Indie jack-of-all-trades Mark Duplass’ roots in the mumblecore film movement have given him a strong base for understanding how to capture the ups and downs of human relationships. His writing on films such as The Puffy Chair (2005), Jeff, Who Lives at Home (2011), and Blue Jay (2016) all focus on deconstructing what keeps people together and what threatens to tear them apart. The monsters in these stories are the frantic yearning for partnership, the unexpected ways people change, and past mistakes that linger like ghosts. Take these themes a few steps further, as Duplass has done in Baghead (2008), Creep (2014), and Creep 2 (2017), and you have yourself a strikingly magnetic horror film.

Often made under strict financial constraints and with mainly non-professional actors, mumblecore is a subgenre of American independent cinema. The movement began in 2002 with Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha-Ha, the Duplass Brothers’ relationship road trip movie The Puffy Chair, and Joe Swanberg’s LOL (2006) coming shortly after. Frank discussions surrounding friendship, sex, and insecurities shone an authentic light on this new movement in American cinema, evolving into something intimate, while at the same time plagued by the detachment that comes with new technology, something that similar films like Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990) or Noah Baumbach’s Kicking & Screaming (1995) didn’t have. Mumblecore films were born out of a definitively millennial era — flip phone and iPod in hand.

Read more – How Mumblecore Prepared Mark Duplass for Horror – Crooked Marque By EMALIE SODERBACK