Jeepers Creepers (2001)
In 1990, Coldwater, Michigan, siblings Ray and Marie Thornton witnessed Dennis DePue, who, moments earlier, had caught their attention after speeding past them, disposing of a blood-stained blanket behind an abandoned schoolhouse. Catching the pair spying on him, DePue got in his car and began tailgating them for two miles. After he drove off, Ray and Marie returned to the schoolhouse to investigate, discovering the blanket and reporting their findings to the police. The following day, DePue committed suicide during a shootout with police in Mississippi.
While Victor Salva has never confirmed whether the DePue case served as the framework for his supernatural horror film, Jeepers Creepers, he did say that the opening act was based on "a true story that I was told, only it was an elderly couple, and they went back to this pipe to see what he was throwing down there. I thought that was a tremendously brave thing to do, but I also remember, when I heard it, thinking 'If that was a movie, if they went back, I would be on the edge of my seat.'"
Regardless of the source of his inspiration, Salva spent a month writing the screenplay for Jeepers Creepers, in contrast to his average timeframe of six months, and by the end, what he had produced was a terrifying, meat-and-potatoes, edge-of-your-seat creature feature driven by a pair of stellar, complementary performances from Justin Long and Gina Philips. While the opening half is markedly scarier, strategically concealing the identity of its relentless antagonist in silhouettes to preserve a suffocating atmosphere of suspense and mystery, the reveal doesn't disappoint, delivering a modern (and largely silent) interpretation of Freddy Krueger who doesn't have to wait for his targets to fall asleep in order to invade their lives and jeopardize their safety.
Beginning with the opening frame, the setup of Jeepers Creepers invokes that of Night of the Living Dead as siblings Darry and Trish Jenner (Justin Long and Gina Philips) drive down a deserted stretch of road in the countryside early in the morning, on their way home from college for spring break. Along the way, they banter and bicker lightheartedly. Salva efficiently establishes the personalities of and relationship between the protagonists (Trish is the serious, contemplative older sister and Darry is the lighthearted younger brother), as well as their motivation for being on the road: aside from spending spring break at home with their expectant parents, Trish has directed to Darry to drive through the country because she's fuming from a recent breakup with a "poli sci track team guy" who her parents love more than she does. Darry tries to pry the reason behind their breakup out of Trish, but she remains stubbornly tight-lipped and bitter.
Through the identifiable and charming banter between the siblings and the austere grandeur of the countryside, Salva creates an atmosphere of calmness that lulls viewers into a false sense of security -- before suddenly unleashing the horror in the form of an irate van that manifests behind Trish's car and tries to drive them off the road. Whoever is behind the wheel honks their horn repeatedly and tailgates the terrified siblings. Trish screams at Darry to get out of his way and let him pass, and Darry tries to do exactly that, waving at the driver to go around him. Yet nothing seems to placate him. Eventually, their harasser passes them and drives off down the road. Who was this irate driver? Why was he harassing our innocent, college-age heroes for no reason? Where is he going? Is he even human? Salva leaves these intriguing questions up in the air for a bit, resulting in a breathless, skin-crawling opening that the second half of the movie struggles to fully recapture.
After falling down the pipe into the basement, Darry stumbles across the content of the blanket -- a dying young man whose torso has been ripped open and stitched back together with rope. Mounted on the walls and ceiling around him are an abundance of naked human corpses in an identical state, preserved with petrified wood. Finding his way out of the church, a shell-shocked Darry returns to the car and they resume their drive with Trish behind the wheel, but now that the Creeper knows what they saw, he will never stop tracking them down. What exactly does he have in store for them? To kill them or worse? And does he desire one more than the other?
Salva litters his script with an assortment of horror cliches -- Trish's stick shift sporadically refuses to start at the most inconvenient times; the siblings only have one cellphone, on which they're unable to call the police owing to low battery; a gaggle of crows and ravens surrounds the church to portend the Creeper's presence; rather than continue driving home, Darry foolishly decides to return to the church to investigate what was dumped in the pipe; policemen are portrayed as incompetent cowards, drawing their guns straight at the Creeper but refusing to pull the trigger, and on top of that, the overweight sergeant (Brandon Smith) is named "Tubbs"; an old-timey, upbeat Jazz standard is corrupted into a harbinger of doom; and a resident psychic (Patricia Belcher) arrives to handily explain the motivations, abilities, and historical timeframe of the Creeper. However, he makes effective use of them while maintaining the simplicity of his opening. Even as the plot thickens and the supernatural nature of the Creeper is made explicit, Salva doesn't overcomplicate the story with convoluted twists or extraneous subplots. It takes place over one relentless day and night, with the focus intimately restricted to the Jenner siblings as they continue to run, drive, and fight their way to survival.
Via the expository speeches of Jezelle Gay Hartman, Salva parcels out snippets of mythology regarding the Creeper: every 23rd spring for 23 days, it gets to eat; it has to instill fear in its victims to select them by smell; it parasitically uses the eyes of its victims to see, lungs to breathe, and hearts to withstand bodily injuries; it dresses like a man to hide the fact that it isn't; and once it selects a target, it's compelled to continue pursuing them until forced back into hibernation. Salva only reveals as much about the Creeper as we need to know, building to a harrowing ending that subverts the expectation for both siblings to make it to sunrise. Only one Jenner is spared, while the other is subjected to a gruesome, prolonged death depicted in a series of agonized screams that reverberate through a boiler room and the visual aftermath of their hollowed-out corpse. Throughout the entire movie, Salva keeps the identity of the Creeper's true target unpredictable, drawing out the answer until the precise moment of truth.
The banter and bickering between the protagonists is authentic, playful, and good-natured, indicating a lifetime of history long before they began the ill-fated road trip that unfolds onscreen. To pass the time and refrain from killing each other before they make it home, Darry and Trish play a road game in which they decipher the pronunciations of the license plates in front of them, competing for who can get the most. You can sense that, growing up, they've played this game their whole lives during family road trips. They bicker over the rule that you have to call it when you see it. Darry accuses Trish of creating this rule on the spot to deprive him of a point; Trish claims this has been the rule forever. They're so competitive that they even turn their juvenile insults into a game: Mama's boy, Daddy's whore, dick-licker, ball-sniffer, ass-kisser, butt-picker. Trish excitedly points out that Darry loses because he used a variation of her word: ass and butt. They simultaneously repeat "uh-huh" and "nah-uh" until the other relents. "Nah-uh, infinity," says Darry. "Uh-huh, infinity squared," retorts Trish. She's always one-upping her little brother.
While dialogue of this petty nature has the potential to annoy, Salva writes it cleverly and carefully enough to immediately endear us to them. Darry and Trish feel like a flesh-and-blood pair of siblings who both love each other and can't wait to be free of each other. Salva uses humor to recuperate from moments of extreme tension; shortly after the Creeper first passes the Jenners, they return to their bantering and license-pate decoding. He also exhibits self-awareness in Trish's replies to Darry's lame-brained naivete and the Creeper's indestructibility: as Darry climbs into the pipe after hearing a man scream for help, Trish cautions, "You know the part in scary movies where somebody does something really stupid and everybody hates them for it? This is it!"; after Trish runs over the Creeper with her car, Darry asks if he's dead, to which she confidently replies, "They never are," before driving in reverse and running him over repeatedly. Salva doesn't aim for Scream-level meta humor, where the characters appear aware that they're in the midst of a horror film, but it makes sense that he reserves his few comments thereof for the character who's most intelligent, witty, and clear-thinking.
Salva executes a smart and flawlessly timed false scare in which Trish stands beside her car on the lookout for the trucker who attacked her and Darry. When she spots a truck driving down the street that resembles that of their attacker, Trish rushes into her car and desperately attempts to start the engine, but it doesn't budge. As the truck passes, she realizes it's a different one. Relieved, Trish rests against her driver-side window and exhales. After a moment of relaxation, Darry slams himself against the window, terrifying Trish into screaming a scream so authentic and spontaneous that it doesn't sound the least bit rehearsed. "Goddammit, Darry!" she screams. "You asshole!" But her righteous indignation is quickly superseded by concern as she discerns the trauma on Darry's face.
Justin Long brings much-needed credibility and sincerity to Darry's misguided decisions that effectively put him and Trish in the Creeper's crosshairs in the first place. When presented with the opportunity to drive into town to find a phone and call the police, Darry insists on driving back to the church before the Creeper returns to it. Right there, it would be easy to hate him and dismiss him as an idiot who deserves the ghastly fate that awaits him. "We were just attacked, Darry!" screams Trish. "And you don't even wanna find out why?" Darry asks. No! Who cares? However, as conveyed by Long's heartfelt delivery, Darry isn't seeking an exciting adventure or to "see if there's something nasty at the end of that pipe." He wants to see if the person who was dumped down the pipe is still alive and able to be rescued. "What if it was you down there?" he asks Trish. He's a goodhearted, caring kid, and while his act of attempted heroism only brings more havoc than it's worth, it's worth noting that in the real-life case of Dennis DePue, the Thornton siblings actually did return to the schoolhouse to investigate the killer's bloody blanket. And in their case, it paid off with the capture and death of DePue.
From an acting standpoint, neither Long nor Philips is gifted a whole lot more to do than give terrified reaction shots and hold them for prolonged moments at a time. Fortunately, Long and Philips are talented and committed enough to make banquets out of their limited directions. Long in particular does a masterful job at conveying petrifying fear in a series of sustained, slack-jawed facial expressions: his eyes widen, his mouth hangs open, his breathing grows labored, he stares thoughtfully at a series of missing person posters (one of which includes Salva), or gives the thousand-yard stare outside a passenger window. After emerging from the church's cellar, Long embodies the effects of shock, speaking in an anguished whisper, struggling to force out a reply. He explains his findings to Trooper Gideon in a frantic delivery, grabbing Gideon's wrist aggressively to simulate his own experience, his initial lightheartedness superseded by a growing frustration with the troopers' intimations of disbelief and a desperation to be believed.
By design, Philips plays Trish as the braver sibling. Her fearful expressions are more composed, less wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Ultimately, her lower-key approach proves the right choice because Darry is the one who the Creeper wants. His hunger is stronger for those who feel greater fear. Had Philips conveyed an identical level of fear to Long, the Creeper would've had to have eaten both of them. As the final girl, Philips is smart, courageous, sexy, sarcastic, and assertive.
In the usually thankless role of the convenient "resident psychic," Patricia Belcher is given a lot more to do than play the stereotypical exposition device. Without a backstory to play off of, Belcher manages to flesh out Jezelle Hartman into a sympathetic, tortured woman plagued by knowledge and horrifying premonitions that she neither wants in her head nor understands why she has them. Her mournful, tearful eyes convey that her uncanny ability to foresee the Creeper's actions is more of a curse than a gift, but she utilizes it anyway in a determined attempt to help the Jenner siblings alter their potentially irreversible destinies. Most of Jezelle's lines consist of exposition, but Belcher delivers them with conviction, distress, and fear for both herself and the Jenners. When asked if she knows who it wants, her hesitation and refusal to answer are heartbreaking.
To create mystery and suspense, cinematographer Don E. FauntLeRoy adopts Steven Spielberg's approach to depicting the great white shark in Jaws by withholding the appearance of the Creeper throughout the first half -- hiding his face behind the black-tinted driver-side window of his truck and introducing his physique in a wide shot from the perspective of the driver-side window of Trish's moving stick shift as he dumps a body wrapped and roped in a blood-stained sheet down the pipe behind the church. The only features that can initially be gleamed from the Creeper are a tattered black trench coat and black fedora. His face is silhouetted, but a mass of gray, straggly hair protrudes only from the back of his head, standing out from the featureless blackness of his front side.
In the daytime scenes, FauntLeRoy accentuates the scenic beauty of the countryside with wide shots of the baby blue sky and the vivid greens of the numerous trees and grass in the fields through which the Jenners travel. In the nighttime, FauntLeRoy films the Creeper from behind, his profile silhouetted against the blackness of night as he devours the tongue from the severed head of Trooper Robert Gideon (Jon Beshara). (In a visual note of gallows humor, this moment transpires with a billboard in the background promoting a meat market that reads, "Tastes so darn good!") While FauntLeRoy holds his camera on Darry and Trish in the foreground as the former panics over the sound of "Jeepers Creepers" on the car radio, the Creeper stands on the roof of their escorting troopers' cruiser in the background, shown through the rear window of Trish's stick shift.
There are two moments where FauntLeRoy's framing and Ed Marx's editing coalesce into heart-stopping suspense: in the first, a head has just been tossed onto Trish's windshield, forcing her to come to a screeching halt. The cruiser trailing her follows suit in front. While Darry waits in the car, Trish gets out and slowly approaches the cruiser, calling out to the troopers inside, who fail to issue a response. A POV shot slowly tracks forward to the driver-side door. Gray hair is visible in the front seat. Then, FauntLeRoy fast zooms onto the detached head of Trooper Gideon. The cruiser door swings open. Trish rushes back into her car. FauntLeRoy prefers glimpses of the Creeper over revealing his entire figure all at once: his clawed fingers, a pair of large bat-like wings that slowly nudge through his back and flap desperately (his most original and jaw-dropping feature); in the second, Eileen Brennan makes a memorable cameo as a crazy cat lady, and while she's guilty of nothing more than owning far too many fur babies, FauntLeRoy imbues her with a touch of menace by shrouding her in silhouettes to make us question her intentions. After the cat lady returns to her home to prevent the Creeper from hurting her cats, a moment of silence is obliterated by the sounds of gunshots, accompanied by flashes of light that penetrate the darkness. Editor Marx cuts between the expectant faces of Darry and Trish in the yard and a silhouette of Brennan behind her screen door, her body completely still. A knee-level shot shows her feet elevated in the air, carried forward by a pair of black boots.
At the 56-minute mark, a close-up of her face, gasping for air, is pushed aside for our first close-up of that of the Creeper. Although scarier in glimpses and silhouettes, the Creeper's appearance is sufficiently demonic and terrifying, if not particularly remarkable. Bearing a resemblance to the Wishmaster and a less visually creative Freddy Krueger, his skin is scaly and black, his teeth razor-sharp, displayed by a sadistic smile. The production designers transform the basement of the St. James Church into what Darry accurately describes as a "psycho version of the Sistine Chapel," decorated with an abundance of naked corpses sewn together by rope and suspended on the walls and ceiling. Their body parts have all been severed or eviscerated and stitched back together as souvenirs. FauntLeRoy uses light to illuminate his most grotesque visuals: a beam of fog shines straight down from the pipe above onto the floor below, illuminating the bodies that unknowingly surround Darry; the dot of a flashlight shines through the hole punctured in an officer's chest from behind. He uses close-ups to accentuate the petrified facial reactions of his characters.
To showcase the closing image that will sear itself permanently in the minds of all who witness it, FauntLeRoy pedestals his camera up from the waist of Darry's corpse (played by a plaster cast of Long's body) to four claw marks on the left side of his chest to two empty, bloody sockets where his eyes once were. He then zooms in slowly for a close-up of the right eye socket. The Creeper's eye rises from behind to fill the gap, staring menacingly into the camera. (Fun fact: Long plays the Creeper in this scene to imply that Darry's eyes have been appropriated by his murderer.) FauntLeRoy's only technique that doesn't work is his fast zooms to highlight visuals like Trooper Gideon's severed head in the street and Darry's laundry sprawled outside Trish's car; they call too much attention to themselves and reiterate that slower reveals are always scarier.
In portraying the carnage executed by the Creeper, Salva elects to go the restrained route, emphasizing suspense building and an inescapable miasma of doom over graphic depictions of gore. Most of the Creeper's victims have already been killed prior to the events of the story; for those killed during, Salva allows most of their deaths to transpire off-screen, either cutting away at the moment of impact, emphasizing their strained final breaths, or using the Creeper's body to block the sight of a mutilation. Trooper Natasha Weston (Avis-Marie Barnes) is violently pulled out of the passenger window of her cruiser. When the Creeper swings his battle axe down into the neck of Trooper Gideon, editor Marx cuts away to an interior shot of Darry and Trish arguing in her car ahead. The body of the young man (Chris Shepardson) dumped into the pipe is shown in his final moments after the fatal injuries have already been inflicted. His skin is moonlight pale, his lips blue, and his torso split open down the middle and stitched closed with rope. (Plot hole: he's able to coherently scream "Help" to get Darry's attention, then once Darry finds him, he lacks the ability to utter a single word.)
Bennett Salvay composes a score that's propulsive and energetic but generic and forgettable, occasionally sounding more in tune with an action film. Thankfully, Salva employs it sparingly to augment the nonstop tension of the Creeper's appearances, whether it's tailgating the Jenners on the road or chasing them along the walls throughout the police station.
When it comes to critiquing a film, the critic must always separate the artist from their art. In the case of Victor Salva, that truism proves a little more complicated. In 1988, he was convicted of sexual assault for molesting Nathan Forrest Winters, the 12-year-old star of Salva's feature-length directorial debut, Clownhouse, and brazenly videotaping an encounter in which he forced Winters to perform oral sex on him. Upon investigation, commercial videotapes and magazines containing child pornography were found in his home. He pleaded guilty to lewd and lascivious conduct, oral sex with a person under 14, and procuring a child for pornography, and was sentenced to three years in state prison, of which he somehow served only 15 months, and lifetime registration as a sex offender. In a documentary detailing the abuse he suffered by Salva, Winters revealed that it began when he was seven years old following a year of grooming.
On a personal human level, this makes Victor Salva every bit of a monster as the supernatural human-eating parasite he created onscreen. It's a wonder he was even licensed to make a movie following such a damning conviction, let alone gather such a talented cast and crew to help him bring it to life. In a mission statement that, in retrospect, holds an ironic undertone, Salva said that he wanted the Creeper to murder primarily male characters because he was "very tired of seeing women slaughtered and raped" in cinema. On its face, that sounds chivalrous and feminist; knowing what I learned yesterday in preparation for this review, I see a man who gets off on the victimization of young men. However, Salva's mentor, Francis Ford Coppola, reportedly assured him that his experience in prison "would have value" and "make [him] a better artist." Based on the briskly chilling script, Hitchcockian filmmaking, and masterful direction of performances across the board exhibited throughout Jeepers Creepers, I defy you to disagree with The Godfather.
7.1/10
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