Horror Aughts: ‘Jeepers Creepers’ Aka the Campy Teen Horror Relic of the Early 2000s
Victor Salva’s darkly humorous classic is better than I ever gave it credit for
‘Horror Aughts’ is a column in which I revisit scary movies from the 2000s that were big commercial hits at the time but have been largely forgotten ever since.
I always had a problem with Jeepers Creepers. I’ve only seen it once, sometime in the mid-aughts, and it stayed with me as an “all bark, no bite” teen horror — a mild but memorable disappointment. Being 14-15 at the time, I had no concept of what low-budget horror really meant, or that building suspense and creating an eerie atmosphere with unique production design were more vital in making or breaking a scary movie than simple tools like jump scares and gore.
Having already seen trendsetting torture-porn milestones like the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Saw and nerve-wracking PG-13 masterpieces like The Ring and The Others, JC was too tame and basic to truly shock me back then. But I’m here to admit that I was wrong. For what it wanted to be at the time, Victor Salva's cult flick accomplished most of its goals — even if I thought it was an overrated teen horror until now. I’ll tell you why it’s not.
Despite working on a relatively low $10 million budget, with a group of actors who were nowhere near A-list stars (JC has basically kickstarted Justin Long’s career), Salva was uncharacteristically ambitious for a 43-year-old filmmaker. This might've had something to do with his personal life, doing prison time in his 30s, but we’ll come back to that later. At that point in the director’s career, he’d made four features (none particularly outstanding but two commercial successes), and only two of them were horrors. His track record didn't indicate he was going to burst onto the teen horror landscape with something like Jeepers Creepers, but he clearly knew what he was doing.
Everything in how the movie's plot unfolds suggests that Salva had a rock-solid plan to execute, aware of the limitations he had to overcome (using minimal CGI and a ton of practical effects) while working on a tight budget. In essence, JC runs on well-placed teen horror signposts, using traditional clichés to smoothly push the protagonists in the direction they’re supposed to go.
We follow Darry (Long) and Trish (Gina Philips), two obnoxious and bickering siblings, on a road trip together in a battered Chevy Impala when a menacing pick-up truck nearly runs them off the road. They freak out, naturally, but when they later see the truck’s creepy driver unloading what looks like dead bodies wrapped in sheets into a metal pipe leading underground, their curiosity gets the better of them. They have to check out what the deal is with that pipe.
Now, this is where most people shit on JC, saying that no person in real life (and in their right mind) would ever do that, which I completely agree with. It’s a dumb move, but I believe Salva did that intentionally, using the characters’ stupidity as a core element often seen in most teen horrors. It's no coincidence the genre is generally looked down upon and criticized heavily. Yet looking back now and considering what comes after the pipe fiasco, I think the film’s dumbness has become part of its charm. From that scene on, it’s evident that Salva's script has no intention to be smart or realistic. He’s deliberately aiming to play into all the nonsensical behavior. It's all camp, baby. Strap in and enjoy the ride.
I mean, if you’re a horror lover (and a Millennial), you’re pretty much aware that JC doesn’t really want to frighten or disturb as much as deliver D-U-M-B fun to entertain through a familiar set of horror tropes. Darry and Trish do check out the pipe, manage to fall into it, and discover a cave plastered with manually sewn-together corpses. We know, it’s only a matter of time until the Big Bad Creeper comes after them and an old psychic lady turns up to tell them (and us) all about the backstory of this inhuman creature. Even in 2001, this was a well-trodden path and Salva chose it for a reason. He tweaked a few things, came up with his own lore, and gave us a mostly original villain, but he was undoubtedly following an established and proven formula.
Where he deserves extra credit, though, is creating a suspenseful, lived-in atmosphere through skillful direction. His use of lighting, attention to detail in vital frames, and the gradually intensifying pace are all crucial to making JC effective and fluid. Still, I'd argue the best features that made it a popular flick were Steven Legler’s deliciously nasty production design and the makeup department’s triumphant effort to assemble a viscerally captivating monster. Jonathan Brack’s Creeper is a morbid and perverted weirdo — every bit as funny as chilling — who totally steals the second half once he’s given more screen time to fool around. I mean, his tongue action with decapitated heads, Jackie Chan-like spins in the air, and heart-ripping “magic tricks” are the most hysterical moments in the movie by far.
Now, given that Salva is a registered sex offender who served 19 months for child molestation in the late 80s, grooming and then having sex with a boy who starred in his first feature (which is appalling and gross, but I’ll have to try to separate the artist from the art) it’s difficult to genuinely praise anything made by him. And for the record, let’s make it clear that Jeepers Creepers was (and is) no masterpiece by any standards. It’s an enjoyable yet not-outstanding-in-any-way early aughts horror that found an audience loyal enough to go on and spawn two sequels (in 2003 and 2017) with varying results. Still, you can’t take away the franchise-starter’s impressive box office numbers, garnering over $59 million worldwide, and how it wrote itself into horror history. Plus, due to its practical effects, makeup, and twisted humor, I have to say that Jeepers Creepers stood the test of time, and even changed how I felt about it for 20 years.
From now on, I’ll try to stick to a publishing schedule so you can expect posts on Monday/Tuesday or Friday/Saturday. One (and occasionally two) newsletter a week, tops.
You can find every entry of the Horror Aughts column here. As always, thanks for reading and supporting The Screen.