Jeepers Creepers (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

How long has it been since you saw a good horror film?

They all pretty much stink now, don't they? The Others was a decent "surprise ending" film in the gothic ghost story tradition. "Sleepy Hollow" was good, as were the first two Hannibal Lecter movies. 

Hmmm  ...where are the teen horror films? Has there ever been a good one? Let's ask IMDb - 

Since 1990, only two teen horror films have been rated above 6.5 at IMDb - Scream and Final Destination. Neither of them is rated over 7.5. (Scoopy Jr and I would add a third one to the list - Idle Hands, but that one is more funny than scary.)  If you go back another 10 years, you add Evil Dead, two of the Nightmare on Elm Street flicks (#1 and #3), and The Lost Boys. Still none over 7.5. If you include all years since time immemorial, you get Halloween as the genre champion, with a mere 7.5, and Carrie joins the list at 7.1

Here's the all-time top 10. Not sure what the 120 days of Sodom is doing on the list.

This is not an easy genre to conquer. Look at it another way - there has never been a great one, and there haven't been that many good ones.

All things considered, I'd say Jeepers Creepers is good enough to be on that list. I'd have no trouble slotting it in the number 8 slot instead of that Sodom movie, and I'm completely comfortable telling you it is better than The Faculty or Scream 2.

In fact, it came very close to greatness.

Two teen siblings drive along a lonely country road, just bantering, when they are suddenly terrorized by an old beat-up truck that seemed to come out of nowhere at terrifying speed. They finally get away from the vehicle by ditching out into a field and resume their journey, only to pass an old church where the truck is parked. A mysterious figure is taking something, probably a wrapped human body,  from the truck and dumping it down a corrugated pipe into some kind of sewer or cellar.

What have the kids seen, and what should they do about it? 

The first hour of this film, the tale of the kids and their encounter with an inhuman horror beyond reason, is terrific. The stuff of nightmares. 

The last three or four minutes are also excellent, and the film has a surprisingly appropriate ending that avoided the genre cliches. 

 But when you saw an exact shape and precise features, he lost some of the most powerful terror - the unknown. Then when the psychic tried to give the back-story there was a whiff of cheese.

There were some good jump cuts, some shocks, some spooky visuals, and the film has moments that are genuinely creepy. The monster sometimes seems to be a bit too much like a superpowered version of that psycho killer in The Silence of the Lambs, but that was more like homage than rip-off.

I'd have to say this was a surprisingly effective movie, and I'm not surprised that it became a sleeper hit last summer.