The world's most socially awkward serial killer is back for round three, as the third season of Patrick Brice and Mark Duplass' cult found footage series The Creep Tapes unleashes more wolf-masked madness onto Shudder and AMC+ this month. This season, Josef/Aaron/Trip Engold/Father Tom Durkin/whatever the hell we're calling him now, gets more vulnerable than ever before, with the horror and humor dialed up to eleven.
Ahead of the full season hitting streaming, we sat down with writer/director Brice and writer/star Duplass to pick their brains on the craft and creativity that made up this season of The Creep Tapes. (This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and contains minor spoilers)
Season 3 is wild; it’s weird, and as always it just looks like a hell of a lot of fun on set. Favorite episode to shoot of this new season, and also the most challenging to shoot?
Mark Duplass: For me, the most challenging was the ‘Nobody’ episode (a remarkably introspective, minimalist episode in which Peachfuzz has what normal people might describe as a personality crisis), because I'm acting opposite myself. We didn't really know if that was gonna work. It felt a little experimental. It's a little bit vulnerable, and also an episode about mental health, which is a subject near and dear to my heart.
The most fun and explosive shoot was in New York (Episode 2, ‘Mo’), because there's this wonderful rule in New York City that you don't need a permit to film if you don't set a tripod down. So we decided to shoot that one on iPhones. We were able to surreptitiously run through Times Square, get on the subway, be in all these amazing places, and it was the middle of winter, and it was freezing, and it felt like at any moment it could fall apart. It was just very electric.
Patrick Brice: There was a one point during that episode where I turned to Mark, and I'm like… I feel like we exist outside of society right now, you know? We're shooting on this iPhone secretly on the subway, we're orchestrating all this stuff, people are going to work, people are living their lives. I feel like we've tapped into the Matrix in some weird way, where our goofy asses are getting to do this for a living, and this is what's important and special.
MD: There's no better place to shoot off the cuff than New York City, because everyone’s busy; they kind of don't really give a shit. Plus, they are already extras in the movie of New York City. There was one shot on a subway where there was a guy reading a newspaper, and he was resetting himself every time I would do the take. It was like he had cast himself as an extra. He was READY to go.
Did either of you really jump out of a plane for the stunt in Episode 3, ‘Anisha'?
MD: I'm terrified of heights, so it was a combination of existing skydiving video, and then we hired somebody to come do a skydive for us, and wear my wardrobe so that the hands would be floating in front of the camera? For a bunch of it, we shot just standing on top of an apple box.
PB: In a parking lot. With a big fan. [hysterics ensue]
MD: So it was combination of 5 or 6 different types of footage, all deftly cut by Chris [Donlon], our editor. But, I mean, if you see the wide shot of how this is done, you'd be like, there's no way.
Well, yeah, you had me totally convinced. Some of us have been Peachfuzz Stans since Day 1, but since the first season of the show, the fanbase has exploded with fancams, handmade merch, trinkets, and all that kind of thing. As he’s an ever-evolving character, I’m curious to know if any of that audience feedback has influenced Peachfuzz’s development in real time?
MD: It does. We love our audience; we've started going to fan conventions, we like seeing what they say to us on social media, and I would say the biggest takeaway for me is that every time I'm afraid we might be pushing the envelope too far, getting too obscure, too weird, too maybe cringe-inducing or awkward, they love it. And they're constantly reflecting that back to us, so it sort of emboldens me to take bigger and bigger swings. Inevitably, not every episode is gonna work for everyone, but they've come back to us and said, in a package of six episodes, we want to feel some wildness.
PB: Yeah, you will get the psychosexual, cringe-inducing episode where Mark is naked, but you're also gonna get the nuts and bolts, Peachfuzz and a guy in his apartment, minimalist, old-school kind of Creep.
MD: You said the one where I'm naked, and then you said the one with the nuts and bolts. That's redundant.
There’s a moment in Episode One, ‘Crystal', that really chilled me to the core when Kate Siegel’s character realizes she is alone on this boat with a man who has developed these almost obsessive, inappropriate feelings for her. It kind of shook and reminded me that, oh yes Peachfuzz is hilarious, he’s charming but he’s also… terrifying, he’s a serial killer. I’m wondering if, and forgive me if I’m overthinking this, it was intentional that this is the first episode in Season 3?
MD: What was intentional was not so much that it was the first episode, but that it was meant for you to have a lot of fun, and to enjoy, and be charmed, and to then be very disarmed by it in that moment, and to have that 180-degree twist. That being said, the ability for that to work was all Kate. She just lit it up with that internal terror.
That's the benefit of shooting a show like this: when someone's in the right mood, and they're in the right place, we don't have to say, great, let's wait for an hour and a half while we light. Kate was ready to go with that, and was like let's go, here we go. And boom, one take later, we've got it, you know?
PB: I get chills thinking about that moment. It's my favorite. It's one shot without any cuts, and she was able to sort of embody such a deep, sad scariness that I think was just shocking to all of us. When we get those moments […] that is the mountaintop for us. That is what we're aiming for. And so to be able to do it with someone that we're collaborating with, we literally just met and really hung out with deeply for only, like, 24 hours.
MD: You know, starting the Supporting Actor Emmy campaign right here.
The opening credits of The Creep Tapes make it very clear that Aaron (Brice's character from the original Creep film) will always hold a special place in Peachfuzz’s heart – do you ever regret killing him off?
PB: I'm constantly pitching my ghost coming back as a hallucination. I think I've done it to Mark, like, 3 or 4 times, and it's been like, yeah, we'll get to that.
MD: Yeah, I regret it. At the same time, I think that the doomed bromance that it is is what makes it live so big in our hearts.
The Creep Tapes Season 3 debuts on Shudder and AMC+ on September 15 with a two-episode premiere.
