This report is from Fantastic Fest 2024, the annual genre film festival in Austin, Texas.
Audiences at Austin’s annual genre festival Fantastic Fest were treated to a Sept. 25 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 fan Mark Duplass, who stars in the series and the two films that started the franchise, shows plenty of skin, including a lingering, loving one, in the three episodes screened at the festival , slowly zooming in shot of his bare butt and his nudity from the front. During a post-screening question-and-answer session with Duplass and his longtime producing partner Patrick Brice, the focus on Duplass’s body prompted an audience member to ask whether Duplass demanded to appear nude on the show.
“Do I insist on nudity?” Duplass laughed. “Okay, I have very strong opinions about male nudity and about male nudity in horror films, and this is 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? This is the worst kind of nudity there can be. The best kind of nudity is Nobody wants to see this person and they will do it anyway. This way there is no exploitation – except for Patrick, who I am perfectly happy to exploit.”
“The only question was, what parts can we show that are new?” Brice added.
“I mean, I’m okay with that,” Duplass said of the full-front image in particular, “because most people [will be] I’m 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 during one of Fantastic Fest’s secret screenings, where audiences sit down for the screening of an upcoming film or television series without knowing what they will see. The series was the fifth secret screening at Fantastic Fest 2024, following screenings of Jason Reitman’s comedy Saturday eveningAli Abbas Donald Trump biography The apprenticeScott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Hugh Grant star in religious escape room drama Hereticand Michael Gracey’s radical Robbie Williams biopic experiment Better man.
The Creep franchise focuses on a serial killer with an ever-changing name (Duplass) and a complicated relationship with a shaggy, snarling werewolf mask known to the fan base as Peachfuzz for reasons revealed in the first film. The films and show are shot in a found footage style, with an on-screen character operating a diegetic camera. The series reveals more about Peachfuzz’s background and finds new victims for him to torment.
“Creep was the first film I made outside of film studies,” Brice said during the question and answer session. “I thought no one would ever see it. It was so great to come back because it really feels like we’re little kids making films again. It 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: “That’s something [Mark’s brother and filmmaking partner Jay Duplass] and I were traveling in a suburb of New Orleans. Now I can just do it with gray hair. It’s fucking awesome.”
When asked why they returned to the Creep franchise, Duplass joked that it was because it was uplifting to see his serial killer protagonist on screen: “I mean, he’s such a good guy. The world needs more heroes,” he laughed.
“This is a very liberating role for me for a number of reasons,” Duplass said. “A lot of the work I’ve done before is nuanced drama, where I’m careful not to push it too hard and make sure it comes across as believable and natural. And that is fair Take it all off and do whatever we want. It’s so liberating. […] I’ll go and do a show like that The Morning Show It has a crew of 300 people and everything is sized like that. And I love this world, I really appreciate it. But [The Creep Tapes] There are never more than five or six people on set, and we stay in the houses where we shoot, and we shoot in sequence, and we make up new scenes in the evenings and eat our meals together. The magic of it is just very important to the other things I do.”
Season 1 of The Creep Tapes debuts November 15th on Shudder and AMC+. The first two episodes of the six-part season will be released simultaneously, with subsequent episodes premiering weekly. Creep And Creep 2 are streamed on Netflix and can be rented digitally Amazon Video, Apple TVand similar services.
