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Mr. Creepo

If you only know Mr. Creepo from his series of ultra-B-movies with ultra-hot “Creepettes”, well, you don’t know Mr. Creepo. The New Jersey native has been a fixture in the cult underground since first publishing paranormal tomes in the ’60s, through editing slap mags in the ’70s, and breaking into the film world in the ’80s with an X-rated Michael Jackson take-off.

His schlock classics are available for purchase at MrCreepo.com and his ongoing journey into the unexplained can be followed at ConspiracyJournal.com. But first take a moment and listen to the great man recollect his childhood sighting of a UFO and working with Scream Queen Debbie Rochon. What a lucky creep!

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Who is Mr. Creepo?
Mr. Creepo is not of this earth. Some say he is a demon in disguise, others say he was born as a space alien. There’s some area of dispute on that. Now, if you asked me what were my influences . . .

That was my next question.
OK, two influences, in addition to being Mr. Creepo, most of my time is spent being Mr. UFO. I’m one of the nation’s leading--if there is such a thing--authorities on unidentified flying objects.

I have been publisher of various magazines. In fact I have a company that specializes in the paranormal pursuits. We put out the Conspiracy Journal. Over the years I’ve been editor for thirty different magazines, a lot of them lend themselves to this area of pursuit.

When I was growing up--I guess I was ten years old at the time--I had a sighting of two strange objects in the sky over the house I was living in in New Jersey.

How the horror part came to be, actually I have to blame this all on Nancy Reagan. Nancy Reagan who was Nancy Davis at the time, and she was the star of a B-movie. The film was Donovan’s Brain. I don’t remember what year it was, but I do remember it was playing on TV. I must have been fairly young at the time--I don’t remember, seven or eight years old--and it was on rather late. In those days kiddies didn’t stay up to the wee hours like they do now [laughs]. You had your milk and cookies and you went to bed at an appropriate time.

My mother, who was in charge, wouldn’t let the young Mr. Creepo stay up to see Donovan’s Brian. But I could hear it from the other room. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie, but the sound of the brain being kept alive in a jar is, like, ba-boop, ba-boop, ba-boop. To the ears of an innocent young monster growing up it was shocking. For years I had to sleep with the lights on because Nancy Reagan was in Donovan’s Brain. Of course, I’m sure, years later lots of people had to sleep with the lights on due to Ronald Reagan, but that’s another story for another time.

How does living in New Jersey, home of the Jersey Devil, influence your work?
I probably wrote about the Jersey Devil in one of my earlier books. There’s a book that I did in the early 1960s. Listen to this, I failed English in high school, or they booted me out with the lowest grade possible, but I’ve become a publisher and author of about twenty-five books myself, some of which have sold very well over the years, all over the world and have been translated into many foreign editions.

Books on the paranormal?
No, actually, they’ve been books on everything. I’ve written books on rock music, I have edited science-fiction magazines. I edited a book on football without ever having watched a game of football. I was even the editor of Moped Action magazine, which fortunately or unfortunately only lasted one issue because, first of all, there wasn’t much to say about mopeds and there certainly wasn’t very much action.

Despite my bad grades in school, I managed to overcome that. I was editing my first little fanzine, which was printed off a mimeograph machine. I had saved all this money up since I was in kindergarten and I went out and [spent] three or four hundred dollars on a mimeograph machine, which was of course long before we had cheap photo off-set and Kinkos, things that we have now. I started putting out a newsletter on UFOs and things along that line.

I’ve always been in the publishing and entertainment fields.

Is that where you first wrote about the Jersey Devil?
No, I kind of got off the subject there. The first book I wrote was for a publisher in Clarksburg, West Virginia, friend of mine, who actually wrote the first book about the Men in Black called They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. This is long before Hollywood came along and fictionalized that.

I had written a book, I guess I was about fifteen years old at the time, and the book was called The Shaver Mystery in the Inner Earth. It was about beings that supposedly lived inside the earth and creatures that come up from the caves and from out of the ground, and so forth, and one of them that I wrote about in the book was Jersey Devil. This would have been in the early 1960s before it became very popular in folklore and made famous in The X-Files.

I had gotten some clippings all about the people who had been menaced by this creature in the Pine Barrens near Atlantic City. I guess this all kind of led up to Mr. Creepo.

Also, in the 1970s, from 1974 to 1976, I was the movie review critic for Hustler magazine.

Right, I was going to get to that . . .
That kind of ties in, too, because I had reviewed all these, ah, fuck films, I guess you would call it, adult movies, erotic entertainment, and met a lot of the stars of the day. I was always intrigued by filmmaking. 42nd Street was the big place at the time for these movies to be shown and, God, there must have been hundreds of theaters around Times Square in New York that were showing these films.

I got the opportunity to interview for Hustler and other magazines--I went on to write for Velvet, Genesis, Swank, and so forth. I met a lot of people who were big in the X-rated films of the time, and also people who were doing other kinds of films on 42nd Street. In addition to the porn there was what we called the secondary B-movie market. In those days for a dollar or seventy-five cents--whatever the admission was--not only did you get to see a feature, but the second movie as well.

Who did you meet?
Of the porn variety, there would have been Vanessa Del Rio, Sharon Mitchell, I had lunch with Marilyn Chambers one time. You might ask was this all professional or did it lead to other things--well I can’t tell you all of that. But I did find it an entertaining and interesting period of my life, certainly not easily forgotten.

What about non-porn players?
Sam Sherman was a big distributor at the time, showing his films in Times Square and also the drive-ins across the country. You got to see all these zombie holocaust movies and Dracula vs. Frankenstein. Of course the cannibal movies were very big. The stuff that could be classified as snuff, like I Spit on Your Grave or I Eat Your Worms or whatever it was.

I worked for a couple of small film companies as a publicist. I was making a name and reputation for myself on the theatrical side of things as well as publishing. I was writing for a lot of these men’s magazines, what we called men’s adventure magazines in those days. This was just when Hustler was starting. That was the first really hard type of magazine. There were a lot of exploitation magazines that were out there that I was writing for, like Violent World, Men’s Action, Stag, and so forth. They might have run a feature of two pinups, but their main thing was men’s adventures and women being kidnapped by the Japanese and the Nazis, being branded and all that.

I had met up with a young lady who was editing a rival magazine. After Hustler I became editor-in-chief of a magazine called Adult Cinema Review, which I think is still being published. It was a fairly big magazine in those days. We ran photo spreads of the different porn actresses and interviews with directors and producers. It wasn’t all just hardcore.

This gal was the editor of a rival publication called Cinema Blue and we decided after having seen all these movies together and having reviewed them and interviewed everybody who was in them, that possibly we could do something that might be one step beyond that.

In 1984 we produced a movie called Driller.

You’re anticipating my next question again. I want to talk about that adult-movie take-off on Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
That was the start of my film career, if you want to call it that, as an actor and pseudo-director. The character Mr. Creepo developed from the character I played there called Quasimodo, the hunchback. It’s the face that we use in the corner of all our video boxes.

That was the beginning of Mr. Creepo, this kind of menacing but lovable imp of an actor.

How do you get such hot, young “Creepettes” to get naked and do the perverse things you ask them to perform on camera?
It seems to me today that everybody wants to be naked in front of a camera. My God, you go to the Internet and type in any fetish you can possibly think of and you get three hundred thousand photographs without even having to pay anything! It seems to me that there are a lot of people out there willing to pose in front of a camera.

Now, just finding someone that is willing to pose in front of a camera isn’t exactly what I do. There are a lot of people I’ve seen over the years that have been willing to pose in front of the camera, but I just didn’t think they had the personality.

In addition to finding some hot young things that are willing to strut their stuff for all to see, I’m also looking for gals with a little bit of personality or something to say on their own besides the nudity. I kind of look at it like the Andy Warhol of B-movies, because he picked, instead of celebrities or people with any kind of recognition in the movies, he picked people off the street who had their own individuality, their own personality. Some of them were kind of warped, to say the least. I think I carry on in that vein.

Some of the people we’ve gotten from the fetish arena, like Persephone, she’s got quite a number of websites out there and does all the fetish balls. Debbie Rochon is one of the top Scream Queens. She’s been in close to one hundred movies by now.

I was going to ask you how you two hooked up, as she’s one of the more established people that you’ve worked with.
I first met Debbie at a film festival near Syracuse [New York]. Debbie was on the program. We had a nice chat, and when I was ready to do The Sandy Hook Lingerie Party Massacre I was looking for a leading lady or someone with a recognizable name and I decided to give Debbie a shout. She honored me with her presence in the movie, and she does a great job. She’s the gal with the acting ability. She helps to hold it all together.

That’s one of your more traditional sex-gore features.
Yes, but I wouldn’t call it sex. It’s exploitation. That’s what Mr. Creepo is trying to do: bring exploitation back into the movies where it belongs. We make no bones . . . well, maybe we pick a lot of bones [laughs], but we certainly make no bones about that. That’s certainly what we’re trying to do.

Skin Eating Jungle Vampires appears to have actually been filmed in a South American jungle. How’d you swing that?
It was shot in Costa Rica, at least part of it was. Part of it was shot in Costa Rica and other parts in Summerset, New Jersey. How did we do that? It took a lot of travel points. I put all my expenses on my American Express card--all of my publishing stuff. It amounts to quite a bit at the end of the year. I think at one point I had like three hundred thousand travel points, so I took a couple people over there to shoot the volcano scenes and a lot of the jungle stuff. The interior of the volcano that explodes, where the Creepettes who are really she-creatures from outer space inhabit for many centuries after their ship crashed on earth and they’re only able to survive eating the bones and blood and guts of tourists. We made a cave in New Jersey, in the woods there. The place was pretty much like the jungles of Costa Rica to be honest with you.

Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires is subtitled The Curse of Ed Wood. Do you feel cursed by the legacy of this infamous auteur?
Let me explain what happened. Barely Legal Lesbian Vampires: The Curse of Ed Wood was shot on the hottest weekend of the summer. Everything that could possible go wrong went wrong. We shot this movie with a lot of people into the Goth scene.

As things went on and weren’t coming out right we decided to have a séance. So we went to the cemetery and called up the spirit of Ed Wood, which is in the film. I have actually been trained in mediumship, so even though it’s somewhat of a satire or a spoof I do believe there is a good possibility that we did call up the spirit of Ed Wood because that kind of humor that was in his movies comes through in what we did.

Why conjure his spirit as opposed to some other B-movie director?
I was influenced a lot by what Ed Wood did. I realized that you didn’t necessarily have to have a million-dollar budget in order to have an interesting film. Plan 9 From Outer Space being about UFOs was one of my favorites. It just seemed natural. He had always been on my mind. When people asked me what kind of movies I make, I’d say B-movies and they’d say, “Oh, you mean like Ed Wood.” I guess that’s how that came out. It just seemed like a natural thing to do.

What’s next for Mr. Creepo?
We have a film that’s in the works now and we’re almost finished editing it. It’s called Blood Spurting Vampire Freaks, probably out by the end of the summer. It has one of the most kinky and unusual fetish scenes featuring a person by the name of Violet Sweet. I can’t really tell you that much about the scene, except to say when I previewed it recently that a couple of people faced away from the screen and a couple of older ladies walked out of the screening.