INSIDE YOU THERE IS ONE LONELY WOLF
What if that guy from Craigslist wasn't just overly friendly? Hannah Green on vulnerability & loneliness in the digital age.
By Guest Writer HANNAH GREEN
Film: Creep, 2014
Where to watch: You will receive a DVD, a knife, and a stuffed animal in a box. Play the disc.
“As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me? you are completely screwed, because the next question is How Much?”
- Tony Hoagland, “The Loneliest Job in the World”
The camera is wobbly, handheld. A timestamp in the bottom left corner of the screen reads 03.21.2012. “I don’t know who I’m meeting,” a male voice says, flipping the camera around to film the mountains rising in the middle distance. “The ad said $1,000 a day, filming services. Discretion is appreciated — whatever that means.”
The voice belongs to Aaron, a videographer traveling to a remote mountain town to meet a client he found on Craigslist. He’s filming his musings on a handheld camcorder, whose shaky footage comprises the entirety of the film. It’s so 2012. Aaron may be coming in blind, but he’s optimistic. Best case scenario, his mystery client is “some 40-something sitting alone in her apartment, waiting for some young, handsome boy to come up the hill and give money, rub downs, and whisper sweet nothings to.” He doesn’t consider a worst case scenario.
Instead of a lonely, attractive older woman, Aaron meets Josef. Josef is… intense. He has an inoperable brain tumor, and, he tells Aaron, wants to record a video diary for the unborn son he’ll likely never meet. He initiates long hugs. He loves pranking Aaron with jump scares. He’s a little weird.
But at what point does ‘a little weird’ tip the scales into ‘definitely get out of there’? Creep (2014) lingers uneasily on that question and on the constant mental calculation required by fleeting online encounters. It makes a formidable entry in a new kind of collective folk-horror that explores the dark potential of anonymity in the digital age. In 2014, when Creep was released, these encounters were more possible than ever thanks to the growing popularity of Craigslist (already almost 10 years old), Uber (founded in 2009), and Tinder (founded in 2012).
This was the internet’s awkward adolescence, a strange hinterland where easy accessibility was married to a lack of traceability; a time when you could meet strangers for any imaginable reason, but before you could discover their whole life story with a few well-placed clicks.
Today, interactions appear to be more traceable thanks to cameras and security checks, however opaque to the average person. And yet, almost everyone I know has a creepy online meet-up story: a disturbing date, a house viewing that gave off terrible vibes, an inappropriate Facebook Marketplace seller. From the other side of these encounters, in the safety of the present, we can laugh about them — they become funny/scary anecdotes, that in turn feed into new mythologies, shaping the landscape of urban legends and new folk-horror tales. My favorite of these is the one where a woman goes back to a Tinder date’s house only to discover that his entire apartment is covered in cling film. Or, one that I was fully invested in and wholeheartedly defended against skeptics (because my friend said that it had definitely happened to a friend of his sister’s flatmate’s friend) — the story, again Tinder-based, of someone who got a rare parasite from kissing a date that doctors said could only be caught from someone who had had sex with dead bodies. Fine, in hindsight, it’s a little less believable. But what is chilling about these stories is the goosebump-inducing near-miss, the deliciously haunting what-ifs. Creep follows these what-ifs to their terrible conclusion — what if that guy from Craigslist wasn’t just overly friendly, wasn’t just a creep, what if the funny/scary anecdote was actually, definitely just scary?
Creep wasn’t going to be a horror film. Working with the bare bones of a script, Mark Duplass (Josef) and Patrick Brice (Aaron), largely improvised the dialogue for what was initially a small found footage project between friends. Brice told Decider in 2015 that in the beginning Creep was “essentially a dark comedy about two sad people forming a connection, or a friendship,” but on the advice of friends and fellow filmmakers, the movie morphed into something rather different. This was solidified when Jason Blumhouse got involved as producer, but the original dark comedy aspect, still strong, provides crucial context for what the film is doing.
Duplass’s Josef ends up going to some disturbing places, but many of his antics are so unexpected and bizarre that they have all the hallmarks of a great funny/scary anecdote (‘and then he, like, ran off into the woods and jumped out at me’), rather than indications that anything truly sinister is about to take place. Josef oversteps the mark again and again: for the first ‘scene’ he wants Aaron to shoot, Josef strips completely naked and mimes bathing his unborn son (queasily referred to as “tubby time”). Later, Josef writes ‘J + A’ in a heart on a rock and offers Aaron serious financial assistance about eight hours after first meeting him. But Aaron, and the viewer, are repeatedly disarmed by Josef’s timely apologies and sudden intense vulnerability as he lapses into musing about his own imminent death. After all, he does have an inoperable brain tumor — you’d be a little erratic too.
It is this taut unpredictability that keeps the viewer’s attention. While there is something undoubtedly ‘off’ about Josef from the outset (the insistence on hugs, the just-too-tight running gear, the eager, loving intensity of his gaze), the strangeness is never quite strange enough to make Aaron back out of the day’s filming, until things start to swiftly escalate, and Josef’s story begins to unravel.
“This was the internet’s awkward adolescence, a strange hinterland where easy accessibility was married to a lack of traceability.”
Sinister wanted-ads are nothing new. As far back as the 1940s, the financially motivated ‘Lonely Hearts Killers’ Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck murdered three women who answered Lonely Hearts advertisements. The ‘Want-Ad Killer’ murdered at least two women in 1974, one of whom was lured in with a job advert in a local paper, and the ‘Craigslist Killer’, a Boston University medical student, found sex workers on Craigslist, met them in hotels and robbed them at gunpoint, culminating in the death of Julissa Brisman in 2009. What sets Josef apart from these killers is his motivation for luring Aaron to the cabin, which doesn’t seem to be straightforward as sex or money.
In Josef’s final video message to Aaron, a plea for redemption, he says, “I just want a chance to show you who I really am, and the truth of me, because the truth is, I’m a sad person. And I really need a friend, and you’re the only chance that I have.” It is this ambivalence – this impossibility of placing Josef into the neat category of conventional freak – that keeps the channel of communication open between the two men. There’s no ‘aha’ moment where we finally twig what Josef is up to or what he wants, right up until the very end.
For the first half of the film, all the focus is on Josef’s antics, but as the storyline proceeds, so too does a growing awareness of Aaron’s own more muted strangeness. It’s not clear why Aaron goes to Josef’s cabin in the woods in the first place, and what keeps him there as things go south. Josef presses the money into Aaron’s hand as soon as he arrives, supposedly releasing him from financial obligation. As a man, Aaron may feel a sense of security denied to female sex workers, or a macabre curiosity as to how far Josef will go, or maybe — just maybe — he needs something from this encounter too.
Variety’s review writes Aaron off as “dangerously naïve, if not downright clueless,” while others posit that his politeness is his undoing. Is it just deference and social ritual that keeps him engaging with Josef? The little we learn about Aaron is enough to conjecture that he too is deeply lonely. He says he had a girlfriend once, but there is no mention of one now, or even of any friends or family. In the second half of the film, the camera’s focus shifts from Josef to Aaron as the latter records his own reactions to Josef’s increasingly alarming overtures. When Aaron begins to receive parcels from Josef, the first (and for all we know only) person he tells is the camera. Aaron seems just as socially marooned as Josef, freaking out alone in his house. After watching that final missive from Josef, where he says he really needs a friend, Aaron turns the camera back on himself. “What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Look at him. He’s so sad.” Of course, he goes to meet him.
In the Decider interview, Mark Duplass says that “Aaron is obsessed with being obsessed with, and that’s what keeps him there.” But by the end of the film, it’s not clear whether Aaron’s reciprocal fascination with Josef is borne out of some obsessive compulsion, or something softer, more hopeful – an outstretched hand, a feeling of pity, or even of recognition. So maybe the question of Creep is just as much about who would answer a random Craigslist ad as it is about who could be posting them. Online missives, fired into the ether, can be picked up by just about anyone: someone hopelessly naive, yes, but also someone a little sad, a little lonely. Josef’s words could be Aaron’s: “I just want a chance to show you who I really am, and the truth of me, because the truth is, I’m a sad person. And I really need a friend, and you’re the only chance that I have.”
Aaron is not physically vulnerable in the same way that the victims of real-life wanted-ad killers are vulnerable – sex workers, young girls, unmarried older women in the 1940s. But he is lonely, and isolated. To compare his situation with real-life victims requires a shift in focus, to see vulnerability not as a personal failing but as the consequence of a society that lets people fall through the cracks to varying degrees: financially, socially, emotionally.
The balance of power and vulnerability in Creep veers from one man to the other like the turns of a switchback. While Aaron’s isolation in the woods (and later his lack of privacy when it becomes clear that Josef knows where he lives) makes him physically vulnerable, he also has the upper hand over the apparent emotional vulnerability of Josef. When money is added to the mix, as with sex work and with the $1,000 that changes hands between Aaron and Josef, things can get even more volatile. While sex workers can be physically vulnerable, the men that hire them exhibit a different type of vulnerability, a desperation that sometimes makes them violent as a retaliation against their own over-exposure. When Aaron goes back to meet Josef after escaping him, he exposes his own desperation, and the fragile balance of power shifts again.
Creep zeros in on this uncertainty, and its potential to create explosive situations. Despite the eventual gory horror, we circle back to what the film was initially about: “two sad people forming a friendship;” the push and pull of two lonely men scoping each other out, reaching out and then retracting before reaching out once again.
Today's world is arguably more atomized than it was in 2012. The landscape of our lives has been changed by sites like UpWork, Fiverr, TaskRabbit, Uber, Grindr, Hinge, and Seeking Arrangements, whether we actively rely on them or occasionally dabble. Almost a decade after Creep’s release, we continue to open up our lives to brief, anonymous encounters, especially when financial or emotional necessity demands it. Sometimes, things feel like they’re creaking at the seams, chasms opening up in systems that do not serve everyone safely or adequately – the housing market, the world of work. A friend, looking for a room in a city groaning under the weight of an acute housing crisis, answered an ad only to discover that the guy who posted it wasn’t offering a room, but was actually renting out one half of his bed. It was the side closest to the bathroom, though. Another friend, whose childcare job pays minimum wage, meets older men who pay for her to travel abroad. I look at pictures of her smiling in the sun and think about how these men operate under pseudonyms, or initials. Just a few flimsy letters. While we can make informed, rational choices about what is dangerous and what is safe, it is impractical to become an island. The implicit trust we must have in the world to keep moving through it is astounding. When you think about it, it’s pretty scary/funny.
Because we can do doctoral-level research on prospective dates, or see a picture and star rating of our Uber driver before they arrive, we feel a level of comfort that belies the fact that, when it really comes down to it, we don’t know these people. In acknowledging this, we have to confront something within ourselves — after all, if we’re going to meet a stranger, then we are also the stranger that someone is coming to meet. At the same time, Creep belies the gap between our true motives and the stories we tell ourselves. Aaron agrees to meet Josef one final time because he’s telling himself that he’s doing something nice for a sad, lonely guy. But by this point in the film, we realize Aaron is the sad guy, and, in the end, the vulnerable one too.
The horror of Creep is ultimately double-edged – not only are there creeps and weirdos out there, as there always have been, but you have to address your own dark impulse to let them in, and the state of a system that demands it of you. How far can you afford to give someone the benefit of the doubt? How much can you risk for work, housing, or the promise of connection? Who are you really risking it for? How can you know at what moment you step, blindly but willingly, over the point of no return? 🪱
Hannah Green is an arts and culture writer based in London, UK. Her work has been featured in various publications including The Cardiff Review, Pilgrim Magazine, and Tears in the Fence Magazine. You can find more of her writing on her website, and subscribe to her newsletter here. Twitter: @hsmckelveygreen.
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