From Aztecs to Pixels – Weekend – Kommersant

The new installment of the Jeepers Creepers franchise, filmed by Finn Timo Vuorensola, is called Reborn, but the creature called the Creepers, which feeds on other people’s eyes and lungs, has not just been reborn, but rebooted. In the 20 years that have passed since the release of the first part, the world has changed – and the Creepers have changed with it. Like all the best horror games in the world, Jeepers Creepers is about teenage passions, adult nightmares, and unanswerable mysteries. And adrenaline. Xenia Rozhdestvenskaya tells how one of the most charismatic movie monsters of this century grew out of.

Teenage Passions

The first part of the film “Jeepers Creepers” (2001) opened a new century. Victor Salva’s film was the first production project of Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope company: after watching a rough cut of the film, Coppola said that it was not trash, but “a dark work of art.”

The hero of the film, a sharp-toothed winged demon with membranes around his muzzle, also dabbled in art himself. According to the story, he appeared for 23 days every 23 years, devoured everyone who got in his way, fed on fear and body parts – he ate other people’s eyes in order to look, he could appropriate himself and someone else’s hand if he lost his in an unequal struggle. But besides that, he was an artist – he sewed a monstrous carpet from his mummified victims, inserted pieces of a mirror into their eye sockets, admired his installations, listened to music. Obviously, he did not kill out of pleasure, but out of necessity. But the bodies of the victims were stitched together out of pleasure.

The franchise was organized in much the same way: it was sewn from different ideas and images, including from the stories of real criminals. Victor Salva took as a basis a real story that took place in 1990 in Michigan, where a husband treated his wife like a winged monster with his victims. But Creepers is also an obvious relative of the alien creature that appears in Stephen King’s novel “It” under the name of the clown Pennywise: he also wakes up briefly about once every 30 years, eats up fear and falls back into hibernation. In his appearance there is a reference to both a winged fallen angel and a kind of anti-Batman, it is not for nothing that he is called the “bat from hell”. And to the Aztec gods – in the comic book “Jeepers Creepers – the trail of the beast” Creepers’ pedigree directly goes back to Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, the creator of the world, the creator of mankind, the lord of the elements. True, Quetzalcoatl was a great ruler who gave mankind medicine, mathematics and chocolate; shredded Creepers only parses people into organs. Horses, smelling him, run away, and people who fall into his nets see strange dreams (hello Freddy Krueger).

Creepers are definitely a cloak. In his appearance there are echoes of Western heroes (a black Stetson and a raincoat), he knows how to present himself. He drives a broken-down truck from the 1940s, which in the third film of the franchise turns out to be full of traps and weapons. Perhaps the Creepers are capable of jamming mobile phone signals, in any case, the phones next to him do not work. Likes harpoons, daggers, axes. And shurikens made from the bones of his victims. He also loves the old Louis Armstrong song with the chorus “Jeepers Creepers, where do you get those eyes?”

Like Freddy Krueger, like Friday the 13th’s Jason, the Creepers prefer teenagers. Any teenage slasher can be perceived as a kind of initiation rite, initiation of a teenager into the world of adults. In Jeepers Creepers, the grown-up world swooped down on young people, gouging out their eyes, taking their entrails and weaving them into the carpet of disembowelled bodies.

adult fears

It is believed that people love horror so much, because in horror the bestial essence of a person is released. Another version is that we are afraid of what we can die from, and, having survived in the finale of the film, we breathe a sigh of relief. One way or another, all the fears that roam in society flourish in horror: the “witch hunt”, the fear of strangers or one’s own, the fear of the crowd or lone madmen, the inability to come to terms with either one’s own body or world problems. Creepers chose a great time to be reborn and reboot: today there are so many problems and fears that the resurrected monster does not cause fear in the audience, but rather irritation.

It changed from film to film, not least because reality changed, the role of the outcast changed, the very essence of horror evolved. If in the first, and in the second (2003) parts Creepers seemed to be an infernal and unknowable evil, an insectoid inhabitant of the night (the more terrible was his love for sewing and music), then in the third (2017) he is a daytime nightmare with the habits of some farmer looking forward to a good harvest. The wings have become larger, the tread is heavier. Previously, they were afraid of sophistication, now masculinity is more terrible.

The action of the new, fourth film of the franchise takes place in Louisiana during the horror festival. Creepers here looks like a geek like everyone else, he’s just another horror fan, only he has a better costume than the rest. Today’s horror is finding the line between entertainment and reality, between fanatical delight and codependency, realizing that everything you’ve been following online isn’t pixels, it’s real.

One of the main characters of any horror is a society that is ready to turn its back on the victim at any moment or appoint itself to the role of the victim. In the first – and so far the best – Jeepers Creepers, the heroes, a brother and sister, half scared to death, tumble into a roadside eatery and ask to call the police, because a maniac was chasing them and they found dead bodies in his lair. Visitors to the diner look indifferently at teenagers, it seems that they do not even stop chewing. This is not just an elderly provincial America, looking at the new generation as an unknown little animal. This, in fact, is the audience of horror: they stare blankly at the screen, without stopping chewing, and get their adrenaline without moving. In the second and third parts, it turned out that only those who have nothing to lose can resist the monster.

In the fourth film of the franchise, one of the heroines is a blogger with 25 million subscribers, the other is an enthusiastic horror fan. This is not just an attempt to modernize the franchise, to take it out of the zone where there is no connection and all subscribers are temporarily or permanently unavailable. This is a new world: today society does not read yesterday’s newspapers and does not go to roadside eateries to chat with friends. Today’s horror stories are live. The online witness does not turn away from teenagers shouting “there is a maniac!”, but demands details: what kind of maniac is he? how are you dressed? How were you dressed yourself?

Eternal fears

Fans are waiting for the fourth part to tell them why the Creepers are still reborn every 23 years and stay awake for exactly 23 days and is it true that he is so ancient that he appeared even before the beginning of time. Actually it’s not that important. Those who wanted and knew how to kill existed until the 1990s, until the 1940s, before the Aztecs. Creepers can make installations of their victims, throw them in the middle of a cornfield, or evaluate new technologies of the new world; the real horror is – and Creepers knows this very well – that evil never disappears and it is apparently impossible to destroy it. But you have to try.

Director Timo Vuorensola says his main goal is to breathe new life into the franchise, give it a new, young audience. Creepers himself, in fact, always wanted just that: new eyes. More new eyes.

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