Hidden Horrors: Jeepers Creepers

Perhaps for some, knowing the real-life context heightens the film’s effect. Or it irreparably takes the viewer out of the experience. In either case, the Creeper is, in fact, a creeper. He is a sex offender, a stalker. In addition to his supernatural abilities, he has deeply human depravities, and the combination makes for a terrifying movie monster. But perhaps it is also an example of where Salva’s film fails. After all, the appeal of horror often comes from the way it exposes our anxieties, the anxieties of our culture, the repressed ones that exist below the surface. However, in considering the source material and the backstory of the director, it feels as though Jeepers Creepers is not so different from those letters DePue sent during his year in hiding.

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On February 13, 1991, Unsolved Mysteries aired a segment that began with Ray and Marie Thornton driving through the country, about twelve miles outside of Coldwater, Michigan. According to the show’s host, Robert Stack, “Their routine Sunday outing would place this ordinary, law-abiding couple at the center of a strange and ominous mystery.”

A van pulled abruptly behind the Thorntons before swerving into the opposite lane then, ultimately, around them. They were surprised by the haste and aggressiveness of the driver, but not so much that Marie didn’t notice that the van’s license plate began with GZ. To her husband, she exclaimed, “GZ … Geez, he must be in a hurry!” It was part of a long-standing game they played, making names out of license plates, the kind of idiosyncrasy that helps identify two people as decidedly real.

A few miles down the road, the Thorntons passed an old schoolhouse. As they did, Marie saw a man near its back transporting a bloody sheet. The van from earlier was parked on the other side of the building.

Rattled, the Thorntons continued driving. Before they could assemble a plan, the same van pulled behind them and began riding their bumper. They knew they needed to write down its license plate, the first two letters of which they had already. So Ray pulled off the road to let the van pass. But when the Thorntons turned in pursuit, they saw the van stopped and the driver changing the plate. Even more striking, the passenger door was open and covered in blood.

The Thorntons returned to the schoolhouse. This would be, to a mind familiar with horror movies, a huge mistake. But Unsolved Mysteries doesn’t slow down for dramatic tension, as director Victor Salva will when adapting the encounter for his film Jeepers Creepers. Marie does note she was nervous. Whether for herself, her own safety, or for what she was about to find – a blood-soaked blanket stuffed into an animal hole – she doesn’t specify.

“On an otherwise pleasant spring afternoon,” summarizes Stack, “Ray and Marie Thornton had chanced upon evidence of a shocking crime, a crime which marked the complete and tragic disintegration of a family. Unwittingly, the Thorntons were witness to the final chapter of a bitter, heated conflict between a husband and his wife, which ended in murder.”

But this murder is not the reason the case lives in horror film lore. Ray and Marie’s story is the one that has sparked imaginations, the what-if principle that makes true crime, like horror, so compelling. And clearly, at the forefront of the mind behind Jeepers Creepers were the questions of what-if that this episode inspired.

The first act of Salva’s film is strikingly similar to real events, with only superficial changes – Darry and Trish are brother and sister, not husband and wife; rather than GZ the vehicle’s license plate is BEATNGU, which they refer to as “beating you” but which is later corrected to “be eating you”; and they’re on their way home from school as they catch up and, thereby, relate various aspects of backstory to each other and the audience. Most other details are relatively unchanged, and the choreography follows the same major beats up to this point. However, once the pair returns to the church (not a schoolhouse, as in real life) and discover evidence of a crime, the same moment Unsolved Mysteries pivots from the Thorntons, the film pivots from reality.

It isn’t hard to imagine Salva’s reasoning. When the real story became predictable, arguably commonplace, Salva saw the opportunity to sensationalize, up the stakes, develop his supernatural monster by making the murderer more than a man. All of this, in accordance with the best horror, would be done to exaggerate a core truth, expose something hidden below the surface of society. However, in the case of Jeepers Creepers, Salva, by making his killer supernatural, actually seems to be avoiding an important truth: what’s scariest about the following story is not the one- in-a-billion chance we might encounter, down the dustiest, emptiest roads of our life, a true monster, but that encountering these monsters is not nearly that rare. In fact, some of them are here with us now.

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The Creeper becomes less human as the film goes along. In the first major departure from real events, Darry falls down the pipe where he and Trish saw the Creeper depositing bloody sheets. This takes him to an underground cavern filled with hundreds of harvested bodies, preserved like taxidermy. Sensational as this evidence of brutality might be, it does not prove the monster has done anything outside of human capability.

The first true suggestion of the supernatural comes after Darry and Trish escape the church and drive to the nearest phone, at a diner far along the interstate. As they enter, they see the Creeper’s truck headed back to the church. After alarming the diners and befuddling a couple of cops with their story, a waitress finds them to ask if that’s their car out by the pumps. Apparently, she saw a man out by it. “Standing there. Sniffing that laundry. Holding big handfuls of it under his nose. Looking like he was liking it too.”

This moment does two important things. It establishes the Creeper’s ability to accomplish the impossible – as Darry points out, it’s not possible that he could have made it all the way back to the church, noticed he and Trish had disturbed his House of Pain, then driven all the way back to the diner in such a short span of time. We don’t know yet, but the film is preparing us for the fact that the Creeper is a creature, a sort of demon gargoyle who will, in the next scene, fly onto the car of the cops following Darry and Trish back to the church, before chopping their heads off with his ax.

But while the Creeper becomes otherworldly, there is no hiding his uniquely human depravity. One might be tempted to liken his sniffing of Darry’s dirty laundry to something instinctual, akin to the way dogs use smell to trace. But dogs don’t show such active pleasure. Add to this the fact that in the following scene, once he’s immobilized the cop car, Darry and Trish pull over to watch him recover one of the cop’s heads, which he French-kisses before using his teeth to pull out its tongue. The Creeper is somehow able to relinquish human form but maintain human depravity. He somehow becomes more monster-like (less human), at the same time that he becomes more human in his monstrosity.

Considering the space between supernatural and human that the Creeper occupies in such strangely specific ways, it’s difficult not to think about Victor Salva, and how he came to formulate his creature. Like many writers, particularly those who work with elements of the supernatural, sci-fi, or fantasy, he likely began by imagining what-if. But even for writers working in the unreal, it’s almost impossible to avoid circling back on what-is.

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Misleading online articles and videos suggest that the Creeper is based on Dennis DePue, the man the Thorntons saw disposing his ex-wife’s body. However, while the first act of the film is based on the Thorntons’ experience, the monster himself doesn’t resemble the real-life one.

Dennis DePue was a controlling husband who, according to Unsolved Mysteries, grew withdrawn and often accused Marilyn of turning their three children against him. They were married eighteen years before Marilyn filed for divorce, which, despite Dennis’s resistance, became final in December 1989. He was granted biweekly visits with the kids, though they were reluctant to spend time with him. He was also granted access to their guest house, which he used as an office and an opportunity to maintain control over the household.

His abuse, his creepiness, only intensified, and this is a story that has many precedents. A scorned, embittered man loses his family and blames everyone but himself. He sees each allowance the judge grants as an opportunity, a little crack in the foundation of their lives to scurry through. According to a friend, Marilyn had to change all the locks on the doors. Even so, she would sometimes come home to find Dennis in the house. This frightened her, not least because she didn’t know how he was getting in.

On April 15, 1990, hours before he would be spotted by the Thorntons, Dennis came to the house to pick up two of his kids. One had already refused to go with him. A fight ensued between Dennis and Marilyn, and he pushed her down the basement stairs, all in view of the children. He went down to her and delivered more angry blows before dragging her upstairs and out of the house, telling the kids he was taking her to the hospital. Instead, at some point between leaving the house and depositing the bloody sheet at the school, he shot and killed her. Then he disappeared.

It’s no wonder that though the setup appealed to Salva, Dennis DePue was not the monster he wanted for his movie. DePue was too commonplace, a bitter and desperate man who felt so threatened that his pain turned to violence, murder, a toxic warping of humanity we’ve seen a thousand times. DePue fled and went into hiding What’s far scarier is a monster so brazen his crimes do not deter him from showing his face, who commits them in front of us, certain we can do nothing to stop him.

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In 1988, Victor Salva was convicted of sexually abusing Nathan Forrest Winters,1 a 12-year-old actor in his debut feature film, Clownhouse. He had known Winters since he was 6, meeting the child at the daycare where he worked. Salva then hired Winters’s mother, an artist who helped with the sets of his new film. He became a family friend and often spent weekends and daylong outings alone with Nathan. The abuse started when Winters was 9, and it would continue through the filming of Clownhouse, for which Salva cast Winters as one of the three young boy leads.

While the events of Jeepers Creepers, unlike those of Salva’s crime, are contained, spanning a day rather than six years, the film effectively conveys the Creeper’s total obsession with Darry, his single-minded pursuit of him along the deserted roads. He even follows him into a police station where, when given an opportunity to kill the middle-aged female psychic (who gives Trish and Darry these details of the Creeper’s mythology: “it eats lungs so it can breathe and eyes so it can see. Whatever it eats becomes a part of it. It dresses like a man, but only to hide that it’s not. You hurt it out there on the road, but only as much as it can be hurt, because it’ll keep on eating till it doesn’t hurt any more”), he sniffs her, this insatiable killing machine, and shoves her aside in order to continue his pursuit of Darry.

Salva claimed a kinship to movie monsters in a 1999 interview with Glenn Lovell,2 saying that as a child, he felt a particular empathy for them. Salva claims to have grown up with an abusive stepfather, as well as to have been disowned by his family at 18 for coming out as gay. Perhaps he saw the creatures as outsiders like himself, alienated for being who they were. These movies expressed something to him, and in his own monster there seems to be a subsequent expression that can be, given the context, difficult, or too easy, to read.

In the climactic scene of Jeepers Creepers, Salva expresses an idea that seems to come out of nowhere. When thinking back to the opening conversation between Darry and Trish, there isn’t any notable laying of the groundwork for a distinction of strength between them. And yet when the Creeper has Darry in his grasp, wings out, near the window, ready to flee with his prize, Trish appeals to him to take her instead. She’s his sibling, she says, has all the same parts, and is the stronger of the two. Maybe she is stronger, but if this is the case, it is not what the Creeper is looking for. He’s not here to take down the most formidable human he can find, but to prey on, as does any predator, the most vulnerable, the weakest.

Salva was sentenced to three years in jail and was released after only fifteen months. Just three years later, he was directing features, notably the 1995 Disney film Powder. After Nathan Forrest Winters boycotted the premiere, Disney addressed the controversy, stating they had no knowledge of Salva’s crimes.3 However, Salva continued to work in the industry, releasing Jeepers Creepers, the first film of what would eventually be remembered as a tarnished franchise, in 2001.

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Perhaps the reason it is so upsetting when sex offenders are allowed to work in the arts is the idea that they, who construct narrative, are able to control the narrative. Alongside his continuing career, Salva tells the story of a man who made a mistake for which he’s paid and from which he hopes to move on. Notably, just days after the murder, Dennis DePue also sought narrative control. He sent a total of 17 rambling letters to friends and relatives, trying to justify Marilyn’s death. To one coworker, he wrote: “Marilyn had many, many opportunities to treat me fairly during this divorce, and she chose to string it out, trick me, lie to me. And when you lose your wife, children, and home, there’s not much left. I was too old to start over.”4

However, contrary to his claim, DePue did start over. Nearly a year after the murder, a woman returned home from work. Her boyfriend, Hank Queen, was already there and appeared frantic as he packed his things. Queen claimed his mom had suffered a stroke and needed him immediately. The woman suspected something else was going on, but she couldn’t imagine what. She did as asked, making him a few sandwiches for the road.

Later, the woman came to realize that her boyfriend, Hank Queen, was actually Dennis DePue. As it turned out, his Unsolved Mysteries episode aired that night and was likely the reason he appeared so rattled, doing what he could to distract the woman in the kitchen so she didn’t see the broadcast airing in her living room.

Hours later, DePue was in a car chase with cops, breaking through two police barricades. After a brief shootout, DePue turned his gun on himself, quite contrary to Salva’s audacious, invincible Creeper. While it is true that human monsters are capable of more evil than we’ll ever need, it’s also true that they are mortal, that each of their lives passes. Perhaps the movie monsters that scare us most are a reminder that while people die, the insatiable evil in the worst of us never does, finding more outlets for all too familiar modes of expression.

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The most palpable fear factor of Jeepers Creepers comes from the idea of being pursued, particularly in an environment so desolate, in one of the country’s transitory deserts, far removed from home, safety, civilization. Along the vast distances of the open road, Darry and Trish are unable to escape the Creeper, particularly the more supernatural he becomes. He can’t be killed, because, according to the psychic, he has eaten so many hearts he has them to spare. His ability to fly allows him to instantly cover whatever meager distance you might manage. There is no space, not your speeding car, nor even a police station, in which you are safe.

Perhaps for some, knowing the real-life context heightens the film’s effect. Or it irreparably takes the viewer out of the experience. In either case, the Creeper is, in fact, a creeper. He is a sex offender, a stalker. In addition to his supernatural abilities, he has deeply human depravities, and the combination makes for a terrifying movie monster. But perhaps it is also an example of where Salva’s film fails. After all, the appeal of horror often comes from the way it exposes our anxieties, the anxieties of our culture, the repressed ones that exist below the surface. However, in considering the source material and the backstory of the director, it feels as though Jeepers Creepers is not so different from those letters DePue sent during his year in hiding.

In other words, though Jeepers Creepers is a scary movie, it might also be little more than a rationalization, not exposing the truth, as great horror does, but concealing far too much of it.

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.