Jeepers Creepers 3 is a 2017 horror film written and directed by Victor Salva, and the third film in the Jeepers Creepers series, being both a sequel to the first film and a prequel to the second, taking place during the same 23-day cycle.
Picking up immediately after the end of the first film, the Creeper is still continuing its rampage as a posse of its former victims pursue it and a piece of it left behind 23 years ago may prove key to stopping it.
The third film contains examples of
- All Girls Like Ponies: Addy is a teenaged girl who is introduced while riding her horse and showing sadness upon learning that her grandmother has to sell that horse.
- Ancient Evil: After looking into the Creeper's mind through its severed hand, Tashtego discovers that the Creeper has been around feeding on humans and hibernating for millennia.
- Ascended Extra: Kenny was just mentioned a few times and appeared as a corpse in the first film but here has several scenes through his ghost and flashbacks. Sgt. Tubbs also has a somewhat bigger role this time around.
- Berserk Button: The Creeper takes being shot at in stride, but it gets seriously pissed off when its hat gets damaged.
- Bring It: After recording her call to arms to destroy the Creeper, Trish dares it to come and get her.
- Brown Note: When the Creeper retrieves its hand and finds a note that reads, simply, "We know what you are", it lets out a scream that causes the crows that have been flocking around it throughout the film to start dropping dead from the sky.
- Call-Forward: In the end, Buddy boards a bus going to a basketball tournament (though, as noted below, a line of dialogue indicates he will skip the return trip, so he'll avoid that nasty situation outright).
- Chekhov's Gun: The amputated Creeper hand that falls from above in the opening scene.
- Drama-Preserving Handicap: The Creeper has a lot of trouble pursuing Addison because of all the damage it has sustained. It gets trapped in its own boobytrap, losing an eye, making it difficult to throw a spear accurately. It tries to fly after her, but since it lost one of its wings in a previous fight it immediately loses balance. Then it also loses one of its feet when it gets hit by a truck, giving her enough time to get away entirely. Frustrated, he has to make do with the truck driver for spare parts.
- Familial Foe: The Creeper menaces the mother and niece of one of his previous victims, Kenny Brandon, due to a piece of his body being buried on their land and the Creeper wanting to eliminate anyone who might have obtained dangerous knowledge from the piece of his soul embedded in that body part.
- Finger Wag: The Creeper does this towards the cop that was escorting the tow truck driver, after he's already grabbed the latter.
- Foregone Conclusion: Since the film is set immediately after the first, it's certain that the Creeper will inevitably escape and be stopped in the second film before it goes back into hibernation.
- Friend to All Living Things: Addys friend Gracie is upset by her brother trapping rabbits and Addy herself is attached to her horse.
- Hoist by His Own Petard:
- Addison trips one of the Creeper's own booby-traps on him so she can escape from the van.
- Michael fires the massive anti-aircraft gun at the Creeper's van, but ricochets kill both Michael and his driver without penetrating the van's armor.
- One of the teenagers pisses on the Creeper's truck, then attempts to flee when one of his friends gets caught in a trap. The Creeper shows up immediately afterwards and probably would have ignored him if he didn't notice the scent on his truck.
- Hope Spot:
- One of Kirk's friends is the only one of his group to make it back to his bike and escape, and the creeper almost let him go before smelling he urine on his truck and becoming vengeful.
- When the creepers truck is taken to the impound yard by a deputy and tow truck driver the creeper shows up and takes it from them, but the leaves them unharmed as he drives off with it. Then it turns out he was just toying with them, comes back and takes the tow truck driver (although the deputy is spared a second time).
- Hunter of Monsters: While there's only one monster in the film, about a dozen hunters have spent over two decades training to fight it to avenge slain loved ones and remove a threat to their community. Their leader is the local sheriff, and one member has a mini-gun mounted on the roof of his pickup truck. Ultimately, the only thing that keeps them from being a Red Shirt Army is that most of them never actually encounter the Creeper.
- Interquel: The film's events take place between the first and second films.
- Mama Bear: in response to her dead son invoking Run or Die, Gayleen stays to confront the Creeper, but also tried to send her granddaughter away.
- Made of Indestructium: The Creeper's van is armored to the point that anti-aircraft rounds just bounce off the thing, including its tires.
- Men Are the Expendable Gender: Unlike the previous two films, all of the creature's victims are male, although fewer female characters encounter the creeper than in the previous films. As mentioned in the first film, his is due to Victor Salvo being tired of the horror cliche of teenage girls mostly being the slashers' victims.
- No Name Given: The Creeper, as usual. It's Almost averted for once when Buddy, Addi, Mr. Lombardi and a couple of Tashtego's men are hiding under some trucks and Mr. Lombardi says Tashtego's men had a name they called it by but he's interrupted before we can get a Title Drop.
- One Hit Poly Kill: The Creeper takes time to aim his spear so he can kill two teenagers with a single throw, as if it's a sport for him (it is).
- Our Slashers Are Different: This film expands the mythology by demonstrating that the Creeper has been around for centuries. It also reveals that the Creeper's severed hand can psychically imprint the Creeper's history into the mind of anyone who locks fingers with it, and that those it consumes can sometimes linger on as ghosts. Also, the Creeper is extremely protective of its secrets and can track its severed-but-still-living body parts, so it will kill anyone who it even thinks may have come into contact with its lost hand.
- Playing Possum: Some of the Creeper's victims that he stored in the back of his truck manage to survive for a while by playing dead.
- Redshirt Army: Zigzagged, most of Tubb's officers and Tashtego's men survive the movie, but that's also because most of them fail to encounter the Creeper up close throughout the film.
- Run or Die: Kenny’s spirit invokes this when pleading with his mother to take Addy and leave before the Creeper comes back, because the Creeper will kill any person on the property just to be sure that its secrets are safe.
- Scatterbrained Senior: Addi and Gracie believe Gayleen to be this due to how she’s been “shouting at the wind, calling it Kenny.”
- Screw the War, We're Partying: Kenny was taken by the Creeper all those years ago when the day after he witnessed an attack he still went out to the homecoming dance with his girlfriend, and in the present day, immediately after the battle with the creeper Buddy is headed to the state basketball championship (although
Fridge Horror is avoided when he mentions he’ll stay visit some relatives instead of coming back with the rest of the team, which ends up saving him from another Creeper encounter in the second movie). - Sequel Hook: 23 years later, Trish Jenner is preparing for a final battle with the Creeper.
- The Sheriff: Sheriff Dan Tashtego.
- There's No Kill like Overkill: In the flashbacks after Kenny accidentally got his hands on a piece of the Creeper he took it home, shot it several times and buried it as deep as he could, but it’s still waiting 23 years later.
- The Unreveal: We're not told precisely what the Creeper is, only that it's more important that it's very old. Nevertheless, the secret is sufficiently important for the Creeper to be extremely pissed that someone knows it.
- Urban Legend: It's implied that the Creeper's exploits are better-known among the locals than previous films had acknowledged, although the teenagers are too young to have lived through a previous round of attacks and assume it's this trope.
- Vertical Kidnapping: Several, including one of a motorbiking youth in mid-jump.
- Villainous Breakdown: It's only when the Creeper's enemies leave it a message saying "We know what you are" that it really voices anger, howling at the skies in despair.
- Weaponized Car: More like booby trapped car; the Creeper's "BEATNGU" van scores about as many on-camera kills as the Creeper does! The traps we see on screen include: twin lines of spikes on the roof and floor of the van's back door opening that can shoot out to form an interlocking grill, a harpoon launcher mounted under the rear of the van near the exhaust pipe, and an opening in the right side of the driver's seat that launches a spike out that reaches into a slot in the opposing wall, perfectly positioned to impale anyone trying to crawl from the cargo space into the driver's space. And the whole thing is armor-plated, including the windows and the tires, so heavily that even mini-gun rounds bounce off.
- Who You Gonna Call?: Tashtego's crew have been waiting 23 years for the Creeper's return so they can avenge their loved ones, and have been training in tactics and weaponry they hope can take the creature down.
- You Killed My Father: Tashtegos right-hand man Mikey Miller watched the creeper tear out his fathers heart and eat it the last time the monster showed up.
