Creep’s Mark Duplass has a plan for exploitation-free nudity in horror films
This report comes from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas.
Audiences at Austin’s annual genre festival Fantastic Fest were entertained on September 25 during a preview screening of The Creep TapesShudder’s upcoming horror series about a serial killer who tricks people into recording their own murders. Indie filmmaker and horror enthusiast Mark Duplass, who stars in the series and the two films that started the franchise, shows a lot of skin throughout the three episodes shown at the festival, including both a lingering, loving, slowly zoomed-in shot of his bare butt and full frontal nudity. During a post-screening Q&A with Duplass and longtime producing partner Patrick Brice, the focus on Duplass’ body led an audience member to ask if Duplass demanded to appear nude on the show.
“Do I insist on nudity?” Duplass laughed. “Okay, so I have very strong opinions about male nudity, and about male nudity in horror films, and that’s an hour and a half conversation, but I feel like that’s not the kind of nudity you want to see. Oh my God, everyone 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 No one wants to see this person, and they’re going to do it anyway. That way there is no exploitation, except Patrick, who I can exploit completely at my leisure.”
“The only question was: which parts can we show that are new?” Brice added.
“I mean, I’m fine with it,” Duplass said, especially about the full-frontal view, “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 all shared something here.”
The Creep Tapes premiered at one of Fantastic Fest’s secret screenings, where audiences sit down for a screening of an upcoming film or TV series without knowing what they’re about to see. The series was the fifth secret screening at the 2024 Fantastic Fest, following screenings of Jason Reitman’s comedy Saturday eveningAli Abbasi’s biopic about Donald Trump The studentScott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Hugh Grant, starring in a religious escape room drama Hereticand Michael Gracey’s radical Robbie Williams biopic experiment Better person.
The Creep franchise centers on a serial killer with an ever-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 film. The films and show are shot in Found Footage style, where an on-screen character wields a diegetic camera. The series reveals more about Peachfuzz’s background and finds him new victims to torment.
“Crawl was the first film I made in film school,” Brice said during the Q&A. “I thought no one would ever watch it. It was so great to have this to go back to because it really feels like we’re going back to little kids making movies. This was the same freedom I had with my friends when I took my mother’s High-8 camera and made films with it.”
Duplass agreed: “This is what (Mark’s brother and film partner Jay Duplass) and I were doing in the suburbs of New Orleans. Now I can just do it with gray hair. It’s fucking amazing.”
When asked why they returned to the Creep franchise, Duplass joked that it’s because the 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 is nuanced dramas where I make sure I don’t push too hard, and make sure it’s believable and natural. And this is just Take everything off and do what we want to do. It’s so liberating. (…) I’m going to do a show like The Morning Show that has a crew of 300 people, and everything is so measured. And I love that world, I appreciate it so much. But (The Creep Tapes) is never more than five or six people on set, and we stay in these houses where we film, and we film 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 for the other things I do.”
Season 1 of The Creep Tapes debuts on Shudder and AMC+ on November 15. The first two episodes of the six-episode season will release simultaneously, with subsequent episodes premiering weekly. Crawl And Creep 2 are streaming on Netflix and available for digital rental on Amazon Video, Apple TVand similar services.