The sequel to Creep took yet one more step toward an unambiguously feminist kind of domestic horror – one in which, at last, we get a woman behind the camera and calling (most, though not all) the shots.
After the opening credits roll, Creep 2 (2017) shows a bunch of online personal ads superimposed on one another, and a female voice saying, “Hi, I’m Sara. Welcome to Encounters.”
Sara (Desiree Akhavan) will be the protagonist of Creep 2, a young vlogger who curates a show in which she answers personal ads and provides odd services to lonely and desperate men. Sometimes, the men want to be held like babies. Sometimes they want to show her their houses and garner her appreciation for their possessions and collections.
None of these encounters appear to include anything we could fairly call sex work. There’s no nudity, no kissing, no fondling, and certainly no sex. Her encounters are much more focused on the strangeness and vulnerability of isolated men than on sex per se.
On all her encounters, she brings her camera, turning the men who’ve hired her into the subjects of her own short films. It’s not entirely clear that the men know about or consent to being filmed; what’s clear is that she sees these men as her subjects, and herself as their director.
We see her, in multiple scenes, sitting close to men on their couches, asking them questions. The interactions are generally extremely mundane.
Like Josef from the first film, Sara often casts a knowing glance over at the camera as she does whatever activities her male clients require of her. She is the director, the shot caller, the woman behind the camera and the auteur of all she does. In a very real sense, what she’s doing is predatory.
Alas, her show doesn’t have many followers, possibly because all her encounters are, in fact, so mundane.
She bemoans to her camera that her newest episode only has nine views. She announces that she’s come to the painful conclusion that she may need to end the series.
So when Sara comes across a personal add on Craigslist – offering $1,000 for a day of “emotionally brave” videography – she’s ready to go, thinking this lonely, desperate man might help her make an episode of her docuseries that gets her some notice.
Soon, Sara is three hours from home, driving deep into the woods. We do not know she’s heading to meet Josef because the location is different from the last time, but we suspect it, of course, because we know we are watching a sequel.
The camera angle is similar to the camera angle capturing Aaron on his way up to meet Josef in the first film: She’s got the camera riding shotgun while she drives, and it’s angled up at her face while she talks about her feelings about heading up into the middle of nowhere.
But of course, there’s a profound difference. Aaron was going up to do videography for the day as a service to the other person; Sara is going up to do videography as a way of collecting material for her own rather predatory web series. So, from the outset, the film asks us: Who is the prey, and who the predator?
When Sara arrives, the man we know as Josef from the first film introduces himself as “Aaron” and offers her a green smoothie to drink. She drinks and says it’s good; he replies, “It’s also poisoned.” She laughs awkwardly before he walks back his threat. And thus the gaslighting and grooming begin.
But interestingly, Sara seems at least partially immune to her new mark’s craziness – maybe her training in dealing with desperate, lonely men has inured her to bizarre interpersonal conduct. Regardless, he—Josef, whom I’ll refer to as Aaron 2 from here on out—is clearly fascinated and somewhat disarmed by her sangfroid, and what he perceives to be her frankness and steely resolve. But we know that she’s playing him: She tells him that she shoots wedding videos to make money.
When she asks him about himself, he says, matter-of-factly, “I am what is commonly known as a serial killer.” There is no pretense of sanity – no cancer patient facade – this time. “I have killed thirty-nine people. This is something that I love to do; it’s the greatest job in the world.”
But Aaron 2 then proceeds to tell Sara that he’s having a midlife crisis. The camera, which she is holding, zooms in—not because she is afraid, but because she’s starting to think that maybe, just maybe, this is going to be the episode that catapults her to internet fame.
Aaron 2 appears to be entirely aligned with her, proposing that the two of them team up to make a documentary about the world’s most prolific serial killer that no one knows about, together, right now. “T’m into it,” says Sara. Again: Who is the predator? Who is the prey? Or, put only slightly differently: Who is directing this film, and who is the unwitting and unlucky main character?
Soon, Aaron 2 shows Sara the final scenes of his Aaron DVD, where he chops into Aaron 1’s head. Then he grabs her camera and turns it on her. She is remarkably unperturbed. Realizing that he’s having trouble frightening her, he suggests that they should do the filming naked.
While Sara films him, he drops a towel he’d wrapped around himself and stands fully nude in front of her. There is a lot of penis in this scene, for a long time. We wonder if Aaron 2 will try to rape her. If she tried to run, would he grab the Shining-esque axe, familiar as the murder weapon from the first Creep, that’s conspicuously mounted on the wall and cut her down?
Instead of running or panicking, to Aaron 2’s complete shock, she asks for her own “turn,” passes him the camera, and takes off her clothes on camera.
It turns out, evidently, that her past experience filming her “encounters” with strange men really has inoculated her against his particular form of craziness. It’s starting to seem like Sara really is directing this picture.
What’s yet more fascinating about this moment is the framing of the shot – which she calls attention to upon giving him the camera, saying, “Do you have your frame?”
When she filmed him, she filmed his whole body, head to toe—genitals very much included.
When he films her, he restricts his frame as she gets more naked; because of Aaron 2’s oddly prudish camerawork, we don’t see Sara’s genitals, and we only see her breasts for a split second before Aaron 2 zooms in tightly on her face. Is he sparing her modesty from the public? Is he sparing himself? Is he afraid of her bravery? Flummoxed by her lack of fear? His camerawork doesn’t read like that of a predator—hers does.
She really is in control. She—not Aaron 2—is directing this film. This is her project.
We cut to a scene in the bathroom, when Sara films herself debating aloud as to what she should do. She’s been with Aaron 2 now for maybe an hour, and she concludes that she’s 99.9 percent certain he’s not a killer, and she thinks he’s the ideal subject for her. Just in case, she’ll keep a jackknife in her boot.
Immediately after that, he jumps out to terrify her, and she doesn’t even flinch. Instead, she points out that his beard is patchy – calling into question the coherence of his masculinity. She acts toward him the way Kubrick supposedly acted toward Duvall-critiquing, nitpicking, mocking, deriding.
This is her movie, and she’ll point out the elements of it – including in Aaron 2’s appearance -that don’t work for her, even at the expense of her star actor’s self-confidence.
As Aaron 2 drives her to their shooting location later in the day, he wears the Peach Fuzz mask. Somehow, in the broad daylight, with her pointing the camera at him, the mask looks absurd, not scary.
Aaron 2 looks like a man playing at craziness rather than being an actual crazy man. This, of course, is what Sara thinks, too. Perhaps it’s because he’s driving a Hyundai sedan?
Perhaps because he’s got his hands firmly planted carefully at ten and two on the steering wheel? Sara’s shot frame, by including these details, makes it hard for us to fear him in this scene despite what we know about the first film.
When he asks her what she thinks about his mask, she points out—totally deadpan—that it probably reduces his effectiveness as a driver. When pressed, she reveals that she thinks he’s “a cute little wolf.” Because of the mask, of course, we can’t see Aaron 2’s facial expression. But we can imagine that he’s getting pretty frustrated under there, since none of his tricks as an interpersonal terrorist and domestic abuser are working. Sara really seems to be immune.
Soon, as they walk along the same hike that Josef took Aaron 1 on in the first film, Sara begins peppering Aaron 2 with questions. Eventually, he snaps at her for asking too many. Her indifference to his terror tactics is really getting under his skin now. He doesn’t like to be the true subject of the film; he prefers to be the secret director.
Seeing his frustration, Sara urges him to think about what Francis Ford Coppola would do to make their movie great.
She is acting, again, like a director, trying to be supportive of her high-strung, emotional lead actor—in this case, precisely by allowing him to continue to pretend that he is the director.
Stunned by her wisdom, he points at her and barks out, “That’s really fucking smart.” Aaron 2, you have met your match!
Whether she will prove your soulmate or your nemesis isn’t clear yet, but there’s something electric between the two of them. And that electricity fueling a film that she is making, even though we know that Aaron 2 secretly thinks it will ultimately be his film.
Even with Sara’s encouragement, Aaron 2 can’t get the scene he wants, so he has a diva-style meltdown. We cut to Sara talking to the camera, referring to Aaron 2’s behavior as a “tantrum.” She says, “He’s so vulnerable right now, and I know the decent thing to do is just give him some space. But at the same time, it would be so easy to go down there and provoke him.” Realizing that another person is vulnerable and choosing to provoke them anyway, just to see how they’ll respond and to test how much power you have over them?
Sounds like abuse to me. It also sounds exactly like how Friedkin directed Burstyn, and how Kubrick directed Duvall. Sara is turning the tables on Aaron 2, more than she realizes, of course, because she still thinks he’s a sad, lonely loser, rather than a sad, bored documentarian and murderer.
Soon, she finds him downstairs in his house, soaking in a hot tub, telling her to turn the camera off because he doesn’t want her to make the documentary film anymore.
But Sara, like Micah from Paranormal Activity, is far more interested in her film than in her interlocutor’s personal boundaries.
Despite his repeatedly telling her to leave, she gets into the hot tub with him, camera rolling all the while. She instructs him to close his eyes: “I don’t want to,” he says; “Do it,” she commands, and he does. She places the camera down, trained on Aaron 2. She then goes over, sits wrapped around him from behind, and proceeds to massage him. She, as director of her own film, has stepped decisively into the role of the controller, rather than the controlled.
The film reveals itself as a radical, feminist rebuttal to the domestic horror genre overall, in which the potential female victim takes the power into her own hands by wresting the camera from the abusive male director and making herself the maker of her own film. She who holds the camera holds the power.
After the hot tub scene, Aaron 2 briefly gets the camera, while Sara showers. He starts talking to Sara in the camera in the way he’d talked to Aaron 1 in the first film. Then he approaches the bathroom Sara is showering in.
Everything is bathed in red light. He thinks he’s finally going to get the drop on her and turn the tables on their power dynamic. When Aaron 2 goes to pull the shower curtain to the side, however, Sara jumps out at him and screams, with a mask of Scotch tape plastered on her face that twists her features into horrific monstrosity. He panics, screams, falls down, and gasps,
“Oh my god, you got me.” Once again, despite Aaron 2’s best efforts to gain the upper hand, Sara remains in control.
But eventually, Aaron 2 starts talking about the thoughts he had while watching “a little show called Encounters.” He knows she lied about being a wedding videographer. He knows she’s using him and planning to make a film about him and about their “encounter.” He knows she is trying to ingratiate herself to him through a combination of flirting and flattery. He tells her all this.
Her cover is blown. Her tone of voice, which had been deep, low, and calm all along, shifts to jagged, halting, and anxious.
Aaron 2 reveals that his big plan is for her to kill him on camera. Then, with the Peach Fuzz mask on his head, he coaches her in how to use an axe to kill a person. It’s starting to look like maybe, just maybe, Aaron 2 has secretly been the director all along.
Aaron 2 takes her out into the woods at night for a “surprise,” which is a locket inscribed with “J+ A Forever,” and with a picture of him and Aaron 1 on the inside. The shot is mostly black, with Aaron 2’s head brightly lit by the camera spotlight, and with the silver locket in the foreground, also illuminated. Beyond, there is nothing. Sara is totally alone with this maniac.
Soon, he reveals a freshly dug grave. He’s not sure, he says, whether the grave is meant for her or for him, but he thinks he knows. Now the camera is trained on Sara. We hear a strange sound, and we watch the microexpressions on her face turn from confusion to concern to fear to shock. It turns out that the strange sounds were Aaron 2 stabbing himself in the abdomen with Sara’s boot knife, which he stole. “This is cool right? We both stab each other, and then we crawl into the grave, and then we die like Romeo and Juliet.” She turns and runs; he follows, the camera light swinging in the blackness. We hear his panting, his pained exertion, as he—at last – tries to wrest back control from her and call the shots.
Eventually, he catches her, attacks her, and drags her into the grave, and then crawls back to the camera to reveal that he’s “not going to die tonight.” We think Sara is dead, but wait for it: As he talks to the camera about how great her final episode was, we see her emerging from the grave behind him.
Speaking to the camera and unaware that she’s behind him, he refers to her as “his muse,” much like Mia Farrow to Roman Polanski, much like Shelley Duvall to Stanley Kubrick, much like Katie to Micah. She was the beautiful woman who had to be destroyed so he could create his finest work.
As he sighs in pleasure and pain at the vicious irony of it all, she creeps toward him, sneaks up on him, beans him hard on the back of the head, and runs. So, in the end, the prey strikes back at the predator. That feels like a riposte, both to the domestic horror genre and to the abusive men who contributed to it. It will be her movie after all, and she will survive the making of it.
But that’s not the end. The final shots of the film show Sara, walking in the streets of Manhattan, near the Dakota/Bramford building, actually. Someone carrying a handheld camera is following her, at a slight distance. We feel afraid for her because we know it’s Aaron 2 filming her. And yet she is wearing the “J+A Forever” locket that Aaron 2 gave her, presumably as a trophy of her survival. She looks strong, secure, comfortable in her own skin.
Finally, Aaron 2 catches her eye, while theyre both underground on the A train. Interestingly, her face remains impassive, almost as though she expected to see him there. Almost as though she wanted to see him there. Perhaps so that she can shoot her own sequel. The film cuts to black.
hexafu 