‘The Creep Tapes’ Creators Mark Duplass & Patrick Brice Discuss the Found Footage Franchise’s Trajectory [Interview]

Peachfuzz is back in The Creep Tapes. Writer-actor Mark Duplass and writer-director Patrick Brice chatted with Bloody Disgusting about the unlikely found footage franchise’s trajectory from Creep to the new series.

“It’s really kind of a special one for me,” says Duplass. “I always hear this fun lore about, like, bands who just started jamming together casually and then it turned into this amazing thing, or like Mike Leigh will be talking with his friends and then all of a sudden this movie comes out of it.

“My art always felt very painstaking and structured how it was made. But Creep was the only project that just kind of fell out of our pockets,” he explains.

“Patrick and I were talking in my kitchen. We were just friends, and he was fresh out of film school, and I wanted to do something really small and and different from some of the studio stuff I had been doing at the time. We started talking about uncomfortable encounters with human beings that we both just love, that sense of ‘This is probably okay. But is this gonna go bad? I don’t know what’s gonna happen here.’

“So we took a couple of pages of an outline, and we went to my cabin in Crestline, which is about an hour and a half outside of Los Angeles, for five or six days, just the two of us. We just started shooting this found footage stuff, and it was a mess, but there was some really fun stuff in there.

“Our friends were watching cuts of it and encouraging us to take it into a much darker direction, which Patrick and I were not quite prepared for, because we weren’t really genre filmmakers by any means. But we listened to them, because we felt like they knew better than us. Then we, literally over the course of a year, kept refining and reshooting. That was the process of Creep.”

“It was a great melding of the minds,” Brice adds. “Because I think Mark and I were both coming from different directions, but we definitely shared a lot of sensibility; shared sense of humor and this empathy for odd characters. The movie sort of became this horror movie about empathy at the end of the day. That was really, really fun to be able to discover.

“For me, I had just come out of film school, and my background was in documentary. I’d never made a narrative film before, so my first narrative film to essentially feel like an experimental film was a delight. It was just a very comfortable, exciting way to make it. We didn’t know what rules we were breaking when we were breaking them.”

Creep was initially met with skepticism, as the found footage bubble ushered in by Paranormal Activity had all but burst by 2014.

“When we told people we’re making found footage, they were like, ‘Ugh, why would you do that?'” recalls Duplass. “Our take was, as naive as it sounds, it’s just a form. A form is agnostic. There’s nothing good or bad about a form; it’s what you do with it. And the form allowed us to be very scrappy and childlike, obviously because it’s so cheap to make.

“To me, the form facilitated this return to being a 12-year-old kid running around the woods with your friends, making things off the cuff and giggling to yourself and watching it back on a 3-inch monitor — all those things that can get squeezed out of you in the process of becoming a quote-unquote professional filmmaker. I was really excited that the form was going to facilitate that stuff.”

It was none other Jason Blum who saw the potential in Creep, just as he had done with Paranormal Activity years earlier.

“I was a little nervous that people would be exhausted by found footage for sure,” Duplass remembers. “When we showed a first cut to Jason Blum, he was like, ‘I’ve seen every shitty found footage movie you could possibly imagine, and you’ve done something new and fresh with this somehow.’ I think it was precisely because we’re not genre filmmakers. We brought this sense of sweetness and love and heart to this protagonist.”

The first film nearly received a wide theatrical release before ultimately being released to VOD.

“There was a moment where this was going to be a wide release Universal/Blumhouse movie,” Duplass reveals. “And then we tested it for audiences and realized, as is perfectly the case, about 75% of the audience in that theater was like, ‘What the fuck did I just watch?’ And then 25% of the audience was like, ‘This is my favorite movie.’ We’re going to be a niche, and that’s okay.”

Niche though it may be, Creep was easily accessible to its audience via a global release on Netflix in July 2015. A franchise was born with the release of Creep 2 in 2017. With busy careers, the filmmakers ultimately decided to make the third installment a series rather than a feature.

“We came up with lots of different ideas for a potential Creep 3 movie,” Duplass says. “I think we were feeling a little bit of the pressure. Could we deliver on something that’s so beloved? We don’t want to make another movie just to make money or a paycheck. It should be really good.

“A lot of the ideas we fell in love with, but we kept feeling like we might be stretching these to make the feature-length form. Then at some point it just kind of popped in organically that not only creatively but pragmatically, a series was going to be perfect for us, because Patrick’s career really took off, and I was really busy doing things.”

Duplass continues, “Getting a month to go away and shoot a movie was difficult, but grabbing four or five days every now and then to go out and shoot an episode — because we cobbled this together over the course of a year. Whenever we had, like, a free long weekend, we’d put together an outline and go make an episode. It really suited our lifestyles.

“Once we made the first one and we realized how freeing it could be to only have to work with the 30-minute format, it actually allowed us to be that much weirder and strange, which we felt like audiences deserved at this point if we were going to return.”

The Peachfuzz mask “will definitely be back” in The Creep Tapes, but don’t expect any insight into its origin — at least not yet.

“Its origin is something that we like to keep shrouded in mystery, because it’s very important for us. Like all good mythological tales, we hope to tell the origin story one day in 2050, 2055,” Duplass chuckles.

“I don’t really remember how or when [Peachfuzz] became such an integral part of the story. It felt like it was just going to be this little side piece at first.”

“Just like with every time we go into making one of these movies, we’ll have these little sparks and little ideas of information,” Brice says. “What’s so cool about these movies and the form and is how it allows for not just improvisation when it comes to dialogue, but improvisation when it comes to theme and plot points.

“I remember the first day like we were talking about ideas for titles for the first film. This was after we’d sort of come up with the concept, and I remember Mark calling me and saying, ‘I don’t know why, but I think we should call this movie Peachfuzz.’ It’s one of those things.”

Brice continues, “So the movie was called Peachfuzz for the longest time, named after this character — I hesitate to say alter ego, because it might be all he is. I don’t know. It was called Peachfuzz until Jason Blum so eloquently told us, ‘There’s no way in hell your movie is going to be called Peachfuzz. Let’s think of a different title.’ And we came up with Creep.”

The Creep series is a psychological character study as much as it is a horror franchise, with Duplass delving into the mind of the elusive serial killer.

“I don’t want to get too reductive about it, but I can definitely connect to the people pleaser inside of myself and amplify that,” Duplass points out. “I can definitely connect to the person who’s learned how to maneuver in this industry by being slightly different in whatever room you need to be in order to win favor with people, which we all do, and then I amplify that.

“A lot of this is taking things that I know and understand about myself, or that I see in Patrick or in some of my favorite characters that I’ve loved, and just cranking them up to 100. It’s really fun.”

The filmmakers have found that viewers connect with Peachfuzz in an unexpected ways, as demonstrated at The Creep Tapes‘ recent premiere.

Duplass says, “We had our premiere at Vidiots recently, and it was the strangest feeling to watch the audience respond and talk to them afterwards. It was like they got their favorite Nicholas Sparks movie shown to them again. They were like, ‘I needed it so bad! My heart needed it. I missed Peachfuzz so much!’ We’re just like, ‘Great! What’s wrong with you?'” he laughs.

If there’s something wrong with you, you can watch the first two episodes of The Creep Tapes on Shudder and AMC+ now, with a new episode releasing every Friday through December 13.

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