Mark Duplass has been a pivotal figure in low-budget independent cinema, particularly the mumblecore movement that came out of the 2000s. It’s been fascinating to watch Duplass’ interests as a filmmaker and producer evolve over the past two decades. 2014’s Creep saw Duplass and Patrick Brice combine their talents to craft a formative found footage serial killer character study.
Creep got under the audience’s skin in the best way possible, and Creep 2 managed to generate even greater acclaim and enthusiasm with a more subversive story. It’s been extremely satisfying to watch Creep confidently transform into an anthology horror series that distills “Josef’s” murders down to concise, economical horror stories.
The Creep Tapes is the ideal outlet for Duplass and Brice’s duplicitous killer that doubles as an entertaining opportunity to deconstruct the found footage genre. Now entering its third season, the series tackles some of its biggest and most personal stories yet.
To celebrate the latest installment in the growing Creep franchise, Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice discuss the selection process for the season’s stories, finding new ways to raise the stakes and expand the universe’s scope, and figuring out their killer’s psychology and whether they know where his story ends.
BLOODY DISGUSTING: What I love so much about this series is that all these episodes find different ways to deconstruct the found footage genre. This season features such an assortment of stories. What’s your process for planning out seasons and deciding on the final lot of six episodes?
PATRICK BRICE: Well, we have a running document of ideas for this show that is just pages-and-pages-long at this point. So part of the process involves going to that and seeing what could work and makes sense for the season. But a lot of the time it’s just instinctual. It’s us either saying, “This is an idea that could work for this season. Let’s go for it!” or it comes from a guest star that we thought would be amazing and figuring out how to tailor the idea to them.
MARK DUPLASS: Yeah, I think our best episodes happen with like a text at like 11:47 PM from Patrick or myself that says something like, “CUDDLE PARTY,” and that’ll be it. Then there will be an “!” And then there will be a “Yes.” We’ll get on the phone the next day and hash it out and talk it through. The document that Patrick is talking about is also very fun because some of those things are fully fleshed-out episodes and some of them are just small germs of ideas. You know, sometimes we’ll go on set with full scripts, and sometimes we’ll have as little as a page to work with. Every episode has its own DNA.
I love that and how ideas can actively evolve while you’re shooting. The show has such a raw feeling to it that conveys that energy.
MD: Yeah, the idea is that rather than doing a full shoot where we shoot all six episodes in a row, we sort of shoot an episode anytime that we get three or four days free in our schedules. Sometimes we’ll build it around a weekend if we’re working on other projects. It helps you bring this fresh energy to it. So the season takes place over the course of a year, which also allows me to have different looks and things like that. We find that there’s something about — I guess what they call “The Beginner’s Mind” — by just hopping into all this. We’re always a little cold on the first day, and we’re still trying to find it. I’ll start acting, and Patrick will be like, “That’s not him.” It takes a minute to get back into it. But achieving that state of childlike creativity with it and a beginner’s mind is very much a part of the process.
This season’s “Anisha” episode is set on a plane and builds to such a huge climax that almost feels impossible for such a small, intimate franchise like this. Can you talk a little about approaching that sequence, bringing it to life, and if you’re looking to push some of these stories to even bigger places?
PB: That came as a result of us saying, “How can we make this feel bigger than it’s ever been?” The concept for that one was sort of born out of doing something that we’ve never done before. It seems kind of scary, and we might not entirely know what we’re doing, but we’re going to figure it out on the day of the shoot. Then something like that is especially nuts when considering the shooting method that Mark’s talking about. It’s much harder to approach things with a Beginner’s Mind when you’re dealing with major stunt work and higher concept ideas. That was one of the most fun experiences I had filming this season just because we were so out of our depth and so out of our element, but still able to apply this shorthand that we’ve learned over the years from shooting this show and getting this franchise.
MD: A lot of the creativity from the show comes out of the function of shooting it on a lower budget. Years ago, when we were making this small independent film — The Do-Deca-Pentathlon — we wanted to get a shot of somebody on a plane. I called one of those stages in Burbank that has all these old, grounded planes. They pull out different sides of them so you can shoot in it. I was like, “It’s going to be ridiculous how expensive this is,” but then they told me the cost, and it was really cheap. As we were talking about expanding the show’s scope, I mentioned that I think it should be doable to get a private plane as long as we can shoot the episode in like two days.
The Creep Tapes episodes that dig into the killer’s family and backstory are always some of the most fascinating. This season looks at his teen years and one of his first kills. Can you talk a little bit about pulling the veil back with this character, how much you want to keep a secret, and how much of this backstory was already known?
MD: That’s a good question. I mean, we really love how much audiences are enjoying the teasing of his backstory. That wasn’t initially part of our master plan. When we did the first episode with his “Mother,” people really responded to that. So we thought that it would be fun to do one episode each season that has a little bit of lore. I think that the fun of playing with a character like this is that we decided very early on that almost nothing he says is factual, but everything is true. So even if the skin and the details of what he’s talking about don’t necessarily make sense or add up — emotionally — everything you hear from him and feel from him is very, very true and honest.
So, this season we thought it’d be really fun to do something on a VHS camera, similar to the one that my brother and I had growing up. I loved that camera because it was the first camera that shot on VHSC, the compact one, and you could do two separate audio tracks and put music on it. It was like its own little filmmaking machine. That got into my hands when I was about 16, so I thought it would be really funny to consider what our lead character would do with this camera if he had it. Immediately, we were like, “What if he made something like Blair Witch before Blair Witch?” The false mythology that he had gotten there first felt very funny to us.
Were you actually able to shoot it on older tech?
MD: So we tried using the older tech and the problem with that is—
PB: It was unreliable.
MD: It’s very cold where we’re shooting too, which can be a problem for the camera. We have used the same camera for almost everything we’ve done on the show, other than some of the more omniscient perspective things and the iPhone one in New York. It’s kind of been our talisman. It’s like our lucky camera. We’ve spent more money fixing that than if we had bought a new one, but he’s our little buddy. So we used that camera and then treated the footage afterwards.
This season’s “Nobody” episode is one of my favorites from the series, and it feels like it’s a bit of a sequel to the first season’s “Brandt” episode, which is also largely this solo performance piece.
MD: You get us, yes! You see us!
Was that episode particularly challenging to figure out? You do such a great job whenever these two sides of the killer and Peachfuzz are in conversation with each other.
MD: Yeah, that one felt harder to get right. I felt like we were talking a lot between takes.
PB: Oh, absolutely. I mean, we were setting ourselves up for this, but it entirely relied on Mark’s shoulders. It’s all his performance and the sort of the dance of it. That was one where, in the opening sequence, we had to really get the timing right. There were a lot of longer takes and sort of fewer cuts because it was just Mark and nobody else.
MD: But we got to use your voice again! One of my favorite things is when Patrick comes in to play Peachfuzz. Also, our third brother in this, Chris Donlon, is executive producer and editor with us every step of the way. He was also able to play the body in the grave. There’s some excellent musical timing that you’ll see in the episode. It’s really fun when we get up there, and that one was just the four of us putting it all together. I think sometimes it brings out the best in us when we’re all a little afraid and a little nervous. “Is this going to work?” We have those down moments, too. “Why did we try to do this?” But sometimes the best stuff comes out of that.
Creep works so well as an anthology TV series, but does that make it any more of a challenge to find your way back to it as a film franchise? Is Creep 3 still of any interest or seem like an appropriate way to conclude the series?
PB: I mean, we never want it to end. I think it will end in our actual deaths. Creep 3 is definitely something we still talk about. I feel like making the show just invigorates me to come up with ideas for what would make sense for a Creep 3. The show is almost like our sketchbook, in a lot of ways. We’re trying to play with different ideas that maybe could be smaller, that then maybe push us to what the bigger story would be if we were to make another movie after that.
MD: Yeah, it took us quite a few years between Creep and Creep 2 to figure out that idea and get it right. I think it’s taking us that much more time between Creep 2 and Creep 3 because it’s so important to us. We’re just so appreciative of the fans, who reflect to us that there’s integrity in the way that these stories are told. They feel that from us, so we don’t want to feed them anything less than an A+ breakfast burrito. When it comes to Creep 3, frankly, we just haven’t come up with it yet. When we do, we’ll bring it forward, and hopefully there will be a Creep 4 and a Creep 5 — there’s got to be a movie that’s just called Peachfuzz. We’re working on it, with the only limit being our own creative ability.
The Creep Tapes Season 3 premieres September 15th on Shudder, with back-to-back episodes airing weekly.
