The V/H/S franchise has become an annual Halloween event on Shudder, and it could potentially deliver a genuinely spooky crossover with another another found footage horror franchise based on streaming platform. The V/H/S franchise combines the format of found footage with a horror anthology storytelling structure. Each movie includes multiple horror movie shorts presented as found footage, with all of them captured in a larger framing story. Since moving onto Shudder, the V/H/S franchise has been a major success for the platform and the biggest ongoing found footage game around.
The V/H/S franchise isn’t the only found footage series thriving on Shudder, with the ongoing Creep franchise also testimony to the power of found footage scares. Following its first two movies in 2014 and 2017, Creep has continued on Shudder with the series The Creep Tapes, with the show heading into its second season. With Creep every bit as chilling as absolutely terrifying horror shorts of the V/H/S series, the two horror franchises calling Shudder home could actually provide a foundation for a splendidly scary Creep–V/H/S crossover.
Creep Would Be Perfect as a V/H/S Segment
The Creep franchise focuses upon an unnamed serial killer (played by series co-writer and co-producer Mark Duplass) who typically lures his victims in by posting ads for phony videographer jobs. Once they’ve arrived, the killer terrorizes his victims and pushes them closer and closer to their breaking point before finally killing them, with Duplass’ killer and/or his victim filming the entire incident along the way. This places Creep firmly in the found footage genre, and gives it commonality with the format of the V/H/S franchise. Not only would a Creep segment fit right into the general found footage anthology layout of the V/H/S franchise, but their respective worlds already feel tonally perfect to join them together.
While Creep does not overtly involve any supernatural elements, the anthology storytelling style of V/H/S provides an easy workaround for that. A Creep segment in a V/H/S movie could easily keep Duplass’ killer in his own corner without any supernatural components in his own story (or perhaps even take the daring leap of putting some fantastical horror elements into the Creep segment). Of course, crossovers of movie franchises inherently face a lot of legal roadblocks, but that would also be much less of a problem for putting Creep into the V/H/S franchise.
V/H/S & Creep Are Both on Shudder (Making a Crossover Much Easier To Facilitate)
The V/H/S franchise has had an interesting release history, the franchise marking the beginning of Bloody Disgusting as a producer of horror movies with the first three films in the series distributed by Magnet Releasing. With 2021’s V/H/S/94, the series found its new home as the Halloween streaming tentpole title for the horror streamer Shudder, where the V/H/S series has thrived ever since (Bloody Disgusting is still heavily involved). Meanwhile, Creep has undergone its own migration to Shudder.
Produced by Blumhouse and Duplass Brother Productions, the first two Creep movies were respectively released by The Orchard domestically and Netflix internationally. The ongoing streaming series The Creep Tapes brought the franchise over to Shudder in 2024, and that could likely help make something like a Creep-V/H/S crossover possible. While there would surely be plenty of necessary contract negotiations between the respective production companies of the two franchises, their shared home on Shudder would surely help streamline such a meeting of horror franchises along with the two already having a built-in platform to debut a crossover on. From a narrative standpoint, there’s also plenty to suggest a Creep-V/H/S crossover could really deliver on its promise.
Why a Creep Tape in a V/H/S Movie Would Make for a Great Crossover
The Creep franchise has consistently been a fantastic exercise in psychological horror. Both movies and each segment of The Creep Tapes show Mark Duplass’ killer taking on a different kind of introductory persona to his victims, masked with a cheerful outward demeanor that gradually erodes as he begins to show his true colors. The killer’s werewolf-masked alternate personality of “Peachfuzz” has also become such a staple of the Creep franchise. It’s what many fans wait for and where its chilling tone really starts to become unsettling.
Duplass’ mysterious serial killer is also every bit as frightening as any monster or supernatural menace seen in the V/H/S franchise, while the slow boil of his filmed homicides always culminates in explosively terrifying ways. All of the above are absolutely musts for any segment in a V/H/S movie. Generating fresh ideas for short films to compromise a new V/H/S movie every Halloween is surely a complex process, and the V/H/S franchise could have one of its best ones baked in with the Creep franchise setting up a delightfully scary Halloween crossover of two great horror movie franchises.
V/H/S 8 and The Creep Tapes Season 2 will both arrive on Shudder this fall.
