What I’ve Been Watching: Creep

Everyone is over found footage except me. The conventional wisdom seems to be that it’s a gimmick whose time has come and is now long gone. Groans attend every new found footage release.

But I don’t buy it. It’s just another technique and, when used in the service of a good movie, can make the story more immediate, more subjective, and much tenser (check out The Taking of Deborah Logan for a relatively recent example of a great and terrifying found-footage film). There’s something to be written about found footage films reflecting the way all of us, especially millennials, create media these days, but that’s an essay—and a lot of thinking—for another day.

All of this is a long way to say that I’m fine with Creep being found footage. It’s a solid concept: guy with a camera gets hired by a man who is dying to film a day of his life to leave behind for his unborn son, who he may never meet. Being a horror movie, it should go without saying that there’s more to the man than meets the eye.

Mark Duplass delivers a great, ultra-creepy turn as the titular Creep, but the story can’t match him. The first half of the film is a lot of fun, but its wraps up in almost exactly the way you’d expect.