I’ve talked many times on these pages about how much I like Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and to a lesser extent the many sequels that followed. Oddly enough I didn’t actually watch a lot of the many (many) films that followed in its wake and were influenced by its winking, meta-narrative.

There are a variety of reasons why that is true. I was becoming a true cinephile around then which meant I was more interested in the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderberg, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut and the like – directors who made “real” cinema rather than horror which wasn’t great art. I had started dating the woman who would become my wife and she doesn’t like horror movies.

But mainly my horror interests were changing. I was starting to discover J-Horror and Giallo. There was this wonderful world of world horror that I had previously not known existed. Suddenly my desire to watch silly little American horror starring hip, young TV stars disappeared.

Over the last few years, I’ve enjoyed going back and watching a lot of those films from that period that I missed the first time around.

Mostly. Some of those films weren’t very good and I was smart to have skipped them.

Jeepers Creepers begins with a car ride across a lonely stretch of Florida. Siblings Trish (Gina Phillips) and Darry (Justin Long) are coming home for Spring Break. They talk and argue, and they play the type of silly games you play on long road trips.

Suddenly a large, old truck begins tailgating them. It weaves back and forth and honks its horns, scaring the two half to death. Finally, it passes them and all is calm. Sometime later they spy that same truck parked next to an abandoned old church. A man gets out of it carrying something wrapped up in a sheet tied shut with ropes. Our heroes have seen the same scary movies we’ve all seen so they naturally assume it is a body. The dude then throws the object down a drainage pipe. As he turns around he realizes those two have seen him do it.

He gets into his truck and rushes after them. Apparently, this old truck has a souped-up engine because he catches them quickly and rear-ends them multiple times. But when he finally runs them off the road he rushes on ahead instead of stopping to kill them.

Instead of acting like normal, intelligent people who would zoom as fast and as far away as possible and perhaps call the police when they get to a safe space, these two decide to go back to the church and have a look around.

Maybe one of those people tied up and wrapped in bloody sheets is still alive Darry muses. Maybe they – these two people without any medical experience – can give them emergency care before calling in any real help.

The pipe goes deep underground leading to what was the old church basement. Darry tries to take a look and instead slips falling to the bottom where he discovers…well I won’t spoil that but it is pretty gruesome.

I will spoil that the guy in the truck isn’t a guy at all but a monster. A poorly designed monster who is on the hunt. And now he’s got the scene of Darry and Trish.

Though there are periodic meta-references to other horror movies these two characters make all the dumb maneuvers people in dumb horror movies make.

After the first attack, seeing the horrors in that basement, and then watching the policeman they finally tell about all of this get ripped to shreds, they do not get the heck out of Dodge as fast as they possibly can, but rather stop at some random house in the middle of nowhere. Trish declares they need to call someone. Exactly who she wants to call and what she will tell them is unclear. Even after Darry asks those exact, and very reasonable questions.

While watching this insane monster do insanely horrible things the two just sit and stare at him. Again, they don’t run. This film is all reaction shots. Over and over again something horrible will happen and the characters will just sit there, mouths agape. The camera cuts between the action and their reactions. Back and forth. Back and forth until I’m screaming that someone needs to do something. Maybe that’s supposed to be shock or something. Maybe real people would act that way when exposed to something so traumatic. But in a horror movie, they need to run or start shooting.

The acting is passable, the script isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is, and again the monster design is bad. Yet, I think I kind of liked it.

It has this laid-back, breezy quality to it. The film never takes itself seriously, but it isn’t winking at us either. It isn’t a hipster film smirking at its audience. The in-film stakes are very high – life and death – but the film never really expects you to care all that much. It wants you to have a good time watching a movie and that’s exactly what I did.