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 co-writes, 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.