It has been almost 10 years since Mark Duplass put on a monstrous smile in “Creep,” a found-footage horror movie about a serial killer named Josef who lures videographers to his home and slaughters them mercilessly on camera.
It’s a universe removed from his Emmy-nominated performance as the high-strung Chip in “The Morning Show” — but it’s a role he seems to relish. Following a “Creep” sequel from 2017, Josef is back again in Shudder’s “The Creep Tapes,” a TV rarity in that the entire series was done in the found-footage style. Not that Duplass knew that he was doing anything particularly new going in.
“If there’s anything fresh about what we’re doing it’s because there is an ignorance to the form,” he said in a recent video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “It didn’t strike me that it would be groundbreaking.”
Patrick Brice, who with Duplass created the series and wrote and starred in the original “Creep,” directed all six half-hour episodes of “The Creep Tapes.” (The first two episodes debuted on Shudder and AMC+ Nov. 15; new ones arrive on Fridays through Dec. 13.) In a separate interview, he said that he had drawn inspiration for the “Creep” franchise from Jim McBride’s proto-found-footage horror film, “David Holzman’s Diary” (1967), and from the 1980s anthology series “Tales From the Darkside.”
“The Creep Tapes” itself is based on an anthological concept: Every episode is purported to be footage from one of the many videotapes that Josef, as revealed in the first movie, has been amassing in his closet, each labeled with a victim’s name.
Basing the show on a depraved VHS library, Brice said, allowed him and Duplass to explore more “Creep” but “not have to fully commit to a third film.” But there was another benefit.
“I’m going to look smart,” Duplass said, “as if I had planted them there in order to make a TV show, which was 100 percent not the case.”
Duplass talked about the challenges of turning “Creep” into a half-hour series, and about the perils of being too polite. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Why did you decide to expand “Creep” into episodic television?
Pure creative willy-nilly and Machiavellian, exacting business acumen. We really struggled to come up with the movie that would be “Creep 3.” At the same time, I joined “The Morning Show,” which takes six months a year for me. The extra time Patrick and I used to have to be little idiots in the woods, finding the structure of a movie over the course of a year, which was the process for “Creep,” was not practical for us.
What’s different about building dread over 25 minutes versus 90?
I have some experience working in the TV space with “Room 104,” that show I did for HBO. I was able to see what the 22-to-25-minute banger, thrilling, horror, darkly comedic episode could be, although “Room 104” was genre agnostic.
But the traditional structure of a half-hour episode of television is unhelpful for “The Creep Tapes.” Normally you want lots of small scenes and to keep your pacing up. Part of what works well for “Creep Tapes” are these six- to eight-minute-long, deeply unsettling, rambling monologues, which have no place in 25-minute episodes. We had to learn how to embrace those and shrink some of the story lines down into simpler forms.
I wanted “The Creep Tapes” to feel, as crazy as it sounds, the way I felt with my family during the pandemic when we binge watched “Friends” and “Seinfeld.” There’s a cold open, and the credit sequence hits, and we just feel comfortable. This is going to be a comfort show, weirdly, for people who love this character. It’s the comfort of discomfort.
There’s a lot more comedy in the series than in the films.
We found that by incorporating more humor into it, people got way more relaxed. When it came time for the scares, they got got at a more intense level. The humor allows us to bring back the shock factor that we’ve lost by the fact that everybody already knows I’m a killer.
How improvised is it?
It’s at once the most improvised thing I’ve ever done and the most intensely scripted. We walk into the process usually with an outline that has all the beats of the story. Because we’re all living together at this cabin we’ve rented, sometimes in Crestline [in the San Bernardino Mountains, in California], sometimes in the woods east of San Diego. We’re writing it the night before and while we are shooting the scene. Because it’s found footage, there’s no coverage. You can’t just improvise and edit it down later. You have to pace it out perfectly. By the time the take is done, that’s actually the finishing of the writing.
How do you make it believable that anyone would stick around with a guy who’s obviously a weirdo?
I have stayed too long in one of these situations before. I believe people are good. I have a little bit of a hero complex, and I feel I might be able to be helpful. It can get me into trouble. I don’t find it unbelievable that these people would stay.
When I was, like, 23 I moved to New York. I needed a loft bed and found one on Craigslist. The guy said come over, I’ll have it disassembled for you. I came over with my van — I was a musician at the time — and he was in a very distraught emotional state, and the bed was not yet disassembled. His wife had just left him. I sat in this apartment with him and helped him disassemble it. I look back on that now and I’m like, I ignored so many warning signs. But I wanted to help him. I didn’t want to be rude and leave. All these polite society things kept me there.
There’s a homoerotic quality to how Josef interacts with men. He’s almost flirting to get them on his side, right?
Josef transcends classifications. It’s not that he’s bisexual or pansexual. He is deeply in love with connection. He’s the same with pets and maybe even inanimate objects in his kitchen. He loves “Forrest Gump.” He’s pure of heart and speaks his mind without any filters. When it doesn’t work out for him, he gets very upset.
“Creep” and “Creep 2” were on Netflix. Why the move to Shudder?
At the time, Netflix was the perfect fit. Back then, a lot of filmmakers didn’t want to be on Netflix because they wouldn’t get a theatrical release. But I thought, I am going to get a ton of eyeballs on it, and most importantly, Netflix really appreciates me. I felt like a big fish in a small sea. That’s no longer the case, and that’s OK.
We made “The Creep Tapes” independently. We took it around town, and some people passed, but a lot of people said, “We want to do this.” These bigger streamers, they’ll buy you, but if you don’t hit and give them billions of viewers in the first season, they’ll cancel you. I was very surprised that we ended up going with Shudder, but they make us feel like the “Morning Show” of Shudder.
Will there be more “Creep Tapes”?
We have a good idea of about eight that we really love. But I hope we get to make a season every year for the next 40 years.
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