Jeepers Creepers (2001)

Writer/director Victor Salva was a natural to bring Jeepers Creepers to the big screen — he's a passionate, lifelong connoisseur of horror films. "My brother and I loved to watch Creature Features with Bob Wilkens," he says. "We'd watch The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dracula and Frankenstein and all the old monster movies. Those were the kinds of movies I joyously made in high school, never thinking of making any other kind of film. Their power comes from suspense, the shadows on the wall. Even though Jeepers Creepers has a few graphic moments, I tried not to predicate it on gore, but rather on suspense and images that would be hard to forget — not because they're graphic, but because they're unnerving and indelible."

The film was written in 1999, says Salva, "after a summer of watching The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense. I thought, 'Now is the perfect time to write my monster movie.' I had heard a true story about a traveling couple brave enough to investigate something mysterious they had driven by; it turned out to be something quite horrendous. I added the supernatural elements, changed their ages, and thought, 'This would be a ride I'd like to take,' a really good roller coaster ride you think could actually happen."

"Horror movies are visceral," says Salva. "They're about affecting your conscious and your subconscious. I didn't want the characters to be Hollywood cliches. I wanted their lives to be bumpy and crappy like all our lives, so we get into the reality of it. Then we have this big force come in and up the stakes."

Jeepers Creepers is full of startling images, but in crafting the film Salva knew it needed to have peaks and valleys so the audience, like the characters, could catch their breath and process what they've experienced. "Jeepers Creepers is full of ordinary moments with the brother and sister, but then this thing whams them. Then they get a moment of breathing and reassembling, and then we wham them again. We keep taking them to place after place that might be a safe haven, but this creature is so unstoppable that he takes every place and turns it into another place where they're reminded they're being pursued."

Salva wrote the screenplay very quickly and was surprised by how fast it attracted attention. Recalls Salva, "Within a week of sending it out, I had three people interested in making it, which I'd never had happen with a script. My manager reminded me it would be a faux pas not to show it to Francis Ford Coppola, who had produced my very first feature. I wound up sending it to him, and he surprised everybody by saying not only did he want to make the picture with me, but that he wanted it to be the first of his slate of pictures for United Artists. That totally flabbergasted me."

For Salva, having his mentor Coppola and American Zoetrope behind the project was a dream come true because he was given freedom to create the movie he wanted to create. As producer Tom Luse recalls, "When Francis visited us here on set in Florida, he talked about how Victor was the perfect person to begin this new slate of films for American Zoetrope. Victor is a creative force unto himself. He's a writer, a director, he has his own special vision of the world, and that's what American Zoetrope is all about — working with creative people and giving them the freedom to make a show within the bounds of budget and schedule, but giving them room to breathe and not feel like there's somebody watching them all the time. Those have certainly been my marching orders from Francis — to allow Victor to surround himself with other creative people and create his movie, his personal vision of terror. That's a great thing, and certainly not the case with many studios."

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