The Creep Tapes

Our Review

Mark Duplass’s serial killer Josef, first introduced in the 2014 film Creep, returns for a third season of the found footage anthology that remains the format’s most unsettling exercise in claustrophobic horror. The premise is unchanged and perfect: each season/tape, Josef films himself with a new victim turned-friend, and the horror is entirely interpersonal, no supernatural, no jump scares, just a socially maladroit murderer’s smile that lasts four seconds too long. Duplass cowrites, and his commitment to the character’s pitiful then-lethal register is the whole show: you laugh, you’re uncomfortable that you laughed, and then you remember what he does to people who laugh at him. Season three’s two episode premiere arrives September 15 with the tapes expanding slightly in scope while keeping the single location pressure cooker format. It’s a Shudder/AMC+ deep cut that never got the audience the films deserved, eight episode seasons of 20-minute horror shorts, bingable in an evening, unforgettable for a week. The rare horror property where the smallness is the point.