by Melissa Strong

Creeps are unpleasant, deviant, and disturbing people.  Real-life creeps tend to be repellent. Movie creeps, however, can be weirdly alluring. Some are even sexy in a sinister, disconcerting way. Sexy creeps are a longstanding tradition with strong ties to film noir, with their elegant femme fatales and dashing hard-boiled detectives. They can be psychologically manipulative, like Gregory Anton in Gaslight (1944); inscrutable with terrible secrets, like Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940); or violent, like Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), who makes wearing a t-shirt look both menacing and hot.