(Note: This is going to be mildly spoilery for the 2014 film Creep, and if you haven’t seen it - well, you should, it’s really good and it’ll inform how you see this film. So maybe go check that out and then read this.)
If you’ve spent any amount of time reading this thing of mine, you’ll know I don’t like sequels to horror movies. If you haven’t spent much time reading this thing of mine, well…I don’t like sequels to horror movies. I think horror works best when there’s mystery and finality to it, and sequels (and prequels, for that matter) undo both of those, diminishing what made the original so powerful. Plus, there’s a tendency to reprise the original - another group of campers come to the cursed summer camp, another group of people with dodgy pasts get snared by the evil mastermind, another family moves into the haunted house. It tends to be more of the same, and again, no finality or mystery. We’ve seen this already. There are the occasional exceptions, as there always are, but as a rule, I don’t do sequels.
Creep was one of those films that made me consider an exception, mostly because it falls so far outside of conventional horror filmmaking in so many ways that I was genuinely curious what another story by these people in this world would look like. And in a lot of ways, Creep 2 doesn’t disappoint, primarily because it elaborates on the first film, rather than reprise it. It’s like variations on a theme, or someone improvising on an existing riff, and it goes some places the original film didn’t. It does have the problem inherent in any sequel in that some of the surprise is lost, but what replaces it works more often than not.
We open on a young man named Dave, who’s just received a package in the mail - we can’t see what it is, because our perspective is being shot from inside the box. He pulls out a DVD, and though we can’t see what’s on it, it has Dave pretty rattled. So he calls his friend Aaron to come over. We’ve seen Aaron before - the last time we saw him, he was calling himself “Josef.” There’s a conversation, there are revelations, there’s a knife, and soon enough, Dave is dead.
Cut to Sara. Sara is a video artist, sort of a documentarian. She’s making a web series called Encounters wherein she answers Craigslist ads put up by lonely men and documents herself spending the day with these men, finding out how they got to this point in their life. It’s very raw, very honest, and pretty much nobody is watching it. She’s losing faith in her ability to do this, in her ability as an artist. She needs something to really push the boundaries, something really compelling.
And then she answers a Craigslist ad from someone named “Aaron.”
Initially, then, we’re sort of working from the bones of the original. An unsuspecting videographer is invited out to a house deep in the woods on the pretext of spending the day filming the person who hired them. That’s not entirely where the similarities end, but it’s where most of them end. One of the things that I thought made Creep work so well was how it gave the audience a first-person perspective on someone gradually realizing that this person they initially thought was just sort of needy and awkward is actually something much worse, and how grounded that was in actual human behavior. It was very much about someone coming to realize too late that they were in over their head, and that’s not exactly what’s going on here - well, it’s not not what’s going on here, but it’s a very different dynamic.
The dynamic in this film feels much more actively collaborative, insofar as both Aaron and Sara are trying to get something out of each other. Aaron’s trying to meet his needs, as in the first film, though here he’s depicted as someone headed into middle age, realizing that he doesn’t have the same joy in his work as he used to, and he’s wondering what’s happening to him. He wants Sara to tell his story. But Sara’s also trying to meet her needs as well, and it’s something more complicated than just a day’s filming for hire - she wants her show to work, she wants something really challenging and maybe even dangerous to make for a compelling episode. She’s already in a place where she’s accustomed to walking alone into potentially dangerous situations, so she’s not naïve, but you get the sense that maybe she has a little more confidence than she really should, based on all of the previous times she was able to handle herself. From what we see of Encounters, she’s mostly been dealing with sheep, and we know (from the first film and from the prologue) that now she’s dealing with an actual wolf, and so the simmering discomfort at all of the boundary violations from the first film are replaced with a simmering discomfort at us knowing exactly how much trouble she’s really in and wondering how it’s all going to play out. On that level, we’re watching a predator toy with its prey for a little over an hour. It’s more nuanced than that, though, as Sara both acknowledges how dangerous it is for her as a woman to walk into a strange man’s house in the middle of nowhere, but also at the same time recognize how well this could pay off for her, paired with an immediate dismissal of the idea that this guy could actually be dangerous. It’s like a much more grounded version of the feeling you get in more conventional horror films right before one of the protagonists opens a door that you absolutely know they should not open. It’s not so much blithe ignorance as you being able to see Sara talking herself out of her better instincts in real time.
But on top of that, there’s the way that Aaron continues to weaponize the idea of intimacy as one of his ways of manipulating his victims. Just as in the first film, he’s extremely confessional and open, affectionately demonstrative and given to SoCal touchy-feely psychobabble as gestures toward vulnerability. And as in the first film, he pushes Sara to be just as revealing, a way of brute-forcing the trust he’s going to exploit eventually. But because Sara essentially has an agenda of her own, she gives as good as she gets, and her fearlessness serves her well. She’s more assertive and directive, she challenges Aaron, she doesn’t back down. She’s someone who’s also used to using intimacy as a tool, used to using trust and vulnerability to her own ends. So there’s much more of a back-and-forth there than in the first film.
Another advantage to this film is the way it makes our antagonist more of a mystery, rather than less. One of the problems I have with sequels to horror films in general is that they tend to reveal more and more about the antagonist until there’s no horror left because it’s all choked out by the backstory. Here, though, we can never, ever trust anything Aaron says or does as being true. As in the first film, he uses intimacy as a tool, not just to lull his victim but also to maintain his own distance. When you choose what to reveal to someone about yourself and how, it’s still a process under your control. If Aaron wants to share an uncomfortable incident from his past he can, and it will seem as though he is being vulnerable, but if it’s a total fiction then we’re no closer to knowing him than we were before. It isn’t playing fair, and as in the first film, those violations of the interpersonal contract of disclosure are uncomfortable. But now that we see Aaron’s entire narrative with Sara is very different from the one he has in the first movie, it means he’s still as much a mystery to us at the end of this film as he was at the end of the first film. All we know is that he kills, and all the rest is up for grabs, If anything, he’s even more of a mystery than he was in the first film. At least in terms of the details - there’s a very clear vocabulary around intimacy and interpersonal connection and specific imagery and ideas to Aaron that provides a through-line, but there’s no myth-making here, no lore to bog down the story. At whatever level he’s consciously revealing things, he’s still a cipher, and that’s chilling.
There’s a pretty strong metatextual undercurrent as well - we are watching a film about the making of a film, and in some ways that makes us, the audience, collaborators as well. Sara’s complicit in helping Aaron to memorialize his killings, and we’re complicit in watching her do it. As in the first film, the majority is shot from the perspective of a single camera, we’re watching footage as it’s being shot, we’re seeing when it works and when it doesn’t work, and when there’s artifice, it’s captured both as part of the film Sara’s making and the film we’re watching. So where the first film felt more immediate, like we were watching everything unfold as it happened, here there’s a bit more of a remove to it, it’s a little more self-conscious, which takes some of the immediate tension out. I don’t think it really harms the film, because it’s an expression of the dynamic between these two people, but it does rob the story of some of its immediacy. It’s more of a head film, and less of a gut film, if that makes sense.
And on top of all that, the performances continue to be very strong. They have to be, since it’s really just two people talking to each other for most of the film. As in the first film, the dialogue was improvised from an outline, so it feels very natural throughout, and Sara’s more proactive, directive role here means we see sides to Aaron that we didn’t see in the first film. In some ways, this is as contrived a depiction of a serial killer as any other serial killer film (man invites someone with a camera to his home so he can have a record of both his attempts to bond with him and then their murder), but the character of Aaron really nails a lot of the real psychological ingredients of serial murderers here - there’s an underlying emptiness or vacuity and constant need, an intense desire for control, and a harmless, unassuming persona that slips when nobody’s looking. We don’t know the facts of his life, we don’t know how much (if any) of the things he revealed in this film or the first one are true, but we see what happens when he and Sara have trouble filming a sequence and he completely loses his cool, we see how Sara’s unflappability and willingness to take charge of the situation puts him on his back foot, and there are moments where the friendly, open, good-vibes persona drops and the darkness underneath, the rage, are clearly visible, if only for a moment. Again, it’s chilling when it happens. Just like the first film this is not an especially gory film by any stretch of the imagination. The horror here is in what people say and do, in the details carefully observed.
It’s not as intensely minimal as the first film - the production qualities are higher, there’s a prologue and an epilogue, which gives it a more conventional feel, but not to a degree that hurts it. The last thing you want to do (and the first thing so many filmmakers do with horror sequels) is just make the same movie again. The settings are similar, again it’s mostly set in someone’s vacation home, and apart from the credits all of the music is diegetic, so it still feels pretty naturalistic. As in the first film, the firs-person perspective sometimes feels a little weird, but not to a degree that pulls you out of the movie. The first film wasn’t really a conventional horror film and neither is this one, they both mine pretty conventional horror-film territory in unconventional ways, but even though this one’s maybe a little more distant than the first, underneath there’s still that constant hum of unease and discomfort, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop, and the characters are acutely enough observed that it’s painful to watch in many of the ways the first film was. It ends on a suitably messy, complicated note, underscoring the idea that there aren’t many neat, tidy answers to be had, and that we’re as much a part of this as Aaron and Sara were. Apparently there’s a third one in pre-production, and I gotta say I’m at least curious.
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