Monstrous Creativity: Jeepers Creepers I (2001) & II (2003)

(This essay contains spoilers. Watch the films first.)

The Jeepers Creepers films concern a monster known as 'The Creeper.' The Creeper 'sleeps' for twenty-three year stretches, then emerges for twenty-three days to 'feed', namely upon humans. I really like The Creeper. He's easily one of the most interesting monsters in modern horror film cinema. If we delve into what makes him so interesting, we'll also discover what makes the Jeepers Creepers films more than just fun monster movies; they're also works of art.

The first thing notable about The Creeper--before we ever notice he's a monster--is that he drives a truck. This first point is curious enough. Very few, if any, horror film monsters proper (i.e. physical creatures of non-human nature) drive vehicles. They attack, push, turn over vehicles; but they don't drive them. Driving a vehicle is a learned human activity, involving developed skills and knowledge. Just how far The Creeper's skills and knowledge go is demonstrated in his ability to terrorize the brother-sister protagonists of the first film. The brother, Darry (Justin Long), comments that his assailant is driving some sort of 'souped-up' truck. And indeed, it does appear The Creeper has some knowledge of mechanics, enough to 'soup-up' his truck. But by far the most remarkable thing about his truck is the false vanity plate reading, 'BEATNGU.' That's "Be eating you!", perhaps a play on The Prisoner's "Be seeing you!", telegraphing to the victims he terrifies on the road that he'll be devouring them later. Not only is The Creeper a skilled driver and mechanic, but he also has a keenly perverse sense of humour.

This isn't simply an attempt to mislead the audience in the first half of the film. While it does lead the audience to expect a human villain, subsequent developments suggest a greater significance to The Creeper's humanoid traits. After their encounter with The Creeper on the road, the siblings turn back to the house, actually a church, where they saw The Creeper disposing of bodies down a pipe. When Darry enters the pipe, he finds an elegant, arched subterranean lair where the walls and ceiling are covered with patterns of wax-preserved, stitched-together corpses. At one point in the series, this is described as a horrific approximation of the Sistene Chapel. To be compared to Michelangelo is pretty high praise. However horrific and ghastly the creation, it is indeed very inventive and, in a perverse way, beautiful. This aspect of The Creeper's lair has its effects as far as horrifying the audience goes, but it also shows us The Creeper is an artist. The idea Salva is developing as the narrative reveals more about The Creeper is the monster-as-artist, the possibility for something Other to be capable of creation, not just destruction.

Historically, in monster movies, the monster is a particularly non-creative force. Nosferatu's/Dracula's advances on Lucy are only capable of adding her to the legions of the undead. The Mummy's only imagined union with his chosen woman is, similarly, eternity in living-death, not both alive but both mummies. Frankenstein's monster depends upon his creator, the baron, to make him a woman with whom to live in permanent non-productivity. Creativity is reserved for the living and the 'normal'. Anything monstrous can only destroy. King Kong never builds anything, but he destroys plenty. Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein's monster all take lives. The same applies to the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Romero's zombies, etc.. The rule in horror cinema is that the monstrous cannot create, but can only destroy. The body that conforms to the norm alone is capable of creation.(1)

Given such overwhelming consistency, one wonders why monsters are always represented as inherently destructive. One of the more interesting answers to this question comes from Linda Williams. In her famous essay "When the Woman Looks," she argues that "the monster's power is one of sexual difference from the normal male...the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality..." Williams argued that the monster and the female were bound together in their shared otherness from male, phallic sexual power. Since only phallic power can beget, then the monsters are inherently non-creative. However, most of the monsters are male. King Kong, Dracula, the Mummy, the Creature, and Frankenstein's Monster all wanted women, and they wanted, presumably, to fuck those women. That doesn't seem to be a very different sexuality from mine at all! I, too, would have wanted to fuck Fay Wray and Zita Johan in their prime. The sexual difference between the monster and a heterosexual adult male's is that his would be productive and the monster's would not. The monsters, as I pointed out above, consummate their sexuality not in the creation of new life, but in death or violence of some form. So what we can conclude, tweaking Williams's ideas, is that monsters are monstrous not in their sexual difference but in their sexual sterility. (This is more consonant with James Whales's ideas anyway, particularly as presented in The Old Dark House, in which the insane family occupying the house is distinct from their guests in their totally non-productive family form.) They seek relationships that are inherently non-productive and, in the conservative mind, non-productivity is equal to non-creativity.

What Victor Salva does with The Creeper, while he is solidly within the history of traditional horror film monsters, is acknowledge that non-productivity does not preclude creativity. The Creeper is a monster that bears no offspring and is a cause of death and destruction, but he's also an artist. He's such an active artist that one wonders when he takes the time to create his art. If he only has twenty-three days awake to do his artwork on top of all the killing he has to do, then he's a very fast craftsman. Perhaps his twenty-three years of sleep gives him a lot of time for creative thought.

The second film in the series, in which The Creeper targets a busload of high school football players, elaborates further on The Creeper's artistic nature. His weapons are all carved from bone, wrapped with skin, and inlaid with teeth. The Creeper's eye for detail is such that he purposely chose the tattooed skin on Darry's abdomen for the centre of his shuriken. We also see a knife with elaborate scenes carved into the bone handle. But by far the most interesting aspect of The Creeper elaborated in the sequel is his method of feeding, which is itself creative.

The Creeper's 'feeding' isn't performed for the same biological purpose as animal feeding. The Creeper terrifies his victims, smells some odor given off from them while afraid, and by doing so determines which of his victims have particularly choice body parts. When he captures and kills his victims, he doesn't consume the body part and absorb its nutrients as animals would; rather, he assimilaltes the body part whole. In the sequel, The Creeper removes one boy's head and transforms it into his own. He does the same with Darry's eyes in the first film. What's interesting to me about this behaviour is that The Creeper is not just creative, but self-creative. He's able to be an artist of himself by composing his own body out of body parts he finds the most attractive (for reasons unknown to us). The only unchanging body parts are the arachnid-like structure on the back of his head, resembling a face-hugger from the Alien franchise, and his wings. The arachnid creature is, presumably, the 'naked' Creeper, which assembles its body from choice parts. What The Creeper does in this assembly is create its own identity, its way of representing itself to others. Its identity comes not from the point-of-view of others defining it by its difference or monstrosity, but from its own positive self-defining meeting the point-of-view of others.

Jeepers Creepers is not the first of Salva's films to contain this theme. Salva's first feature, Clownhouse, is also concerned with monstrous creativity of a sort. Clownhouse concerns a group of psychopaths who escape from confinement, put on clown costumes, and terrorize a group of children, one of whom is particularly afraid of clowns. We scarcely get to see the escaped psychopaths as themselves. What we see is them invading the clown tent at the circus and applying cosmetics, creating their own identity, as it were. They use creativity to create their identity as scary clowns. They also take a twistedly creative approach toward terrorizing the film's children. Jeepers Creepers just expands and deepens the theme, transforming the psychopaths to a genuine monster and the craftlike creativity to artistry.


It is difficult to take this discussion further without bringing in biographical details on writer-director Victor Salva. Ordinarily biography is best left out of criticism, either because it's speculation read into the film or it's simply not enlightening. In the case of Salva, I think it is both significant and enlightening. Salva, while making Clownhouse, sexually abused the twelve-year-old star and videotaped it. He was reported, tried, and served his jail time. Ten years after Clownhouse, he finally got to make another feature. He even got to make a film for Disney, Powder. This film was boycotted and resulted in protests instigated primarily by the victim, by then an adult, and his family. Each film he's made since has met with some protests by people who believe a convicted pedophile should never be allowed to work again.

That's as much as need be said for our purposes. What we see is that Salva is what is often referred to in our society as a 'monster.' Anyone who abuses a child is 'monstrous'. Perhaps, however, his alternative and distinctly non-productive sexuality (homosexual and pedophilic) is part of what suggests a 'monster' to our society. While I have heard Roman Polanski called a monster very rarely, I have heard it frequently used for Salva. Polanski, despite sexually abusing a twelve-year-old girl, has had wives and has two children with his present wife. Salva, who also sexually abused a twelve-year-old, has never been married and has no children. The difference is one of productivity.

So, like The Creeper and so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is non-productive. But like The Creeper and unlike so many other classic movie monsters, Salva is highly creative. In an interview, he refers to his films as his children. (2) This is very important, because creativity for Salva is allowed to substitute--perhaps very satisfactorily--for productivity; this is true both in his life and in his films. So with The Creeper, Salva is representing a very interesting aspect of who he is: a (social) monster who is also creative, a monster who is an artist, creating darkly beautiful art and creating himself in the process. Seeing the monster-as-artist in the film means seeing the possibility of artistic creation as a substitute for biological creation, artistic creation as a means of recreating oneself: in his films, Salva creates himself insofar as he shows us he is not a monster, but a creator of a different order.

As an amusing turn-of-the-tables, the denouement of Jeepers Creepers II shows the film's major protagonist, a father (Ray Wise) whose child was taken by The Creeper, charging kids to view the sleeping Creeper nailed to a wall of his barn. What's interesting about this is the total lack of creativity in the father's sideshow moneymaking. He's productive enough: he had two children and still has one. But he can only display the Creeper, a self-made work of art, rather than make his own art. Why should biological creation without artistic creation be any less monstrous than artistic creation without biological creation?

But I promised that delving into biography and how Salva reflects himself, the creator of perverse art, in The Creeper would be enlightening. Finally, I want to address this. What seeing the film's relationship to Salva himself makes us ask is just what the protestors of Powder never asked themselves: why can't the monster's art be accepted, even if we don't accept the monster? The Creeper, of course, has to kill to make his art. The Creeper is biologically a monster. But Salva doesn't and isn't. His 'monstrosity' is social only and in creating his art he can also recreate himself. He kills no-one in the process and as I've argued, and am clearly convinced of myself, Salva's films have merit as works of art. There is a possibility of separating moral concerns about the creator from the aesthetic concerns of the created art. Perhaps some are afraid that accepting the monster-as-artist means failing to see him as a monster any longer, failing to see a non-procreative creativity as monstrous.

The Jeepers Creepers films are not masterpieces. They succeed very well as entertaining monster movies, the first being particularly skillful in audience manipulation and the second containing some fantastic monster-slaying action. As penetrating works of art, they are occasionally vapid or confused. The homophobia subtext of the second film is particularly striking as such. It is in the character of The Creeper, a character into which Salva has clearly invested much of himself, that the films show great depth and insight about human concerns of monstrosity and art, and their possible co-existence. (3)

(1) There are, of course, apparent exceptions. Science-fiction horror films tend to rely, in fact, upon the horrible productivity of the monster. The Alien films in particular feature the horrific chestbursters, alien young bursting from the human bodies in which they've been implanted. Inseminoid, as the title implies, is about nothing other than an alien force that impregnates human women. There is, too, a large body of cinema--both animated and live-action--in Japan in which demons and/or aliens capture, rape, and impregnate busty human women. The most fruitful argument to deal with this objection is that in these films the very productivity of the aliens itself, which uses rather than complements human creativity itself is destructive and repulsive. It's production through destruction rather than creation. But that argument must wait for another essay.

(2) "Interview with Victor Salva," by Mike Gencarelli, www.mediamikes.com. Sept. 24, 2011.

(3) Jeepers Creepers III has been conceived and I am eagerly awaiting its birth to see how well it meshes with the ideas explored in this essay.

Wrong Turn (2003) - 2.5/4

Imagine you open your eyes and see before yourself a dog standing on a beach ball and being chased by a clown. Yes, you're at the circus; you'd just nodded off. Suddenly, in your drowse-inspired detachment, you're struck by the realization that the universe has been developing for billions of years according to unbending laws of physics so consistently, so unerring, so determinately that it could be said the entire universe has led up to this point: the clown and the dog on a ball. Granted countless other things are occurring in the universe simultaneously; but it did take billions of years for you to watch a dog on a ball. One can be extremely amused by the mock-epic implications; one can also be a little disappointed in the universe. It's such a trivial thing to spend billions of years working towards.

Fifteen minutes into Wrong Turn, I knew I'd feel a similar disappointment. The plot is simple: a doctor takes a shortcut through West Virginian woods to avoid a traffic jam, strikes an unexpectedly-placed SUV, and the whole group that goes looking for a phone is hunted by violent, inbred hillbilly cannibals. The moment I noticed three girls and two guys in the SUV group, I knew who would survive the film. But with that prediction (an accurate one) came this disappointment: that all the horror, violence, agony, death that occurs within the film does so just so the handsome, square-jawed man and the pretty, resourceful woman can 'get together.' This is the unspoken progression of the film. All the premises and how they work out leads to this conclusion: the handsome man and the pretty girl develop a romance.

I don't mean to imply Wrong Turn gives us pointless love scenes: it never does. But the film does conclude with the surviving pair together. It was predestined. The moment we spot Eliza Dushku, we realize she exists for the doctor and he for her. They're written that way. And everyone else, who should have a separate and meaningful-in-itself existence actually exists for these two to get together. The ordeal doesn't take on any symbolic implications for the implausibility of any two people coming together; it is concrete, particular, regarding these two people in this universe set up just for them. Because in the movies, pretty yuppies getting into a relationship is the most important thing in the universe. Hence my disappointment. Like the dog on the ball, to end the film on the predictable couple getting together and driving off into the sunset seems to trivialize all the came before; it trivializes the characters, the events, the horror all.

A more interesting though no less predictable film with a similar progression is House of Wax (2005). While that film also subordinates the existence of all other characters and all the events to the relationship of a brother and sister, it seems somehow more meaningful. Their relationship, for one, predates the events we witness and, while hardly well-developed, has a specificity to the characters. The relationship in Wrong Turn is entirely generic; it is, as I said, handsome man and pretty woman, but nothing more.

The said, the film offers some exciting chase action, including a siege on a fifty-feet-high watchtower and a battle in treetop branches. The success of these chase sequences depend very much on setting logic far aside. If Johnny is so inbred he can't learn spoken language, how likely is it he'll be a master archer or as nimble as Tarzan? These hillbillies should be club-footed special-care charges barely able to feed themselves. Yet, as is so often the case with the Hollywood depiction of hillbillies, the only parts damaged by inbreeding are the face and conscience. Amazingly proficient at anything physical, able to plan out sophisticated strategies, they are entirely incapable of moral reasoning. This is useful for creating a monster the yields thrilling suspense sequences, as when the protagonists hide in the monsters' lair, and chase sequences, as when the protagonists flee through the woods. But one wonders what else it's useful for. That is to say, what is accomplished on a social and psychological level by depicting hillbillies in this fashion?

The victims of hillbillies, from a genuine classic like Deliverance (1972) through cult classics like Just Before Dawn (1981) and Rituals (1977) on to Wrong Turn, are always middle- or upper-class and educated. In Rituals, they're all doctors. In Deliverance they're successful businessmen. In Wrong Turn one character is a doctor and the others all seem well-to-do. The hillbillies are, of course, living in poverty and without education. Were I to hazard a guess, I'd suggest that we, the predominantly middle-class and educated audience, are being confronted with two monsters of our world: the enormous failure our economical and educational systems to distribute goods justly over all; the possibility that education and success has made us weak and unable to fend for ourselves in situations of real danger. Hence the logic-defying physical capabilities of the hillbillies in Wrong Turn and trapping skills of the hillbillies in Rituals. When the hillbillies are finally beaten down by our cityfolk protagonists, we can return to the world at ease with our social and economic systems: the monster has been repressed again. If the extremity of the backwoods horror tropes in Wrong Turn are any indication, the repression has only exacerbated the situation. The hillbillies are Wrong Turn are more hideous, more heinous, more horrendous than in nearly any of its predecessors.

But I'm not here to preach social justice. Wrong Turn, for all its decadence, delivers on terror, even if it does show its hand a little too early and is, behind the gloss, a generic backwoods horror. Still, it would take a very uncooperative viewer not to cheer the film's final punchline, at least in his heart. If the universe has been following those unbending laws, maybe there is no such thing as a 'wrong turn.' This is how inbred hillbillies ought to be repressed.

Cheerleader Massacre (2003)

Maybe I'm just getting tired of 'Turkeys' or maybe this film is actually as uninspired and wretched as I believe it to be. I'm very gentle on what some call 'bad movies,' as my reviews from the past two weeks will reveal. I never laugh because a film is 'bad'; at least not until tonight.

Some sort of sequel to The Slumber Party Massacre--a well-written and jokey slasher--Cheerleader Massacre tells the story of a group of very attractive cheerleaders getting stuck in a cabin in the mountains with three guys and their coach. At the same time, a serial killer has escaped from prison and is killing high school girls. For some reason he ends up at the camp in the woods too. The theme of serendipity is built up out of the motif of the arbitrariness of this film's events.

The holes are flecked with some plot, but don't let that deter you. The escaped killer's MO is killing women in their 40s. Yet the police still go and question Brinke Stevens, who apparently survived the locker room assault in Slumber Party Massacre, about her attack in that film. She's introduced in an overdramatic shot as a wraithlike creature, the embodiment of angst and victimhood that never forgets. So that section, which includes a lengthy clip from SPM, is a big slab-o-filler. The whole police procedural about the escaped killer is merely a red herring, though it takes up half the film. The rationale behind the murders makes no sense whatsoever and has nothing to do with Slumber Party Massacre. One can detect the influence of David Lynch in how the events of the narrative have little to no bearing on one another outside of their shared motifs of insipidity and tits.

Cheerleader Massacre is decently shot and decently edited--far better than most shot-on-video pictures. More's the pity that it's so inept and vapid an instance of storytelling. The only thing it offers is lots of beautiful girls. Every woman in this movie, young and old, is gorgeous and busty (all natural, too). This is offered for our gratification in awkward, silly moments, like the cheerleading coach's shower, which, if shot in real time, would have amounted to a full hour of a woman doing nothing but rubbing her own tits very slowly, over and over. Each symbolic movement of Irish Spring over her large aureoles, shot with the kinetic grace of Kurosawa, brings to mind Stonehenge and the Nazca Plains with their mysterious grandeur. Sounds erotic, eh? Well it's not; it's just stupid and manipulative. Besides, you know what? Most women are beautiful, unless they're fat, ancient, or inbred. You go to the grocery store any day and you'll see plenty of women who could be causing boners in b-movies. It's just not that interesting. Oh, and all the men are flabby, gormless doofs.

Nothing to recommend. Sorry, this one's a total dud. I went in expecting to like it, too. I say you'd be much, much better off watching The Corpse Grinders 2 for some shot-on-video fun.