Of all the holidays celebrated worldwide, no single day is more loved by the UTG staff than Halloween. With the arrival of October, the time has finally come to begin rolling out a plethora of features and special announcements we have prepared in celebration of our favorite day, including the one you’re about to read.

31 Days Of Halloween is a recurring daily feature that will run throughout the month of October. The hope and goal of this column is to supply every UTG reader with a daily horror (or Halloween themed) movie recommendation that is guaranteed to amplify your All Hallows’ Eve festivities. We’ll be watching every film the day it’s featured, and we hope you’ll follow along at home. If you have a suggestion, contact us and we may include your favorite scarefest in an upcoming column!

DAY 7: Jeepers Creepers (2001)

Justin Long is not The Mac Guy.

I mean, he is, sure – but that’s not how America should know him. They should know him as Darry Jenner, the shaken, terrified core of Jeepers Creepers. From his first seconds on screen, he radiates an innate likability, playing dumb road games with his sister, Trish (Gina Phillips), as they drive home for a college break. He isn’t much for cynicism or snark or trying to be cool, he’s more interested in why his sister’s still dating Poly-Sci Track Team Guy and trying to top her in a bout of gleeful name calling. In this way, his performance and presence is reminiscent of Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween – a hero who’s a hero simply because he doesn’t deserve what’s about to happen to him.

This is important, because while the movie isn’t particularly violent or sadistic (especially by the standards of a post-Hostel world), it does become increasingly bizarre. What begins as a lesson in Hitchcockian restraint (has a more ominous gaze ever been captured on film?) takes a number of sharp turns that only Long’s wobbly-kneed portrayal of dumb-struck fear keeps from flying off the road.

And yet, the movie itself feels classic; lived in. It’s the best urban legend that you’ve never heard; the most chilling explanation of what haunts every broken-down, boarded-up building on every desolate highway in America. It’s gothic and surreal and if you squint, it isn’t hard to pretend you’re watching someone’s nightmare sequel to The Outsiders – which is maybe what EP Francis Ford Coppola saw in the project. No horror movie in recent memory is so drenched in magic hour and classic cars and diners without trying to evoke any particular time period. And it’s funny, without dancing on the grave of the genre the way Scream did. Instead, it revels in pulpy gags derived from clever imagery and sharp dialogue.

Released into the horror wasteland of 2001 (along with The Others and Session 9), Jeepers Creepers was a hit, but not a big enough hit to signal a sea change in direction of the genre. That would have to wait until the following year, when The Ring would release the first of many long haired ghost children into the shadows of America’s multiplexes.

I promise you, whatever else you’ve heard: watch this movie. Watch it alone. Watch it in your basement with the lights off and your phone off (or at least screen down on the couch).

Watch it and pray for Justin Long.

Editorial written by guest contributor, director Chris Cullari
Last year’s Day 7 film: Let The Right One In

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Brian Leak

Editor-In-Chief. King of forgetting drinks in the freezer. Pop culture pack rat. X-Phile. LOST apologist.

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