Creep: Domestic Horror Hors Piste

The film Creep (2015) is very possibly the most subjectively frightening film I’ve seen in the last ten years. I had to run out of the room twice the first time I watched it.

But as I’ve rewatched it over the last decade, I’ve come to understand that it’s a goddamn masterpiece. Here’s why.

1.     It is an actual aria on low-budget, high-concept horror. It is rumored to have cost a meager $5,000 to make, total. There are two actors, total. No special effects or costuming of any kind, apart from a wolf-head mask. There is no sound design, like, at all: almost the entire film is shot in room-tone. The cinematography is as minimal as possible, being almost exclusively shot by a hand-held camera, held by one of the two characters. So the filmmakers gave themselves precious little material to work with, other than an outstanding script, an outstanding concept, and two outstanding actors. (Note to those of you who make horror films: courage.)

2.     It is one of the most powerfully intertextual horror films I’ve ever seen (highest billing goes to Jordan Peele’s Get Out!, about which more in a few weeks). Creep engages explicitly or implicitly with Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, Blair Witch, and the entire sub-genre of horror-in-the-woods films. It does all of that intertextual signaling subtly and gracefully.

3.     The most stunning instance of its intertextuality isn’t with a particular film, but rather with a particular fairy tale cycle: the tales of the Big, Bad Wolf who hunts down and murders little girls—think Red Riding hood. In doing so, the filmmakers capitalize on a central genetic lineage for early horror—the fairy tale—that most modern horror filmmakers steer clear of, perhaps because they’re not even aware of it. Put otherwise: children’s literature writers (the Brothers Grimm, for instance) were pioneers of the horror genre, and our deep-seated sensitization to the kinds of fear that fairy tales evoke and rely upon is electrically energized in this film.

4.     After Winter’s Bone (2010), which wasn’t billed as a horror film but should have been, Creep is the single most powerful work of feminist horror of the 2010s. I grant it that laurel despite (or, actually, because of) the fact that there are no female characters, apart from a very short phone conversation that one of the two main characters has with a woman’s voice at one point, relatively late in the film.

5.     It accomplishes its feminism not by overtly talking about feminist issues, but by placing its own male protagonist in the role of a woman. To be clear, it’s not a trans film or a film in which cross-dressing plays a role. It’s a film, instead, in which the male protagonist remains male, and yet simultaneously is locked into a kind of vulnerability almost always reserved for women, both in real life and in horror. Creep turns the character Aaron into the object of prey of a sociopathic stalker and murderer.

Creep opens with a videographer (Aaron) shooting an intro sequence while driving in a car up to a remote mountain cabin. The opening very strongly invokes the opening of The Shining, except that we are in the car with Aaron, rather than watching the car Jack Torrance is driving from above. It also strongly invokes Blair Witch, as Aaron narrates his process and his plan; he talks to the camera about how “we are leaving the flatlands and heading up towards the mountain top.” He goes on to reveal that he doesn’t know whom he’s meeting, but that he’s answering a personal ad for $1000 to do a day of film shooting. He notes that the ad had said, “discretion is appreciated,” which immediately imports the idea of sex work; Aaron recognizes that explicitly, saying, “So here’s a thought. What if this is just some 40-something, who’s sitting alone in her apartment, waiting for some young, handsome boy to come up the hill and give rubdowns, money, and whisper sweet nothings.”

You wish.

But of course, what’s interesting about this moment is the gender dynamic. If Aaron were a female character, he wouldn’t be thinking those things. He’d be packing a container of mace, or maybe wouldn’t be taking this particular gig in the first place. Instead, he imagines that this whole stupid f’ing enterprise he’s signed up for might end in a cougar tryst.  

Aaron arrives at the cabin, trudges breathlessly up the stairs—again, there’s no sound design per se here; we just hear Aaron breathing while he lugs the camera up the stairs with him. No one answers the door when he knocks, so he pans his camera around to find and then zoom in real close on an axe embedded in a tree trunk. This very loud point of tangency with The Shining isn’t lost on Aaron, who’s now starting to get a little antsy. He heads back to his car to take cover from the creepiness outside.

Suddenly, BANG: Joseph—the other main character—materializes outside Aaron’s car window with a loud thunk. Aaron jumps; we jump. There are introductions, and Joseph flatters Aaron by saying, “you have a nice, kind face.” This soothes Aaron. Joseph opens the car door, and Aaron’s camera captures Joseph’s wedding ring—so we’re feeling reassured by that, and so is Aaron. Surely a married man wouldn’t kill someone, right? Joseph is, like, a regular guy, with a social life and a family. Totally much less scary, and not at all likely to be an axe-wielding psychopath.

Tell that to Wendy and Danny Torrance in The Shining.

Up at the house, Joseph reveals that he’s a terminal cancer patient, and that he wants Aaron to document a day in his life for his unborn son, whom he refers to as “Buddy.” With this disclosure, Aaron is endeared to Joseph, his guard is let down. Joseph seizes that moment and grabs Aaron for a big bear hug. Joseph notes that, by the end of the day, it won’t at all be weird anymore that they hugged like that. He keeps on hugging Aaron.

Now, think about this dynamic if Aaron were female. We’d be freaking out; she’d be freaking out. Why? Because Joseph is using one of the oldest sex offender tricks in the book, which is to violate someone else’s physical boundaries in a relatively innocuous way—a hug—and to affirm, counter to that person’s resistance, that it’s normal. Aaron is being told to disregard his fight or flight reflexes, and to allow this total stranger to get into his personal space.

Joseph’s desire to violate Aaron’s boundaries gets turned up immediately thereafter, when Joseph says, “I’m going to go get in the tub.” He expects Aaron to come with him and film a full-grown, naked man in a bathtub. “We’re going to go a lot deeper places than this,” says Joseph. Again: Joseph is clearly grooming Aaron. He’s warning him about further boundary violations to come, but he does so in a normalizing way.

In the bath, Joseph plays a game in which he imagines that Buddy (his unborn son) is taking a “tubby” with him. “When I was your age, I used to take tubbies with my dad, and it was pretty much the greatest time of day.” As if that image weren’t creepy enough, Joseph proceeds to do the world’s creepiest pantomime, holding his imaginary child in his hands over the water. The pantomime is somewhat sexual, somewhat cannibalistic, and mostly just totally surreal.

Then Joseph starts talking about suicide and dunks himself in the tub. Aaron starts calling to him to emerge from the water. When Joseph does come up for air, he says, “Oh man, that was supposed to be a joke. I got a weird sense of humor, man. I’m sorry about that.” Classic gaslighting move: it’s easy to picture something similar going down between Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby. And, indeed, if you read through literature on domestic and intimate partner violence, you’ll find that suicide threats are a well-known and very powerful mode of controlling another person, because it’s hard to leave someone who seems bent on self-slaughter.

No one is thinking that Joseph is a normal guy anymore. Not even Aaron. And yet…he overwrites what he knows. He’s hooked in.

Joseph wants to take Aaron on a special hike, so he tells Aaron to go get a jacket from the hall closet. In the closet (camera still and always in-hand), Aaron is startled beyond belief by a huge, terrifying wolf mask. Hey there, Little Red Riding Hood: you sure are looking good. You’re everything that a big, bad wolf could want.

When he hears Aaron scream, Joseph explains that the mask is just “Peach Fuzz,” a mask his father gave him. Joseph sings a completely insane, nonsensical song about how Peach Fuzz is a good friend. To say that Peach Fuzz is a nice, friendly guy is absurd, because the mask looks like this:

Not your Mr. Rogers of wolves.

Now that his adrenaline is pumping ferociously, and he’s seriously doubting Joseph’s sanity, Aaron does the only logical next thing: he goes on a long solo hike into the woods with Joseph.

Way out into the woods, Joseph runs off for a second, only to run back and scare the shit out of Aaron. He says, “That’s what it feels like when you think you’re going to die. It’s incredible, isn’t it.” As they go deeper in, Joseph says, “There’s a little Peach Fuzz inside you yet.” It’s hard not to hear a sexual threat in that line. Later: “When you saw that axe outside of the house, was there a small part of you that thought I might kill you with it?” So, Joseph is systematically messing with Aaron’s sense of reality. He’s saying threatening things, interleaved with things designed to make Aaron feel stupid for having worried. He’s gaslighting him.

For anyone who’s ever been stalked, abused, gaslight, or otherwise tormented at close range, the film is getting actively uncomfortable now. And yet…Aaron stays put. It’s clear as day that Joseph is crazy: we know it; Aaron knows it. But Aaron doesn’t act on it. Why is that? Well, first, it’s because Joseph is acting straight out of the DV and coercive control toolbox with all the gaslighting and boundary-violations, but leavened with threats of self-harm and demonstrations of his own vulnerability and affection. But second, and this is important, Aaron doesn’t react because he’s a man, and he can’t quite accept the fact that he is being groomed by another man.

Night falls, and Aaron has a natural justification for leaving; he wants to drive down the mountain as carefully as possible. But Joseph convinces him to come in for “one drink”—the classic line of the sexual predator planning a date rape.  Right when Aaron finally, finally tries to leave, Joseph reveals that he lied about Peach Fuzz.

Uh-oh.

He tells a story about how he discovered that his wife had a bestiality fetish. As a punishment for what he saw as her sexual crimes, Joseph broke into the window of their own house with the wolf mask on his head, and he raped her: “Ravenous, animalistic sexual intercourse. I’d never seen her so happy…Aaron I raped my own wife.”

Big, screaming uh-oh.

Understandably, Aaron drugs Joseph with Benadryl, and uses Joseph’s phone to call who he thinks is Joseph’s wife. Turns out that it’s his sister, who anxiously tells Aaron that Joseph is not well, and that Aaron needs to get the fuck out of there. Finally scared into action, Aaron tries to escape. Just then, Joseph appears, now with the Peach Fuzz mask on, blocking the door. He rocks his hips sexually, side to side, and starts growling. (This, by the way, was the first scene in the film that made me run out of my living room.)

Aaron rushes the door, overpowers Joseph, and escapes. Phew.

Except…this isn’t a simple movie about a murder in the woods. It’s really about the psychology of stalker-murderers and their victims. Back at home, Aaron is being stalked now by Joseph. Aaron is plagued by strange, sexual nightmares about Joseph. A package arrives from Joseph, containing a video, a baby wolf stuffed animal, and a knife. The video, which Aaron watches, instructs him to cut open the baby wolf with the knife; he finds a heart locket with a picture of him and one of Joseph in it.

Eventually, Joseph invites Aaron to meet up with him at a lake. Unfathomably, Aaron goes. We watch him, from a camera he’s left rolling in his car, sitting on a bench, waiting for Joseph. We see Joseph sneak up behind him in a trench coat—a clear reference to the iconography of the sexual predator—and then slip on the Peach Fuzz mask, and reveal that he’s carrying an axe. This is all from a huge distance, via camera. Slowly, slowly, slowly, we watch him chop into Aaron’s head. (This was the second scene I ran out on.)

This could have been the end of the film. But there’s more in store.

The film of Aaron’s murder suddenly stops, and we realize it’s Joseph watching it, back home. Joseph says to the camera that he loves Aaron, and that Aaron will always be his “favorite.” He takes out the murder recording, labels it, and then puts the tape onto a shelf with dozens of other similarly labeled tapes. The labels in red are of women he’s killed; those in black are of men. Interestingly, there’s about a 50/50 balance, in terms of gender. But Aaron’s CD gets pride of place…

The final shots of Creep are of Joseph corralling another videographic mark. He will kill again. And indeed, there’s a kickass sequel, which I’ll talk about next week. But for the moment, let me return to my 4^th and 5^th points, above.

This is a feminist film of the highest order. Not because it’s “about” women; it’s actually really not. It’s about vulnerability to manipulation, coercion, gaslighting, and grooming. By centering its exploration of these dynamics not on a wraith-like little woman like Mia Farrow, but on a big, burly, bearded, hetero videographer, the film makes a really important intervention into the field of feminist horror.

What if, it’s asking. What if stalking were a social danger directed with equal frequency at men. It’s pretty fucking scary, isn’t it? Maybe this is something we should be thinking more about, eh? How stalkers work, and how their victims are gradually maneuvered into maximum danger?

It’s one thing to feel empathy for Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby, or for Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist. But it’s another thing altogether to be made to feel—through very stripped-down but effective jump scares—the actual physiology of personal danger. I don’t imagine that most men were physically crawling out of their skins in 1968, watching Rosemary’s Baby. But I am pretty doggone sure that most men watching Creep in 2015 were feeling eager to get home safely.

Look out, little boys and girls: the Big Bad Wolf is coming for you, and he doesn’t care who you are, or what you look like. All he cares about is the hunt.