Jeepers Creepers (2001) on Netflix
Trish and her brother Darry drive home from college when a truck tailgates them on a Florida road. They see its driver dump what looks like a body down a pipe.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.3/10159,026 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes47%
Trailer
Plot summary
Trish and her brother Darry are on the road home from college for spring break, crossing the Florida countryside, when an old truck comes up hard behind them before passing. The talk turns to Kenny and Darla, a prom couple who vanished in 1978. They find the same truck parked at an abandoned church and watch a figure in a trench coat dump blood-stained bundles into a pipe in the ground. The driver spots them and forces them off the road. Once he has gone, Darry talks Trish into going back, and he crawls down the pipe to see what was dumped, with Trish holding his feet.
Cast
- Jon Besharaas Trooper Gideon
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Jeepers Creepers (2001)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film is thought to draw on a 1990 case in Coldwater, Michigan, where two siblings saw a driver dumping a blood-soaked blanket behind an abandoned schoolhouse and were then tailgated for two miles. The case featured on Unsolved Mysteries on March 20, 1991, and the next day the man killed himself in a shootout with police.
- Jeepers Creepers was made years after Victor Salva served prison time, released in 1992, for sexually abusing a child actor during the production of Clownhouse. Coppola recalled that one of the actors resigned on learning of the case: so I helped Victor get the job, and I was criticized for it.
- Salva's original script had a twenty-page third act, scrapped during production, in which Darry drives the Creeper's truck into a train in a failed attempt to kill it. Brad Parker had storyboarded the whole sequence, but a $1 million budget cut removed it and Gina Philips and Justin Long were allowed to improvise.
- The Creeper was written specifically for Lance Henriksen, who had worked with Salva on The Nature of the Beast and Powder, but he dropped out. Jonathan Breck shaved his head on the day of his audition and took part in the sniff test, sniffing the casting crew while in character.
- It made $15.8 million in its first four days, ahead of Rush Hour 2 on $11.2 million, and broke the record for the highest Labor Day opening weekend, previously held by the 1996 film The Crow: City of Angels, holding it until its own sequel in 2003.
- Salva took one month to write the screenplay, down from his average of six months, and said he wanted the Creeper to kill characters that were for the most part male because he was very tired of seeing women slaughtered and raped in cinema.
- Philips said she wanted to star in the film after finding the script too scary to finish in one night.
