Paranormal Activity‘s indictment of directorial abuse as a powerful if hard-to-perceive dynamic in American domestic horror gets revisited, with a crucial twist, in Creep, four years later.
Creep is a masterpiece, both as a work of art and as a work of hair-on-fire horror feminism in the same lineage as the 1970s domestic horrors we’ve come to know and love, engaging with Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, and The Stepford Wives. But fascinatingly, despite its multiplicity of domestic horror sources and inspirations, the entire cast consists of two men and no women. Patrick Brice plays Aaron, and Mark Duplass plays Josef.
So, lacking female characters, how is this film feminist? Simple. It accomplishes its feminism not by overtly talking about feminist issues as feminist issues but by placing its own male protagonist into a role that is nearly always reserved for females in domestic horror films.
Just as Micah became the object of prey for Katie’s demon, a young, naive videographer named Aaron will become the object of prey of a sociopathic stalker and murderer named Josef. Our empathy will be aligned with him throughout the film, as was true with Rosemary, Chris, Regan, Joanna, Kathy, Ripley, and Wendy. But because of the added dynamic in which Aaron is our director and cameraman, filming everything that’s happening to him, we will see almost the entire story of Aaron’s domestic entrapment and torture directly through his eyes.
The domestic horror in this film feels extremely direct, extremely immediate, because we are in total synchrony with the man who’s making the film. Even though, as we will see at the end, he’s not ultimately the one who’s calling the shots.
Creep opens with Aaron (Patrick Brice), filming himself driving a car up to a remote mountain cabin. The opening strongly invokes the opening of The Shining, except that we are in the car with Aaron, rather than watching the car Jack Torrance is driving from above. He goes on to reveal that he’s answering a personal ad for $1,000 to do a day of film shooting in a remote location, though he doesn’t know whom he’s meeting. He notes that the ad had said, “Discretion is appreciated,” which immediately injects the idea of sex work into the film.
Aaron recognizes that explicitly, saying, “So here’s a thought. What if this is just some forty-something who’s sitting alone in her apartment, waiting for some young, handsome boy to come up the hill and give rubdowns, money, and whisper sweet nothings.”
He, like a more benign and frankly naive version of Micah, is hoping he’s walking into a porno situation. But of course, what’s interesting about this moment is the gender dynamic. If Aaron were a female character, he wouldn’t be thinking those things. He’d be packing a container of mace or stuffing a jackknife into his boot. Maybe he wouldn’t be taking this particular gig in the first place.
Instead, he imagines that this whole stupid enterprise he’s signed up for might end in a cougar tryst and maybe a bespoke, low-budget porn film.
Aaron arrives at the cabin and trudges breathlessly up a set of stairs to the front door. We hear Aaron huffing and puffing while he lugs the camera up the stairs with him. This is important because it aligns our physiology with his; we’re getting his POV, not just in what he sees, but down to his very breath. This filmic insistence on our physiological empathy with Aaron is going to be crucial to the horror dynamic of the rest of the film. We are very nearly in Aaron’s body with him throughout the film.
No one answers the door when he knocks, so he pans his camera around to look down at the yard. There, he finds an axe embedded in a tree trunk. He zooms in on the axe. This clear reference to The Shining isn’t lost on Aaron, who’s now a little unnerved and starts muttering to himself.
Like Katie reacting to Micah’s proposal that they use an Ouija board, Aaron has seen this movie before. Wisely, he heads back to his car to take cover from the creepiness outside. All of this we see from his POV, as though we are one with him. When he gets back into his car with the window tightly shut, we, along with Aaron, feel a physiological relief.
Suddenly, Josef – the other main character, played brilliantly by Mark Duplass – materializes outside Aaron’s car window and slaps his door. Aaron jumps; we jump.
There are introductions, and Josef flatters Aaron by saying, “You have a nice, kind face.” This soothes Aaron, of course, because in saying that, Josef acts as if he had been afraid of meeting Aaron—not the other way around.
Surely someone who’s relieved to encounter a “nice, kind face” wouldn’t also be a sociopathic serial killer. Augmenting Aaron’s burgeoning feeling of safety, when Josef opens the car door, Aaron’s camera lands on Josef’s wedding ring—as viewers, we are meant to feel reassured by that, and so is Aaron. Josef is just a regular, married man. This should be a relief, except, of course, if we’re keeping track, Guy Woodhouse was a regular, married man. As was Walter Eberhart. And Jack Torrance. Maybe there’s not quite so much comfort in that tiny golden circle around Josef’s finger as Aaron might hope.
Up at the house, Josef reveals that hes a terminal cancer patient, and that he wants Aaron to document a day in his life for his unborn son, whom he refers to as “Buddy.” With Josef’s vulnerable self-disclosure, Aaron is endeared to him, and he lets down his guard yet further. Josef isn’t just a married man but a cancer patient who is eagerly expecting a baby. What could be less threatening than that? Josef seizes that moment and grabs Aaron for a big bear hug. We feel Aaron flinch a bit, as does Josef, so Josef notes that, by the end of the day, it won’t at all be weird anymore that they hugged like that. He keeps on hugging Aaron.
Now, think about this dynamic if Aaron were female. We’d be freaking out; she’d be freaking out. Why? Because Josef is using one of the oldest sex abuser tricks in the book, which is to violate someone else’s physical boundaries in a relatively innocuous way—a hug-and to insist, counter to that person’s resistance, that it’s normal. Aaron is being told to disregard his fight-or-flight reflexes, and to allow this total stranger to get into his personal space.
Aaron is being groomed for further incursions into his space, incursions that will go way past his boundaries.
Josef’s boundary violations ramp up quickly when he informs Aaron “I’m going to go get in the tub” and confirms that he expects Aaron to come with him into the bathroom. He expects Aaron to film a naked, full-grown man— and a stranger to boot—in a bathtub. “We’re going to go a lot deeper places than this,” says Josef, smilingly and warmly.
He’s warning him about further boundary violations to come, but he does so in a normalizing way, with a smile on his face.
The viewer experiences whiplash in sync with Aaron: Josef seems nice, but he’s a little too familiar. When we get nervous about how overfamiliar he is, he doubles down by asserting – gleefully – that more intimacy is yet to come.
What is with this guy? Is he a slightly weird, lonely man? Or something more insidious? We don’t know and neither does Aaron, partially because Josef grooms him and us in unison, crossing little boundaries and then larger and larger ones.
In the bath, Josef starts talking about suicide and dunks himself under the water. Aaron calls to him to emerge from the water. Josef appears to be attempting to drown himself. When Josef finally does come up for air and registers shock on Aaron’s face, he says, “Oh man, that was supposed to be a joke. I got a weird sense of humor, man. I’m sorry about that.”
Classic gaslighting move: Oh, did my behavior make you uncomfortable? It was just a joke.
Moreover, if you read through literature on domestic and intimate partner violence, you’ll find that suicide threats are a well-known and very powerful mode of controlling another person, because it’s hard to leave someone who seems bent on self-slaughter.
No one is thinking that Josef is a normal guy anymore. Not even Aaron. And yet, Aaron overwrites his instincts. He’s hooked in. That’s the horrific thing about grooming: It works.
Josef wants to take Aaron on a special hike, so he tells Aaron to go get a jacket from the hall closet. In the closet (camera still and always in hand), Aaron is startled by a huge, terrifying wolf mask. When Josef hears Aaron scream in shock, he explains that the mask is just “Peach Fuzz,” a mask his father gave him. Josef sings a completely insane, nonsensical song about how Peach Fuzz is a good friend. To say that Peach Fuzz is a friendly wolf is absurd:
The mask’s grey hair is matted and wild; its teeth are long, fully bared, yellowed, and bloody; we can see bloody gums; its tongue lolls out hungrily; its eyes angle downward toward the nose in an expression of uncontrolled rage. Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? Aaron is, and rightly so, because he’s Little Red Riding Hood in this scenario. Or, perhaps, because he remembers the scene at the end of The Shining when Jack Nicholson, wielding his axe, recites a “Big Bad Wolf” nursery rhyme through the bathroom door to Shelley Duvall. Or maybe Aaron doesn’t think of that scene, but we certainly might, especially prompted by the earlier shot of the axe in the yard.
Out on their special hike, Josef runs off for a second, only to sneak back and terrify Aaron by jumping out at him. He says, “That’s what it feels like when you think you’re going to die. It’s incredible, isn’t it?” This certainly feels—both to Aaron and to the viewer—like a threat, but Aaron (and we) can normalize it by thinking about how Josef is a terminal cancer patient who’s simply trying to convey the feeling of knowing you are in mortal peril.
The two men carry on hiking, our POV locked in tight with Aaron’s through the camera. As they go deeper in, Josef says, “When you saw that axe outside of the house, was there a small part of you that thought I might kill you with it?” Josef is systematically messing with Aaron’s sense of reality. And yet Aaron stays put.
It’s clear as day that Josef is crazy. We know it; Aaron knows it. But Aaron doesn’t act on it. Why is that? Part of the answer is that Aaron is a man, and he can’t quite accept the fact that he is being groomed by another man.
Why would a straight, married cancer patient want to groom and attack a man?
But the film will soon reveal that sex and gender are no protection here.
Night falls, and Aaron has a natural justification for leaving; he wants to drive down the mountain as carefully as possible before it gets any later. But Josef convinces him to come in for “one drink”- the classic line of the sexual predator.
They have their drink, but then, right when Aaron finally tries to leave, Josef reveals that he lied about Peach Fuzz. At this point, the lens of the camera is covered; we only have sound, while looking at a black screen. Josef tells a story about how he discovered that his wife had a bestiality fetish. As a punishment for what he saw as her sexual crimes, he broke into the window of their own house with the wolf mask on his head, and he raped her.
Josef says it was “Ravenous, animalistic sexual intercourse. I’d never seen her so happy. I have to admit, it didn’t feel terrible on my end… Aaron, I raped my own wife.” The camera lens pops back off, so we can see again, and Aaron has decided to leave.
Unfortunately for Aaron, he cannot leave because Josef has stolen his car keys and hidden them. This, again, is a well-known form of domestic violence – denying someone access to a vehicle in order to keep them imprisoned in the domestic sphere.
At this point, Aaron can no longer normalize the situation in his own mind, nor can he rest comfortably with the idea that he’s safe from harm because he’s a man, because Josef has just deprived him of his chance to escape.
So, aiming to preserve his own life, Aaron tries to make a run for it. Just then, Josef appears, now with the Peach Fuzz mask on, blocking the front door. He rocks his hips sexually, side to side, and starts growling. Aaron is the prey; Josef is the predator. But Aaron rushes the door, overpowers Josef, and escapes. We, as viewers, sigh in relief. He’s made it, and we’ve made it with him.
But not for long. Back at home, Aaron receives a package from Josef containing a video, a baby wolf stuffed animal, and a knife. The DVD, which Aaron watches, instructs him to cut open the baby wolf with the knife; he does so. Inside, he finds a heart locket containing a picture of him opposite one of Josef.
A couple of nights later, Aaron’s got the camera trained on himself while he sleeps; we see Josef sneak into his room and, with a very long pair of scissors, slice off some of Aaron’s hair. Josef sees Aaron as a fetish object, a plaything for him to terrorize, hunt, and eventually kill.
On another DVD that he slips into Aaron’s house, Josef invites Aaron to meet up with him at a lake. Unfathomably, Aaron goes. But of course, it’s not totally unfathomable: Once again, Aaron thinks he can outfox Josef with his masculine and, in this case, directorial know-how.
We watch Aaron, from a camera he’s left rolling in his car and aimed at a park bench by the lake. He approaches the lake at which he’d agreed to meet Josef, and he sits on the bench, waiting. Through Aaron’s camera, we see Josef slowly, slowly sneak up behind him in a trench coat—a clear sartorial reference to the iconography of the sexual predator – then slip on the Peach Fuzz mask and reveal that he’s carrying an axe – again, a clear reference to The Shining. Then, swiftly, he chops into Aaron’s head. We hear a very quiet thunk. Aaron slumps over, dead.
The film of Aaron’s murder suddenly pauses, and we realize we’re watching live footage of someone recording a screening of the film of Aaron’s murder. Obviously, it’s Josef watching the film, back at home. Josef pops in front of the camera and says to us that he loves Aaron, and that Aaron will always be his “favorite.”
He takes the murder recording out of his DVD player, labels it “AARON,” draws a heart on it, and then puts the DVD onto a shelf with dozens of other similarly labeled tapes and DVDs.
All the while, Aaron thought he was in control because he had the camera. But in actuality, he was simply the cameraman, shooting a film that Josef was choreographing and directing all the while. A film about his own torture and death.
In Josef’s DVD collection, we see that the labels in red are of women he’s killed; those in black are of men. There’s about a fifty-fifty balance in terms of gender. This balance is intimately linked to the film’s incandescent and provocative politics.
Indeed, Creep is a feminist domestic horror of the highest order, not because it’s “about” women; it’s actually not about women at all. It’s about a more basic, human vulnerability to manipulation, coercion, grooming, and physical violence.
By centering its exploration of these dynamics not on a wraithlike woman like Mia Farrow or Shelley Duvall but on a big, burly, bearded, bearlike, male, hetero videographer, the film makes a crucial intervention into the field of feminist horror. What if, it asks, stalking and domestic horror were social dangers directed with equal frequency at men?
What would the world look like if men had to fear entrapment, sexual assault, and mortal endangerment at the same rates as women? I can tell you one thing: Our anti-stalking laws would be much, much stronger.
And what if men had to suffer the kinds of technological predation to which they so often subject women? What if, indeed, men were subjected at the same rates as women to the kinds of coercive control and gaslighting, the kinds of objectification and dehumanization, to which women are subjected all the time by men behind cameras? Because again, in the end, it’s revealed that Josef, and not Aaron, is making the film we’re watching. Aaron believed he was at the helm; he believed he held the power because he held the camera.
But he was wrong all along: Josef was using Aaron as a cameraman to film a documentary that he, Josef, was scripting and directing all the while. Josef is the Polanski of this film, the Friedkin, the Kubrick. Josef is the filmic genius here, torturing Aaron for our viewing satisfaction and for his own.
And in the end he steals the recordings Aaron had made to pad out his own personal Criterion Collection of murder documentaries with its crowning glory: the seduction, entrapment, and murder of Aaron, the aspiring director.
This is made all the more powerful by an even deeper irony. Patrick Brice, the actor who plays Aaron, is also the director of Creep. From a metatheatrical standpoint, this film then offers a powerful and pointed corrective to the likes of Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, or Stanley Kubrick: If you want to make domestic horror, make it about yourself. Put yourself in the hot seat.
Brice is not tormenting a Mia Farrow, nor an Ellen Burstyn, nor a Katharine Ross, nor a Lee Remick, nor a Shelley Duvall, nor a Katie Featherston. In his exploration of domestic horror, he is his own target.
hexafu 