Creep [2004]

This is the first British entry in the post-millennial back-to-the-1970s horror trend that began with homage in Wrong Turn and Cabin Fever, switched to pastiche with House of 1000 Corpses and Resident Evil, then turned to outright remake in redux takes on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead. Like all these films, Creep tries to recapture the grimy, gory intensity of the ground-breaking, radical horrors of the '70s. In true video nasty style, the earlier scenes feature short, sharp shocks as characters are yanked out of frame to be returned with bloody mortal wounds, but as the night progresses, these give way to protracted scenes of torture - the appalling death of the junkie Mandy, strapped to a delivery table in a parody of surgical procedure - and the violent tit-for-tat of the heroine's conflict with the monstrous, yet pathetic Creep.

While the American films in the cycle tend to look to Tobe Hooper and George A. Romero for inspiration, Christopher Smith draws mostly from Gary Sherman's still-undervalued 1972 Death Line [aka Raw Meat] - the one about the cannibal ghoul ['mind the doors!'] in the London Underground, descendant of Victorian navvies trapped in a cave-in, who picks off commuters for food and is tracked to a filthy lair by Donald Pleasence's drunken copper. However, stirred into the mix are other gruesome British horror pictures of the era, made outside the cosy confines of Hammer Films' Transylvania, in which a wretched underclass, left to fester unnoticed in the crannies of a stratified society, turns to cannibalism, psychotic murder and a love of tormenting those temporarily weaker than themselves - Jack Cardiff's The Mutations, Jim O'Connolly's Tower of Evil, Pete Walker's Frightmare, Freddie Francis's The Ghoul. There is even a distant echo, in the evoked-but-unexplained backstory of Craig the Creep [who, admittedly, looks most like the deformed Jason of the first Friday the 13th], of Joseph Losey's The Damned, in which a group of children are irradiated and raised in an underground facility to inherit the world in the event of a nuclear war. Most of the American entries in the current cycle pare away the content of the '70s originals, reprising the splatter but not the social comment, but this makes a fair fist of linking its monster with a panoply of 'issues' - homelessness, drug addiction, unethical experimentation, the secret state, perhaps even the inadequacies of public transport in the capital. It isn't as successful in this as the more pointed Death Line, but at least an effort has been made around the edges of a picture mostly concerned with cramming its suspense and horror into a single night of storyline.

The cleverest chill in Creep comes at the climax, when the heroine and soon-to-be-killed sidekick finally get the upper hand, battering the monster into submission and Craig makes a pathetic plea for his life which touches their hearts [a moment that occurs in most of these films, reminding us that the monster is an abused child at heart]. However, the speech carries on too long and prompts a realisation that Craig doesn't understand what he is saying and is merely repeating what his last victim [Mandy] said to him as he tortured her to death, with a malevolent final smile that hints the monster knows exactly how cruel he is being. Also tantalising and effective is the Phantom of the Opera-style vision of a lost world under London, accessible to those who ignore the 'passengers should not pass beyond this point' notices: not only abandoned underground stations, but also record rooms full of untouched files of unspecified documents, Vietnam-style submerged cages in the sewer system, Cold War hold-out shelters and medical research facilities located suspiciously near Downing Street. The film rushes through these locales with characters too busy fighting for their lives to wonder at the thrown-away wealth around them, but a mix of London locations and German sets gives the backdrop enough detail to compensate for the fairly ordinary up-front story.

Though it doesn't explain too much, the Creep script does cram too much in -the monster [expressively played by Sean Harris, Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People] has presumably been in his lair for years, working at breaking down the wall found in the opening scene, but racks up a remarkable body count in a brief reign of terror, performing the traditional horror film trick of showing up wherever he is needed to deliver a scare or slaughter a supporting character. Franka Potente's Kate, in a yellow party dress barely held together by a single button, is established early as shallow but redeemable, inevitably gaining maturity through suffering - but the actress's natural ferocity doesn't quite sit with the character. Kate goes from someone who flashes £20 or £50 notes at homeless druggies to get a rail-card or directions to an emergency intercom to a bedraggled survivor mistaken by a commuter for a beggar, presumably growing out of being the kind of girl who'd cross London for a chance to throw herself at George Clooney simply by virtue of witnessing a couple of murders and overcoming a persistent monster. Potente always looks like a kickboxer in a frock, which makes her credible when she fights back, but not as the sort who could ever be at the mercy of a yuppie drug-dealer called Jeremy - or even a deformed homicidal maniac.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Sight & Sound February 2005

Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com