Jeepers Creepers (2001)

Victor Salva's Jeepers Creepers arrives from 2001 with the tidy confidence of a creature feature that knows precisely how long it can hold a highway at night before the audience begins checking the exits. Two siblings, one truck, a pipe in a field, and a thing with wings. It grossed fifty-nine million dollars against a ten million dollar budget, which in the moral ledger of American Zoetrope passes for restraint. The first half is genuinely unnerving. The second half is a police station, and the film never quite recovers from the trade.

The picture's progressive credentials, such as they are, live almost entirely in casting arithmetic. Gina Philips and Justin Long lead as white siblings, and the supporting ranks include Patricia Belcher as the psychic Jezelle, a Black woman whose race the screenplay never notices, comments upon, or troubles itself to address. This is commercial horror convention in its natural habitat, not a statement of intent. There is no queer presence of any kind. There is no environmental lament, no critique of accumulated wealth, no interest in bodies except as inventory. The antagonist is an ancient predator that feeds every twenty-third spring, and it holds no economic philosophy whatsoever.

Where the film gestures, faintly, toward a social conscience is in Salva's decision to have the Creeper prey mostly on men. He said he was tired of watching women slaughtered on screen, and he seeded red herrings so that Trish would survive while her brother Darry does not. That is a genuine inversion of the expected pattern, and it arrives without a single line of dialogue explaining itself. No character turns to the camera to instruct us on the matter. The sermon is absent. What we have instead is a modest structural choice buried inside a monster movie, and the film seems content to leave it there, unexamined, which is its own quiet dignity. The creature eats, the credits roll, and nobody learns anything about society. Refreshing, in its way. Almost restful. The genre could use more of this restraint, though it rarely asks for my opinion on the subject, and it will not start now. I have catalogued worse. I have catalogued a great deal worse, and I suspect I will again before the season ends. The score sits low, and it earns that low score honestly, which is more than most films manage. I respect the honesty. I do not respect much else about the final act, but the honesty stands.

We are left, then, with a lean and competent fright machine that asks nothing of its audience beyond a willingness to be startled, and rewards that willingness often enough to justify the ticket. It does not lecture. It does not moralize. It simply eats people on a schedule, and for that small mercy I am, in the end, grateful. The Creeper will return in twenty-three years. So will the sequels, sooner. I will be here, clipboard in hand, waiting to classify them. It is, after all, the work.