Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice talk The Creep Tapes, tease potential future seasons

Creep continues on Friday, November 15, exclusively on Shudder and AMC+. Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice return to bring us more twisted stories about the serial killer at the center of Creep and Creep 2, played by Duplass. Brice directs all six episodes of the follow-up series, The Creep Tapes, which will showcase more of the mysterious murderer's various exploits as he tricks and manipulates various aspiring filmmakers into keeping him company for a day.

With the first two episodes of The Creep Tapes now streaming, 1428 Elm had the chance to chat with Duplass and Brice about the new series, specifically why they chose to change things from a movie format to an episodic one and much more!

1428 ELM: The television show format works really well for this series, but why did you guys decide to go this way versus making Creep 3?

MARK DUPLASS: There are a couple of advantages to it, I think that creatively, because of the shorter format, it allows us to be that much weirder, stranger, with some of these ideas that we wouldn't really make a whole movie out of—and they don't deserve to be 80 minutes long, you know? It fueled our creative and strange whimsy.

I think, secondarily, there was a functional aspect, Patrick has gotten much busier in his career and I'm often away acting on things so this means that whenever we have like four days off, we can get everyone together, go rent a cabin, stay in it, make the episode together, and it connects us back to that creative energy of feeling like you're 12 years old with your friends out in the woods with a camera trying to find a story again.

It's so good for our spirits, and, I think, good for the art, too, because we're so happy to be there doing it, as opposed to making a bunch of them on the road where we might get a little tired of it or feel constricted by the found-footage form. We shot this over a year, just popping in and out, and it really makes us the most excited to be there when it's intermittent like that.

PATRICK BRICE: I mean because of how the show is structured with each of these tapes being their own individual story, it also kind of frees us because we're not telling one continuous story. These are all self-contained, so being able to visit them at one time and one moment, we're able to capture that spark and get out of there in a way that we're not able to do in our other projects right now.

DUPLASS: We change up my looks a lot, too, which is fun.

1428 ELM: The show is so good at creating a sense of unease in the viewer, as an actor how do you access that part of yourself, that unnerving energy?

DUPLASS: It's at once really fun to do because I tend to be a little bit of a people-pleaser, and I operate in trying to make people around me comfortable, so to play directly against that is wonderful. But at the same time this character is trying for connection and love, that is what he's going for in a lot of ways, and that's something I can deeply identify with. As crazy as it sounds to say, this character comes from inside of me and people I know and is just intensely amplified in a way that's fun for me. So, it's scary to say this, but it's not that big of a stretch

1428 ELM: I feel like killing is not even the biggest appeal to him; it's all the build-up and everything that comes before that drives him.

BRICE: You're absolutely right, like torture porn, that's as far from our interests as you can get, but the idea of a cat playing with a mouse before it kills it, that space and time, that's more fun for us to explore. And then, once the mouse is gone, the cat is not as interested anymore.

DUPLASS: It's really depressed.

BRICE: It has to go to find another mouse.

1428 ELM: It gives you a lot of room to explore since, once the murder happens, that's when the tension drops. It's almost like a reverse-slasher film, instead of seeing a bunch of kills throughout, it's just all suspense, which is the best part, in my opinion.

DUPLASS: That's how we feel too, and it is honestly where our interests lie, and our skill sets lie, we don't try to do anything that we're not necessarily good at. We discovered early on, with the first film, that I think part of the value of this whole Creep franchise is that Patrick and I didn't start out as genre filmmakers. I like making sensitive, feeling movies and Patrick was a documentary filmmaker obsessed with highly intellectual video diaries, so we were in some ways not suited for this form, but I think it made it feel fresh.

1428 ELM: When you have an anthology series like this one, how do you decide how to structure it, or what episode will go where?

DUPLASS: you should go in order, I think, we knew the last episode would be last, and we had a good hunch that this episode that comes first would go first, but mostly we followed our bliss and tried to make really entertaining 30 min stories they could have gone in any order, but we tried to pace it out like a record.

The first two episodes of The Creep Tapes are now streaming on Shudder and AMC+, new episodes air Fridays.