrestles him to the ground before resuming her run. Wouldn't it have made more sense to continue running until she found her way out of the woods? Instead, she chooses to turn around and make herself an open target. Having miraculously regained his footing, Josef stands up and chases Sara, managing to catch up to her, pin her down behind a tree, stab her repeatedly (off-camera), and haul her into the grave. Reemerging therefrom, Josef crawls toward the camera and delivers a closing monologue, cowardly deciding against joining Sara in death but thanking her for reigniting his passion. Unbeknownst to Josef, Sara, who appears to have inherited her attempted murderer's immunity to stab wounds, crawls out of the grave, sneaks up behind him, and whacks him in the back of the head with his shovel before running off. Against the laws of human mortality, both Josef and Sara survive their injuries. 

In an equally nonsensical and superfluous epilogue, Sara has returned to her life with all her mobility intact. Just as he did with Aaron, Josef has somehow tracked Sara down and is now stalking her in broad daylight as she walks in the street and sits in a bus. Here's the kicker: he's stalking her from the front, not behind. And yet, she fails to register his presence until he starts to whistle the Peachfuzz theme song, at which point her eyes meet his lens before the screen cuts to black, insinuating that their story isn't over. 

That same year, Brice and Duplass announced plans to create a third installment, with both men returning to their previous positions. In March 2020, they admitted to a mutual struggle to come up with a worthwhile concept, insisting that they want to make Creep 3 "super inspired," or at least more inspired than the title, which threatens to deliver thirds of the same dish. With an interval of nearly a decade since their last excursion into the universe of Josef and Peachfuzz, it's clear that Brice and Duplass are once again unwilling to settle for a rehash of their previous feature, taking the necessary time to construct a story that will take their deviously enigmatic character on a path not already traveled and unlock even more dimensions along the way. While I consider the book on Josef and Sara's twisted, if darkly touching, love story to be closed, as long as the filmmakers continue to confound expectations and take chances as they do in spades in their first sequel, Creep has the potential to become one of the most original and exciting franchises in modern horror history, especially within the margins of the seemingly played-out found-footage subgenre.

6.4/10