Introduction
About a year ago, I went to a baby shower at a colleague’s house in the rolling hills of Kentucky. It was one of those classic autumn days. The leaves are only beginning to change, and the temperature hasn’t called for more than a light jacket. In this part of the Midwest, Halloween displays are compelling. Cobwebbed gravestones, cute inflatable ghosts, orange and purple LEDs, pumpkins galore. One house in my neighborhood has maybe fifty plastic Jack-o-Lanterns with various expressions of spooky mirth strung above the lawn. People take Halloween seriously around here.
As the sun descended, we started a firepit in the driveway. The evening concluded with a few generous pours of fine Kentucky bourbon. When it got dark, my co-workers were attracted to a garish display near the other end of the cul-de-sac. It was a house lit up like a Big Top. A veritable freak show. There were multiple incarnations of Pennywise from the film IT, and the almost ghastlier-looking Art from the less-terrifying Terrifier franchise, with his signature crooked nose and dental neglect.
Four figures stood along the driveway. The hockey-masked Jason Voorhees. The razor-fingered Freddy Krueger. And the tall and ominous Michael Myers. There was also a crustacean preacher-hatted monster in a billowy coat that none of my work associates seemed to know or recognize. “That’s the Creeper,” I said. “Every twenty-third spring for twenty-three days, it gets to eat.”
Victor Salva and the Boogeyman
This spurred me to rewatch the turn-of-the-millennium monster movie Jeepers Creepers (2001). To dissect this film, so to speak, I followed it up with another viewing with audio commentary by Writer/Director Victor Salva. Now, to be fully transparent, and since it’s been written about ad nauseum over the years, let’s call it what it is. I didn’t know about Salva’s backstory until I’d Googled the director’s biography and filmography.
In the late 80s, Salva pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of a child actor on the set of Clownhouse (1988). I’m putting this information up front because I know if I don’t acknowledge it, someone may think I didn’t do my research or that I’m defending some agenda, which I’m most certainly not. Also keep in mind, there’s been a resurgence of the obsession we have with the modern Boogeyman. For example, the continued fascination with the disgraced and deceased financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. This fall, we have Robert Pattinson in the new film Primetime playing Chris Hansen of To Catch a Predator fame.
Why is this imbued within our entertainment structure? Because we consume it like fast food. It’s cheap horror, but we’re not really horrified by it in the way that we should be. It’s been normalized and ingrained in the cultural fabric of American life for years. That’s what’s horrifying. Maybe I actually believe there may be value in human art which demonstrates profound talent, despite the artist’s transgressions. You can’t separate the art, so confront it head-on. Salva was regarded as a protégé of Francis Ford Coppola years after the whole Clownhouse incident. Somehow I can’t shake the feeling that Jeepers Creepers depicts real-life people, events, or scandals under the guise of fiction.
Get to the Truck
This is maybe a natural segue, if you’re still following, into the film. The title Jeepers Creepers comes from a song from the 1938 musical-comedy Going Places. Performed by Louis Armstrong, it’s been covered by over 250 recording artists. However, the phrase “jeepers creepers” was colloquially known. It predates the film and song, as a minced oath for Jesus Christ. Snippets of this song recur throughout the film. It plays on the radio, is sung by a few characters, and, in the end, is played on an old phonograph in the monster’s abandoned warehouse.
The film’s final product is perhaps a special miracle of tight budgetary constraints along with the happy accidents that inevitably occur from shooting on location in a place like central Florida. The plot’s gist is that two college-aged siblings, Patricia “Trish” and Darius “Darry” Jenner (Gina Philips and Justin Long), driving home from college in a 1960s Chevy Impala for spring break, encounter a terrorizing truck-driving demon.
I should mention, given the aforementioned disclaimer, that Long was twenty-three during filming and Philips was thirty-one. They have magnetic chemistry, and it’s not weirdly sexual or anything. It feels natural, and it’s clear from the jump these two have a vested emotional interest in each other. This is refreshing for a genre that tends to oversexualize victims. The opening sequence is the only time they have to build Trish and Darry’s characters. The feedback at early screenings was to cut down this expository sequence and to just “get to the truck”, even though the truck attack comes within the first five minutes of the film.
Developing Character
Before the first attack, there’s quite a nice array of character setup. Opting to choose a scenic state route rather than driving on the interstate, Trish has chosen to drive home for spring break with her little brother rather than spending it with ‘Mr. Poli-Sci-Track-Team Guy.’ This hits a deep-wrought emotional nerve for Trish.
In a Hitchcock-like reveal, our first sighting of the truck appears as a blurry speck in the background but grows bigger and bigger. Trish and Darry are unaware of the gradual approach until its hell-screaming blast of its decrepit horn. This is just one example of Salva’s finesse at building suspense. Throughout the entire film, the director creates these stark peaks and valleys between character development and action, sound and silence, and tension and release. It’s obvious he’s working hard to give the viewer a thrilling cinematic experience rather than a few cheap jump scares, which he admittedly has a few.
As the truck speeds past and the siblings calm down, Trish brings up another sensitive subject, their mother, which strikes Darry’s emotional nerves. It seems their parents don’t have the happy marriage they once did, and Darry reveals he’s under pressure from their mother to make something of himself, which he believes is just forlorn loneliness now that her youngest is out of the house, explaining all the dirty laundry he’s bringing home. Trish suggests it goes deeper than that; maybe their parents are actually unhappy and thinking about divorce.
Trish is reminded of the local urban myth of a prom couple, Kenny and Darla, who went missing in the late 1970s. They were rumored to be drunk driving on this same road 23 years earlier. Their bodies were never recovered. This story haunts Trish, who believes she’s on the same proverbial road, thus setting up quite a brilliant red herring. It’s a common trope in the horror genre that young women are typically the ones in danger, when in fact it’s actually Darry, not Trish, whom the Creeper (Jonathan Breck) is after.
House of Pain
Much of the action after the initial truck attack is captured during “Golden Hour,” including a shot of Justin Long urinating, which he apparently made happen for not only one but two takes (which maybe goes to show what a disciplined actor he truly is). During these magical shots of the falling sun, Trish and Darry drive past the truck parked at an abandoned church. There we see a cloaked figure tossing a wrapped body down a rusty sewage pipe. In reality, the antique church was the St. James, an African-American church which, according to Salva, had a strange history of conflicting and mysterious murders, resulting in the church falling into a state of disrepair and inexplicably burning down a few years after the shoot.
As Trish and Darry speed past, the truck continues to pursue them and eventually chases them off the road. As it mows past them, Darry convinces Trish to return to the abandoned church out of concern for the bagged body (“What if it was you down there?”). They return to the church, which is laden with live crows, a complicated element to add into movies. Crows are trainer-specific, i.e., they only respond to one trainer. They’re also incredibly smart, and when they fly away, they don’t return like homing pigeons, so the crew usually wires the crows and edits the wires out. According to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Migratory Birds Treaty Act of 1918, it is illegal to handle or film certain birds in Florida without a permit. Go figure.
Darry climbs into the Church’s drainpipe and falls into a subterranean world. Perhaps in the darkest reveal of the film, he discovers the Creeper’s House of Pain, a kind of ‘a psycho version of the Sistine Chapel’ where the Creeper eats and sews his victims together, preserving their bodies on the ceiling of the lair. In the commentary, Salva admits that the film does not completely translate one idea: the Creeper takes certain body parts from certain people, then sews them back up and together as part of his artwork. Darry also discovers the preserved bodies of Kenny and Darla sewn among the Creeper’s victims.
Seeking Help
After Darry emerges from the underground lair, the siblings seek help from the police in a roadside Diner. However, their story is too incredible for anyone to believe. Darry picks up a randomly ringing payphone and speaks with Jezelle Hartman (Patricia Belcher), a psychic and pseudo-prophetic guide who gives Trish and Darry the Creeper’s history and nature. It feeds on human body parts. One of the kids has something it wants, and it chooses victims based on the scent of their fear. Jezelle tells Darry that, via her dreams, she can see who the Creeper is after and how they die. The call breaks off as the diner’s guests see a shadowy figure sniffing Darry’s laundry at the back of their car. This alludes to the Creeper’s weird, kinky sense of humor.
The Poho County troopers tail the kids’ Chevy as they proceed to the police station. But the demon thwarts them once again, decapitating one of the deputies. In the most memorably bizarre shot of the film, the Creeper sucks the tongue out of the deputy’s severed head silhouetted against a delicatessen’s billboard ad reading, ‘Tastes so darn good!’ This drives home the point about the ironic interplay between horror and satire.
As Trish and Darry once again escape the Creeper’s clutches, they seek help at the roadside house of a crazy cat lady. I kid you not, legendary actor Eileen Brennan plays said lady. The actor has an extensive Hollywood resumé but I know her mostly as Mrs. Peacock in Clue. We finally get a glimpse of the Creeper’s wings here, suggesting he’s not only not human but not even humanoid. After Trish runs over the monster multiple times, the siblings finally make it to the police station filled with cops, guns, and lots of control. However, this is of no use against a flesh-eating demon.
Order quickly turns to chaos as the Creeper trips the power lines and begins his feast on inmates and guards. Salva builds the suspense here by playing the scene without letting the audience see it. A walkie-talkie relays the action, like a 1940s radio play. Jezelle also returns for the final stand-off between the kids and the Creeper. This scene initially ran twenty pages longer and featured a more pyrotechnic ending involving a train. However, MGM ultimately cut the additional material.
Where’d You Get Those Eyes?
The more emotional finale transpires in one of the station’s interrogation rooms. The monster, behind a panel of one-way glass, watches as Trish and Darry search for an escape. Unaware of the Creeper’s proximity, Trish gets up close to the glass (a subtle homage to one of Salva’s favorite monster movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon, when Julia Adams is swimming unknowingly above an amphibious piscine humanoid). The Creeper smashes through the glass, grabs Trish and Darry, and sniffs out their fear. It casts Trish aside, who valiantly begs for it to take her instead. But it’s already too late. The Creeper, looking him directly in the eyes, has chosen Darry, and they fly out the window.
Entering the Creeper’s abandoned warehouse, in the final sequence of the film, we first hear screams growing louder and louder and also the hissy static of an old phonograph playing the film’s titular song: “Jeepers Creepers, where’d ya get those peepers? Jeepers Creepers, where’d you get those eyes?” And when the camera finally moves into the Creeper’s workshop, where the monster is busy threading and sewing the nude figure of its freshly splayed victim, we settle on the final shot: Justin Long, now the Creeper, looks out through the hollowed eye sockets of his former self, Darry, in a strange, morbid and, yes, creepy end.
Among the film’s production departments and crews, a few notable mentions include Steven Legler (Production Design), Don E. FauntLeRoy (Cinematography), Ed Marx (Editing), Bennett Salvay (Composition), Kevin Egeland (Art Direction), and Kimberly Mullen (Casting). Jeepers Creepers, produced by United Artists and MGM Studios, grossed nearly $60 million worldwide on a $10 million budget, making it a commercial success.
