Mark Duplass Explains How ‘The Creep Tapes’ Found Inspiration in ‘Friends’ and ‘Seinfeld’
He’s baaaack. Indie filmmaker and actor Mark Duplass has returned as eccentric serial killer Josef from the found-footage horror films “Creep” and “Creep 2,” but now he’s bringing the terror to TV. Now streaming on Shudder and AMC+, “The Creep Tapes” follows Josef’s continued exploits with each episode featuring a different victim. In shifting the narrative to 25 minute installments, Duplass found inspiration in making his anthology series “Room 104” for HBO or observing classic sitcoms.
“I wanted ‘The Creep Tapes’ to feel, as crazy as it sounds, the way I felt with my family during the pandemic when we binge-watched ‘Friends‘ and ‘Seinfeld.’ There’s a cold open, and the credit sequence hits, and we just feel comfortable,” said Duplass in a recent interview with The New York Times. “This is going to be a comfort show, weirdly, for people who love this character. It’s the comfort of discomfort.”
Since Josef is an established character, Duplass was concerned that the fear factor would wane across a series. Instead, he discovered the humor created a new sense of dread.
“We found that by incorporating more humor into it, people got way more relaxed,” Duplass said. “When it came time for the scares, they got got at a more intense level. The humor allows us to bring back the shock factor that we’ve lost by the fact that everybody already knows I’m a killer.”
In true Duplass fashion, much of the humor comes from the improvisational nature of the material, but he acknowledged the amount of planning that went into each scene as well.
“It’s at once the most improvised thing I’ve ever done and the most intensely scripted. We walk into the process usually with an outline that has all the beats of the story,” he said. “Because we’re all living together at this cabin we’ve rented, sometimes in Crestline [in California’s San Bernardino Mountains], sometimes in the woods east of San Diego, we’re writing it the night before and while we are shooting the scene. Because it’s found footage, there’s no coverage. You can’t just improvise and edit it down later. You have to pace it out perfectly. By the time the take is done, that’s actually the finishing of the writing.”
“The Creep Tapes” is currently streaming on Shudder and AMC+.
