Interview with the Insatiable Indie Filmmaker, Creep Creepersin
Interview Conducted by Marc Patterson – March 2010
Back in March of this year I had the chance to catch up with Creep Creepersin, an emerging horror filmmaker with a punk rock DIY aesthetic that he applies to his mind-bending and gory as hell films. The running joke is that he churns out more films than he has time to watch. From what I’ve seen so far he’s a sort of modern day Jess Franco in the making. Only time will tell…
Brutal As Hell: Thanks for taking the time out for the interview. We know you’re busy trying to get the editing on Brides of Sodom done. How are things going? How close is that to being done?
Creep Creepersin: I have a deadline of April 1st.
BAH: So you’re under the crunch then.
CC: Yeah.
BAH: So what exactly is Brides of Sodom all about?
CC: It takes place fifty years after a nuclear holocaust on earth, and in this future since the sun hasn’t shined in many years the vampires live on earth and have taken all the humans that were left, and have put them into little camps to breed and make more humans. So the story takes place there, and the hunter who is a vampire goes out and rounds up humans for the clan, and ends up falling for one of the humans and a bunch of shit happens after, betrayals and crap like that.
BAH: So do you actually write the material or do you work with other people who come up with these ideas?
CC: This one I wrote, and it was right after I did Orgy of Blood with Domiziano, and we were talking to a company who was interested in picking up Orgy of Blood if we could have a sequel to it. So I wrote out a treatment that was a loose sequel and then that didn’t work out. So I added a bunch of shit to it and took some stuff out and made it its own package.
BAH: Gotcha. So that leads me to another question, we’ve interviewed Domiziano Arcangeli recently on our site. (read interview here) You guys work with each other a lot. So how did you two connect?
CC: We were on the set of Vaginal Holocaust, Domi wasn’t on set, but one of the producers on Vagainal Holocaust was his old rep, or something like that. There was this connection between the two of them and he had called him up and said that he wanted to meet with me to watch a film with me I had done called Erection. So when I got home I gave him a call and he told me that he wanted to make a bi-sexual vampire movie, and I had a treatment out to him by the end of the week and we started shooting by the end of March.
BAH: Yeah, he’s a really nice guy and I’ve enjoyed talking to him about some of his films. So, you mentioned some of the other films already. Orgy of Blood, and my personal favorite is Vaginal Holocaust. I did a write up on that one just on name alone…
CC: Laughs
BAH: …Just on name alone, I thought it was, well I love all the old cannibal films and was like Vaginal Holocaust? This is great! I think the title to my news blurb was “Vaginal Holocaust – Muff Said“
CC: Laughs Aww man, that’s awesome!
BAH: So the thing is you’ve cranked out a lot of films and are working on a lot of projects, so for our readers who aren’t initiated yet, can you give us a sense, if the titles don’t give a sense enough, of the vibe that defines your films? What do you want people to think of when they hear about a film by Creep Creepersin?
CC: Well one thing is I don’t want to say that the titles are deceptive at all, but the titles are definitely something to get peoples’ attention. The films themselves have a lot of dark humor in them and they’re more psychological with the exploitative elements that makes all exploitation films fun. But I’d like to say they are more thought pieces with your obligatory gore and sex, but they are more psychological.
BAH: Just from some of the trailers and clips I’ve seen they are definitely edgy. I actually haven’t seen any of your films, which I think I can say that here, but is there ever a point in making one of your films that you stop and think to yourself… damn, maybe we went too far on that one?
CC: Orgy of Blood is probably the one where a lot of times I was like, “I can’t believe that we just shot that,” and I had to kind of second guess what we were doing.
BAH: Can you give us an example, or would that be revealing too much?
CC: Nah, that’s cool. There’s this dream sequence where the main character walks downstairs into this mansion she’s in and there’s all these nude party-goers. It kinda has this Eyes Wide Shut orgy feel to it. And she goes downstairs and there’s a girl bent over on the floor screaming in pain and she gets up closer, and there’s this dude coming out of her vagina screaming for help, and when she grabs onto his hand he gets sucked back inside and pulls her in with him. So that was pretty hardcore.
BAH: Yeah, that’s pretty extreme, but it’s cool. You’re obviously doing something that’s original, something that’s different, not the typical shit we see spewed out of Hollywood film factory. So what’s your rule of thumb when it comes to boobs and blood on set? Is there really such a thing as too much or is more really always better?
CC: It depends on the context I guess. Me personally? I grew up loving really really gory movies. Anyone who was a kid in the 80′s was inundated with all the gore of the 70′s and 80′s, which was over the top guts and everything. And I grew up liking that a bunch and now I like blood and am a big fan of Machine Girl and Tokyo Gore Police, and I like insane amounts of blood for no reason. But, as far as excessive gore? One of the things I really like to pride myself in is that people watching my films have experiences in whatever their lives have entailed for them. Whatever has scared them or whatever has grossed them out, or freaked them out, will replay in their head whenever they see something that plays out in that instance. Since they have a preconceived notion of what makes them sick or scared or feel uneasy, I want to take them to the point where they relive something that they’ve either personally gone through or have seen that has made them a little freaked out instead of saying “This pile of guts is grosser than the pile of guts you saw in blankety blank blank film.”
BAH: And that’s where I think the psychological aspect comes in.
CC: Yeah, the theater of the mind is far more devastating to an individual than just something I could throw on a screen.
BAH: Yeah, and if that nasty set piece can be tied to something psychological like what you’ve been talking about, that’s what makes it effective. That’s what makes it memorable. And in five years, ten years, down the road and you’ve seen hundreds of other gore films, I mean Tokyo Gore Police, Machine Gun Girl, these films are great and I don’t think people are going to easily forget these films, especially Tokyo Gore Police with the girl with the crocodile vagina, the snapping…
CC: laughs
BAH: (laughs) Yeah, not easily forgettable, but it doesn’t exactly tie to any piece in your psyche that’s going to make it haunting.
CC: Definitely. So the stuff I like to show is the stuff that I know that either hasn’t been done, or hasn’t been done like this. When it comes to stuff that people have seen before, or experienced in real life situations, I like those to be a little hidden, and a lot of things I don’t like to do is I don’t like to have a third act. I don’t like resolution. I don’t like to tie up all the loose ends. I think it works better for a person watching a movie to not know exactly what happened. They are forced to talk about the film with the people they saw. I like people having to try to figure out the mystery for themselves, to make them be a part of the film.
BAH: Yeah, I personally like a a bit of open-endedness myself and find it interesting that Quentin Tarantino talked about it a little bit, and even to this day he’ll never tell you what was in that case in Pulp Fiction. There’s certain aspects to the film that by leaving it open ended you allow the viewer to make that film their own film and make their own conclusion, but not all audiences like that. So you’ve shown your films in some places, so what’s the reaction to this kind of open-endedness?
CC: Confusion. The only film of mine that’s available wide anywhere is OC Babes and the Slasher of Zombietown, which is a good film by any means, but it was the first movie I made where someone gave me a budget and said – make a movie like this and we did it and it was kind of a rough feel, but it was a lot of fun. But on that one, because we had a situation where we had an executive producer who was just like “Yeah this whole thing where we don’t know what the fuck is going on? We need to tighten that up a little bit,” and instead of having me say what happened, we had the characters who survived try to figure out what happened and we had a little epilogue where they’re just as confused as someone who was watching it. And the characters have the same questions as someone who was watching it would have, and at the end of the day they would rather go out and fuck than try to figure out what happened sort of thing.
BAH: What are your favorite psychological horror films that you look to as an inspiration, something that you might keep on in the background as you work through some scenes?
CC: Wow. I could get inspired by watching any David Lynch film. Anything that David Lynch has done is inspiring to me. Michael Haneke. The original version of Funny Games. That was the movie that made me want to make movies. That was the one that made me say “I have to be able to get this emotional feeling and make people feel like that.” So yeah, there’s old Cronenberg stuff I dig a lot, but on the exploitation front, which is still a total viable topic for me to talk about, any Russ Meyer, early John Waters… I Spit On Your Grave is one of my all time favorite movies, but for some reason only with the Joe Bob Briggs commentary. I think I’ve watched it twice without it, but a hundred times with it. It’s so good. Last House on the Left too. I’m also really big on the pinky films from Japan, from the 70′s like Girl Boss Guerilla and Terrifying Girl High School, Lynch Law Classroom, shit like that…
BAH: Yeah I have the pink box set on my shelf.
CC: Aww, So good. I love that shit.
BAH: Yeah I held off for so long on buying it, because it was so much money, but I finally found a deal somewhere and broke down and bought it.
CC: (Laughs) Yeah they’re great. And then like the Ilsa movies. I love that shit. It’s just that you don’t get stuff like that now, and when you do get stuff that’s almost like that you get a porno that plods around and doesn’t work. So there’s almost a purity for some reason around the late 60′s into the 70′s that’s just, I don’t know if “pure” is the right word for it, but there’s just something about them, you know? And then as far as psychological thriller stuff goes again there’s Takashi Miike, Visitor Q is probably in my top five favorite movies. But also Hitchcock. Everyone has to love Psycho but like 39 Steps… great shit. I try to just watch shit that makes me crazy, that when I watch it I get so fucking excited I have to go out to make a movie. I’m trying to narrow my film watching down to stuff I just love and want to sink my teeth into.
BAH: So when can people start seeing some of your films?
CC: Well Vaginal Halocaust and Orgy of Blood and Caged Lesbos a Go-Go are… well, I know Vag and Cage have a UK release date for the spring and I don’t know exactly what the date is on that. I know there is a German release date, a Brazilian release date, and a Japan release date but they’re not set in stone. I think they’re waiting for an American pick up, but as far as we’re putting a package together right now for He, Erection, Corporate Cutthroat, Ding Dong Dead, Frankenstein, and Peeping Blog that are going to… well there are two companies that are bidding against each other for this package and I don’t know if they are going to do a Creep Creepersin box set collection, but they’re doing something that’s going to coincide with a couple of the bigger movies that we’re doing this year. They’re going to try to put them out when those come out for marketing. Like we just did this movie The Brothers Cannibal that’s probably going to be the first film of mine that has a theatrical release. Then we’re going to France, and I don’t know how much of this I can actually talk about but my wife is directing a movie that I’m producing called The Catacomb Tapes, and that’s the first really big budget film that we’ve been a part of, but I know that the people who have Vag, Orgy and Caged are just kind of waiting to have the bigger film come out to kind of spring board off of, which is kind of frustrating for me as a director because I know there is more work I could get if my work was more readily available. But, I understand that the powers that be that sign the checks have their own plan. All that being said there’s this Grindhouse film fest in Vegas and you can go to Pollygrind** to find out more about it, but on Saturday all my films playing and that will be Vaginal Halocaust and Caged Lesbos and we haven’t decided yet what the third and fourth movies will be yet, but that will be the first real showing of those movies.
**Pollygrind Film Fest Las Vegas
BAH: So I know this is a loaded question considering, but what do you have lined up, outside of pushing what you’ve already done into theaters? What are you working on creatively?
CC: There is a trilogy that we (Domiziano) will start shooting in June. It’s called Final Girl and Domiziano is playing a really big director that has disappeared for many years and he’s basically come back to make his opus, his film that he will be remembered for and so the first film of Final Girl will be centered on the casting sessions where he finds the perfect final girl for his film. In doing so what he has is thirteen girls where he puts them in a situation where they either have to kill each other or be killed by these members of the cast of his film ‘Red Machete Blue’, which is the name of his opus. And the people in his film have so much faith in him that they are willing to go out and kill for him. So the first film is to find the final girl. The second film is actually the movie that Pasqual (Domiziano) makes. So in the titles it will have all the fake actors names and it’s his film and it’s very much like a giallo, like Strip Nude for Your Killer. And the third movie is the party after the premiere of the film where he’ll pull some crazy stunt to ensure the infamy of the film and his own fame.
BAH: Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you’d like people to know about?
CC: The only other thing that is going on is that we’re finishing up the recording of our new album. I don’t know if you’re aware of our band, but we haven’t been doing the band stuff since we’ve been making all these movies. But the recording is almost finished. I know we’re going to be doing some shows so long as it fits in the schedule of shit we have coming up. So this year there’s going to be a ton of movies coming out and next year too, so people will be able to keep track of what we’re doing a little better.
BAH: Awesome. We’re looking forward to it!
Thanks again to Creep for the time out for the interview. He’s a busy guy busting his tail to make some truly independent horror films. Keep an eye out here for news on the latest projects and for when and where you can catch his films.
