Will There Ever Be a “Jeepers Creepers 3”?

by Chris Vegvary

I enjoy when someone is able to come up with a new horror character. None can beat the classic horror villains of the 1980’s, like Freddy Krueger, but it’s always nice when a new mascot for the genre emerges. And so it was for me when the 2001 film Jeepers Creepers came out. Aside from having a compelling trailer that introduced me to my first taste of the music of the band Disturbed, the movie itself was actually really good.

A pair of siblings, brother and sister, are on a road trip home from college. After the two are harassed by an old truck with the license plate “BEATNGU”, the brother, Darry, spots a strange sight while driving down the road; he sees the man from the truck had run them off the road dumping a large, heavy-looking sack wrapped tightly in rope down a drainage pipe, and the man also looks up and sees them just as they pass. After getting away from the man, Darry decides that he and his sister Trish should go back and check out what got thrown down the drainage pipe.

From there, things pretty much spiral out of control for the pair. It turns out that whoever the man is, he’s been collecting hundreds of bodies and preserving them like petrified wood in the basement where he lives, and some of the bodies turn out to be over a hundred years old. How, you ask? Because it turns out that the man is, in fact, not a man at all; it is a creature that wakes up for 23 days every 23^rd Spring in order to feed on certain people and replenish its body parts by eating theirs. Hence the license plate on the truck, “B EATNG U”. In the end, Darry is taken by the Creeper, who kills him and consumes his eyes.

The second film takes place a couple of days later and involves a vengeful father (whose son was taken by the Creeper) hunting the creature down in order to kill it. The Creeper begins to stalk a school bus full of high school athletes on their way back from a basketball game. While it doesn’t have a lot of time left before it has to go back to sleep for 23 or so years, the Creeper assaults the students in full force, but after a homemade-harpoon-gun blast to the face, the Creeper goes into hibernation again. At the end of the film, it is 23 years later, and the Creeper is only a day or so away from waking up.

There was a third film planned for the series called Jeepers Creepers: Cathedral, but all information on it seems to have dropped off the map. Were the first two films really hated that much? I’m aware that the second one wasn’t as well liked as the first one, but I thought they were both really good movies. It would have been nice to see the origin of the Creeper, but I suppose that’s never going to happen now. While the Creeper’s time may have passed, I still maintain hope of seeing him again in some form or fashion, whether it be a long-delayed movie, a comic book, or hey, how about a video game? Only time will tell.