The Fall and Rise of a Creeper

I’m never good at starting a discussion about the Jeepers Creepers franchise. There are so many ways to frame that particular conversation and, as someone who has all three movies in his collection, I’m probably having that conversation more than the global average.

Should I describe it as good, sometimes excellent, horror? That’s certainly true when it comes to some segments of the trilogy. Is it fair to fall back on that most helpful of clichés, “it’s so bad it’s good”? Because that could be the tagline for certain parts of the franchise. Can I, in all honesty, use the word “abomination”? Sometimes.

The release order doesn’t help. Jeepers Creepers hit the screens, fangs bared, in 2001. Three years later, Jeepers Creepers 2 showed the end of the Creeper’s vicennial spring break. There was then a fourteen-year hiatus, caused both by the uphill struggle of trying to get any damn thing done in the movie business and the attention drawn to the criminal past of director Victor Salva: a past that included the sexual abuse of a twelve-year-old boy. But clearly, destiny or some force equal to or greater than destiny really wanted a middling-at-best horror movie to receive an extremely limited release and then go directly to DVD and Blu-Ray in the year of 2017. Because Jeepers Creepers 3 exists.

And to address that point: yes. Watching a series of films about a creature that stalks and abducts teenagers (exclusively) so that it can abduct and consume them is an unsettling experience when you know that particular fact about the films’ creator. The fact that the third film contained the words ‘Can you blame him though? I mean look at her, the heart wants what it wants, am I right?’ when discussing a young victim of sexual abuse does nothing to moderate these concerns. At least The Usual Suspects doesn’t portray Verbal Kint limping over to the nearest underage extra, eyes dimmed with lust; a movie about a predator made by a predator just feels…

Well, I’d never not consider it a justifiable argument against watching the series.

Moving on to subjects it’s a lot easier to make callous jokes about, the film’s premise is one that you could generously call “intriguing”. In essence, a creature that may well be thousands of years old spends twenty-three days out of every twenty-three years awake, and in that time it dedicates itself to hunting down teenagers (and only teenagers) with the intention of consuming them and incorporating parts of their body into itself, a quality that is really making it difficult to move on from that last paragraph. The added wrinkle to this scenario is that the Creeper has quite a discerning palate: he’ll only eat people whose fear has an appealing scent, which is a quality that almost makes sense until you actually have to type it out like I just did. I’m not sure whether soiling oneself manages to add to or subtract from anyone’s particular “shit, this is terrifying” bouquet as not one of the three films makes even the most cursory examination of this subject. The Creeper is also immortal and can heal itself from damage, which it has to do by – you guessed it – taking a bite out of anyone that’s out there smellin’ like a snack, which is to say anyone whose fear has just the right nose and oaky undertones.

I’m going to address these films in the order in which their events chronologically happen as opposed to their release date, mostly because there are very few scenarios when a story really needs a prequel, and because there are none whatsoever in which such a thing as an “interquel” (which Jeepers Creepers 3 has the audacity to describe itself as) is necessary. Spoilers for all three follow, and I’d advise at least watching the first instalment before reading if you have any plans of watching it: it’s a lot better going into it blind.

Jeepers Creepers is, if looked at through the lens of horror cinema, the only entry which could honestly be called a success. A lot of it works really well: the film starts by establishing the dynamic between its two main characters: the brother and sister duo of Trish and Darry who enjoy immature arguments, long car rides through the wilderness, and accidentally stumbling into Lovecraftian nightmares. While that’s happening, you get a lengthy and extremely subtle view of the Creeper’s truck (the immortal, inhuman antagonist has a truck) gradually approaching: it’s so innocuous that upon first viewing it’s likely that you won’t even notice it until it’s inches from Trish and Darry’s car, at which point its already blaring its horn and trying to run them off the road. That’s what Jeepers Creepers does so well: its shifts of tone between existential dread, slow dawning horror, and unrelenting terror are as sudden as they are seamless. Even its false scares are beautifully effective. There’s a scene where Trish, acting as a lookout as part of her brother’s crazy scheme to get the pair of them killed and eaten, spots the Creeper’s truck approaching. There follows a frantic, fear-filled sequence of her trying to get away before – finally – it’s revealed that it was a different vehicle entirely. Just as both we and Trish are relaxing, yet dwelling on what would have happened if it had been the truck belonging to the murderous, corpse-collecting psychopath that’s still in the vicinity, Darry throws himself against the car window without a second’s warning, plunging us right back into terror again. In the space of a few minutes, we’re subjected to horror as Darry explores a basement that would make Norman Bates feel a little queasy, terror as Trish sees what we assume is the killer approaching, horror again as we reflect on what could have happened, and then right back to terror as Darry serves us with one of horror cinema’s few justifiable jump scares.

Jeepers Creepers, for the most part, doesn’t sleep on the fear factor, which is understandable considering what a central part of its mythos fear is. At certain points, it feels like the Creeper is deliberately victimising its quarry and its audience by subjecting them to scenario after scenario, most of which are surprisingly effective. From driving past as they finally reach a populated area (both shattering their illusion of safety and making them fear discovery of their trespass into its lair), breaking into their car and sniffing Darry’s underwear (the intrusion and underlying sexual menace add a new vulnerability to the protagonists), to killing their police escort and consuming their flesh in front of them (revealing slightly more of its inhuman nature), before finally revealing its true monstrous and winged form to them, the Creeper is playing a game, searching out the aromas of their fear like a winetaster. And this works so well for a horror movie because its method involves forcing them – and us – to endure different types of fear throughout the process. In its own way, Jeepers Creepers exploits the nature of its genre as effectively as Cabin in the Woods, although with the only the vaguest hints of dark comedy as any comfort.

And, in the end, the Creeper triumphs, finally getting its victims in its clutches, whatever damage they’ve managed to inflict on it already gone. The final horror of the film twists the knife by teasing out the answer to the question that’s been building since we first learned the nature of the Creeper itself: which character’s fear is more to its taste? Darry is, in the end, the unfortunate chosen one, possibly doomed by his greater knowledge of what the Creeper is capable of following his exploration of its inner sanctum. The last shot – the Creeper staring through Darry’s eyes (in two equally-disturbing ways) – permits the film one last scare as it knocks a hole through the fourth wall. We have, after all, been made to witness everything that Darry himself did, and the Creeper seems to be aware of it.

Jeepers Creepers 3 is a less-impressive entry in the same way that my obscene doodles of stick figures are less impressive than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Taking place following the climax of the first film (actually during that movie’s syuzhet), the title seems unable to make up its mind between showcasing the aftermath of a portion of mankind’s confrontation with the reality that monsters exist and we can’t fight them and exploring more of the Creeper’s nature and origins, so it settles for doing a slapdash job of both. In fact, the Creeper’s vehicle is a more compelling character than the monster itself; I think it actually has more screen time. It dominates the first fifteen minutes of the movie where, using its frankly absurd arsenal of boobytraps and safeguards (or should that be dangerguards?) to do a decent job of resisting arrest, or whatever it is that cops can do to vehicles. At several points, a harpoon literally shoots out of the exhaust pipe, I guess for when the Creeper decides to hunt for any particularly terrified whales: a movie that would be a great deal better than Jeepers Creepers 3, you may well think. For this first segment of the movie, I genuinely wondered whether this was supposed to be a weird and comedic take on the franchise: a risky move when a single entry into the series can be taken even slightly seriously. But no: apparently the armed, dangerous and quite possibly sentient truck is a very real part of the Jeepers Creepers canon.

It’s also the best part of the entire movie, the rest of which is tugged between three almost-separate plotlines: the Creeper casually slaughtering a group of rebellious teens (characterised almost entirely by their propensity for dirt bikes and hurling stones at abandoned vehicles), a tale of very apathetic attraction between a boy and a girl who mostly exchange long looks of bland indifference before the Creeper arrives to put an end to that nonsense, and a militia full of people that have encountered the Creeper before and have dedicated their lives to hunting it down and killing it. As this movie is a prequel to Jeepers Creepers 2, you can imagine how well that goes. What links all of these plots together, apart from the fact that the Creeper eventually shows up and murders with varying levels of discrimination, is the fact that not one of them ends up mattering. The dirt bike enthusiasts exist purely to get murdered as a reminder that the Creeper is still hanging around, while the boy and girl survive the Creeper in a series of events that could have easily had Yakety Sax playing in the background.

But special attention has to be given to the rough, tough, Gatling-gun-on-a-jeep monster hunters, whom I think it's fair to describe as the Jeepers Creepers 3 of heavily-armed militias. The bulk of their time is spent digging into the past of the Creeper, which can apparently pass its memories on through someone touching its amputated hand. I’d call it a deus ex machina plot device, but it doesn’t actually advance the plot in any way. Whatever secrets are revealed are kept from the audience, which manages to eradicate any potential point of the film being made in the first, and then the militia heads off to face the Creeper in a confrontation they’ve been waiting for twenty-three years for. And that might have been a fitting finale for the film, if not for the utter one-sidedness of what, if you were being kind, you could call a battle. The Creeper rips through them with the offhanded nature that I tend to employ while picking up a loaf of bread, and while I’m all in favour of the antagonist of a horror movie being made to look dangerous, it goes on to mean as little as anything else in the film does, considering that the Creeper goes on to take more of beating from his own sentient truck: the closest thing the film has to an MVP.

And that, sadly, is the truest description of Jeepers Creepers 3: nothing truly concrete can happen for fear of overwriting the events of its already-released sequel, but the film takes some real steps to avoid anything of consequence that it can accomplish. The main takeaway from the story is that the Creeper is now aware that some people know about his past and presumably his vulnerabilities, though the fact that he massacred around ninety per cent of them a few hours before seems to offer him little comfort.

But if Jeepers Creepers is good and Jeepers Creepers 3’s only saving grace is that none of its bland content matters, Jeepers Creepers 2 somehow manages to be the best and worst of the franchise in one glorious mix. While the first instalment slides smoothly through the different flavours of fear, Jeepers Creepers 2 lurches drunkenly from one distinct mood to another, staggering from comedy to horror to action with the all the grace of a three-legged elephant in the midst of a heroin binge. It’s difficult to get a handle on what we’re supposed to be feeling at any one time, which is a shame as this serves to undercut the film’s more competent moments.

It all starts promisingly enough with the abduction of a young boy from his family’s farm, with the familiar sense of dread pressing down for several minutes before the Creeper strikes. No slow ramp up this time, however; the Creeper shows just how terrifying a predator he is, grabbing his prey, evading pursuit, and flying off into the sunset in a matter of seconds. It’s the kind of sight that would sap all hope from you and a perfect tone to establish for this film.

We’re then introduced to the rest of the cast: a bus of high school basketball players and cheerleaders returning from winning state championships. If you ever watched One Tree Hill and thought “I wish that I could watch this shower get picked off by a cannibal monster”, then this film was made for you. There’s not a lot of sympathetic characters among them, which is good in terms of a portrayal of teenagers but not great when it comes to a horror movie. The set-up is accomplished competently enough, as the bus is disabled and anyone resembling a sensible adult is abducted from the sky like Batman’s expanded his war on crime to include basketball coaches and bus drivers, and the teens find them trapped inside the vehicle. The Creeper’s horror antics are reasonably effective as it openly picks out its intended victims, which is an interesting element to throw in there and one which, to the film’s credit, is built upon.

What slows the movie down from this point on, however, is the fact that the Creeper can’t always be in the limelight, so there are long stretches where the characters are left to engage in conversation and ponder their fates, which draws your attention to the fact that you have no reason to care whether any of them are eaten or not. What makes this problem even worse is the fact that this is also the stage that the writers and director make their film a vehicle to confront racism. And don’t get me wrong: horror cinema has a long and often successful history of allegory and political symbolism stretching back to its beginnings. But even with that in mind, I cannot comprehend why the people behind Jeepers Creepers 2 felt that this cinematic endeavour was the perfect means by which to confront a real big-boy topic. Between clumsily trying to equate racism with the divide between the to-be-eatens and the ones with presumably gross fear-smell (“There are two classes of people on this bus!”), and by straight-up making one of the characters a racist (“Maybe I’ve got the wrong skin colour to play on this team”), you’re once again left with the feeling that this was intended more in the spirit of comedy than a real attempt to confront an issue that really matters. It’s laughable enough that racism actually feels like the more adult position, which is probably the single scariest thing about Jeepers Creepers 2.

So, with the bus about as whiny and melodramatic as your average bus full of high school students, and with a cannibal monster that’s putting in so few appearances you’d swear that he’s having to sneak out of the office every time he fancies a nibble of a terrified teen, it’s a real relief when the Creeper, having suffered one hilarious injury too many, finally snaps, rips apart the bus and starts hunting kids like Jeffrey Epstein’s sat the entire team down and given them that speech from Glengarry Glen Ross. The damage has been done, both to the Creeper itself and its aura of invincibility but at least the winged nightmare is getting serious, and we’re back to the system that worked in the original: resistance is useless against this horrifying predator. But this movie’s got a curveball that the original didn’t, and for all the ridiculousness of it, it’s probably the best thing about the entire franchise.

That curveball is Farmer McDeadson, whose approach to his son’s death and his brush with the inhuman is to strap a literal harpoon gun onto his truck and blast right through denial, anger, and bargaining all the way through to the “Captain Ahab” stage of grief. This enraged, heavily-stubbled madman lurches into the film with no other warning than is provided than sporadic scenes of him angrily whacking pieces of metal with other pieces of metal like STOMP is branching out into funeral music, shattering any of the remaining horror that the film has managed to cobble together. He enters the drama by shooting the Creeper through the chest with a harpoon made from its own weapons, after which he shoots it in the chest with another harpoon, then fires another harpoon into its brain. I realise that this is a fairly colourless description, but there’s not a single way I could encapsulate the absurd energy of those final fifteen minutes in which horror is completely replaced by a balls-to-the-wall revenge movie.

And, honestly, it’s the right call. Jeepers Creepers 2 couldn’t survive on its horror; the rest of the film is proof enough of that. By the time the movie throws up its hands and says “fuck it: bring on the mourning farmer with his fucking homemade harpoon gun”, it’s the change of pace that’s sorely needed. And, honestly, give me another horror movie that ends with the parents of the victim of the prologue-murder hurling themselves into a vengeance-fuelled hunt of the film’s monster. Even if our harpoon-wielding farmer doesn’t actually kill the Creeper (it turns out that the twenty-three-day deadline doesn’t much care if you’re in the middle of getting worked over by some grizzled agriculturalist), he’s the most memorable part of the entire story. Jeepers Creepers 2 would be a mostly unmemorable entry into the annals of horror cinema if it wasn’t for its underlying story of a man who decides not to take any shit from dread terrors of the night, gets together a collection of pointed sticks, and rides off to start shooting at any demons that he happens to spot. It’s what you’d get if you crossed the Rocky series with the Necronomicon.

In terms of what we can learn from the Jeepers Creepers series, I’d like to see that there are a few lessons buried in the general craziness. The first film, at least, shows us the value of switching gears while remaining within horror, which as I’ve already mentioned the film does extremely well. The third entry is a reminder to, in the words of Ron Swanson, whole-ass one thing rather than half-ass two; there were a lot of things that went wrong in that movie, but trying to accomplish at least two distinct objectives was the first wrong step. As for Jeepers Creepers 2, I guess the lesson is that it’s better to be remembered for doing something that’s out-of-left-field crazy rather than being forgotten as something generic and clumsy.

Also, if you’re hunting monsters, bring along a harpoon gun, because that thing will fuck them up.