Twenty-five years ago, Jeepers Creepers arrived in theaters and looking back at the movie now means looking at two very different stories at the same time.
There is the story of Jeepers Creepers itself: a wonderfully strange, genuinely frightening monster movie that arrived at exactly the right moment for horror.
And then there is the story of Victor Salva.
Jeepers Creepers opened on August 31, 2001, just days before September 11 would change virtually everything about American life and culture. Horror itself was also at an interesting crossroads. The Scream era had revitalized the slasher movie during the 1990s, but by 2001 the self-aware slasher formula was beginning to run its course. The remake explosion of the 2000s hadn’t really started yet. Neither had the much more brutal wave of horror that would characterize part of the decade.
And then this new monster movie showed up.
A brother and sister are driving home from college through the middle of nowhere. An enormous, rusted truck suddenly appears behind them. They encounter a strange man apparently dumping bodies down a pipe beside an abandoned church.
And for quite a while, nobody watching the movie knows what the hell they’re looking at.
That’s one of the things that made Jeepers Creepers work so well.
At first it could almost be a serial-killer movie. Then it becomes something else entirely. The Creeper isn’t a man. He isn’t Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees. He isn’t another wisecracking 1990s slasher villain.
He’s a monster. Pure and simple..
The mythology slowly reveals itself: every 23rd spring, for 23 days, this ancient creature emerges to feed on human beings, consuming parts of their bodies that it can then use to regenerate its own.
Made for roughly $10 million, Jeepers Creepers opened at number one at the American box office. It made approximately $13 million during the three-day weekend and nearly $16 million over the four-day Labor Day period, setting a Labor Day opening record at the time. Worldwide, it ultimately grossed around $59 million.
The movie actually became the HORROR REPORT’S 2001 movie of the year and proved from this screenshot:
Two years later, Jeepers Creepers 2 actually broke the Labor Day record established by the original.
A franchise had been born.
But there was another story behind Jeepers Creepers, and it had begun long before anyone saw that truck barreling down the highway.
Victor Salva had already been convicted of sexually abusing a child.
In 1988, Salva pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his sexual abuse of Nathan Forrest Winters, the 12-year-old star of Salva’s 1989 movie Clownhouse. Salva had also videotaped one of the encounters. He was sentenced to three years in prison and served approximately 15 months.
That distinction needs to be made clearly when discussing this history today: these aren’t allegations that surfaced years after Jeepers Creepers. Salva was convicted.
And yet he returned to filmmaking.
Francis Ford Coppola, who had helped finance Clownhouse, continued to support Salva’s career. Salva eventually directed Powder for Disney, released in 1995.
That movie generated controversy when Winters publicly protested its release and questioned why Hollywood was providing another major filmmaking opportunity to the man who had abused him.
But Salva continued working.
And eventually he made Jeepers Creepers.
There is something worth remembering about 2001, though, particularly for those of us who actually lived through this period rather than discovering these movies decades later through the internet.
Information didn’t travel the way it does now.
There was no Twitter. No Facebook. No TikTok. Google itself was only a few years old. You didn’t necessarily watch a movie trailer, immediately search the director’s entire history and then spend the next hour reading thousands of people arguing about whether you should see the movie.
For a tremendous portion of the audience walking into Jeepers Creepers, Victor Salva was simply a name appearing during the credits.
I remember even reporting on my own website years later about Jeepers Creepers potentially becoming Victor Salva’s salvation and wondering aloud how much his past should be part of the story. Had punishment occurred? Was forgiveness possible? Was there a point at which somebody was permitted to work again?
Those were uncomfortable questions then and they remain uncomfortable questions now.
But history also demonstrates that society goes through cycles of judgment, forgiveness, reconsideration and sometimes judgment again.
What happened in 2001 wasn’t necessarily widespread acceptance or forgiveness of Victor Salva. For many people, it was simply a lack of widespread knowledge. As the internet matured and information became easier to find, that changed.
People researched Salva. His conviction became increasingly associated with the franchise he had created. And inevitably, audiences began looking backward at the movies themselves through an entirely different lens.
Things that might once have seemed merely strange began receiving considerably more scrutiny.
There is the scene involving a man urinating in the original. There is the second movie and its prolonged focus on a high-school athletic team composed largely of young, muscular male characters. And eventually there would be Jeepers Creepers 3, containing a subplot involving a teenage girl and inappropriate sexual attention from her stepfather.
It would be irresponsible to declare that every one of those creative decisions reveals something about Salva’s intentions. We cannot know that.
But it is equally impossible to pretend audiences haven’t reexamined those scenes differently after learning what the filmmaker had done.
And by the time Jeepers Creepers 3 was being made, everything had changed.
Then the casting process created another controversy.
A casting notice sought an 18-year-old actress to portray a 13-year-old girl whose backstory involved inappropriate sexual advances from her stepfather. Breakdown Services ultimately removed the casting notice and project from its system.
Suddenly the story surrounding Jeepers Creepers 3 wasn’t simply that the Creeper was coming back.
Victor Salva’s past was coming back with him.
And when the movie was screened in 2017, the controversy became even worse.
Reviewers reported that one version contained dialogue appearing to rationalize the stepfather’s sexual attraction to the teenage character. That dialogue was reportedly removed from the theatrical version, but the damage was already being done.
There were boycott efforts. A planned Los Angeles screening was canceled amid controversy and threatened protests. Entertainment publications that might once have simply written about another Jeepers Creepers sequel were instead explaining to an entirely new generation what Salva had done.
And then came an extraordinary piece of historical timing.
Jeepers Creepers 3 received its theatrical event release on September 26, 2017.
On October 5 — only nine days later — The New York Times published its investigation into Harvey Weinstein.
The #MeToo reckoning exploded across Hollywood.
Suddenly an industry that had spent decades wrestling, sometimes very poorly, with questions about separating artists from their behavior was being forced into a completely different conversation about power, abuse, accountability and who continued receiving opportunities despite their conduct.
Salva’s conviction was nearly three decades old by then. But the cultural judgment surrounding it was new.
And after Jeepers Creepers 3, Victor Salva essentially disappeared from mainstream filmmaking.
There has been no subsequent Salva-directed feature film released. When the franchise returned in 2022 with Jeepers Creepers: Reborn, Salva wasn’t the director. The monster he created continued without him.
Which brings this story back to the summer of 2001.
Because despite everything that subsequently happened to the reputation of its creator, something strange has happened to Jeepers Creepers itself.
The movie survived.
And personally, I understand why.
I remember going to see Jeepers Creepers with friends on a fateful summer night when it came out. I remember driving those long, winding roads to the theater and then driving those same dark roads back home afterward. Before a stop at Perkins when we met a girl who was pretty and nice, and joining the military.. we never saw her again and 9/11 happened just days later. I wonder to this day if she also remembers that strange chance encounter herself…
If you’ve ever lived somewhere surrounded by mountains, woods and roads that become completely black at night, you’ll understand why Jeepers Creepers was probably the perfect movie to watch before that drive home.
Jeepers Creepers reinvigorated the enjoyment of horror.
It wasn’t another slasher. It wasn’t simply trying to outdo the last movie with more blood. Somebody had created an actual monster with its own mythology, its own rules, its own appearance and an instantly recognizable presence.
After the Scream-dominated era of the 1990s, that felt incredibly refreshing.
Twenty-five years later, Jeepers Creepers has staying power.
There remains this strange exception audiences seem willing to make for the movie itself even when they aren’t willing to make that exception for Victor Salva.
Perhaps that’s because movies ultimately become bigger than the people who make them. Hundreds of people participate in creating a film. Actors give performances. Crews build sets. Musicians create scores. Audiences attach their own memories to what they see.
And eventually a movie becomes part of somebody else’s life.
That doesn’t erase what Victor Salva did.
Nathan Forrest Winters was a child when he was abused, and any retrospective about Salva’s career that treats his conviction as merely an inconvenient footnote would be doing a tremendous disservice to the person who actually suffered because of his actions.
But acknowledging that history doesn’t require pretending Jeepers Creepers wasn’t important.
Both things can be true.
Victor Salva committed terrible crimes against a child, was convicted, served prison time, returned to filmmaking, found enormous success with Jeepers Creepers, and eventually watched public attitudes toward his past change dramatically as a new generation learned what had happened.
…that’s the complicated legacy we’re left with 25 years later.
A movie that arrived during the final days of one version of America, just before September 11, at a transitional moment for horror itself. A monster that seemingly came out of nowhere and became an icon. A filmmaker whose disturbing history gradually became inseparable from discussions about his creation.
And memories of driving home on dark summer roads after seeing something genuinely new.
Every 23rd spring, for 23 days, the Creeper gets to eat.
Twenty-five years later, people are still talking about him.
They’re just talking a lot more about the man who created him, too.
