Graham Barnfield
posted 30 January 2005

Comparisons between Christopher Smith's feature debut and Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972, aka Raw Meat) are widespread among horror fans since Creep crept onto the festival circuit last summer. 'Beneath Modern London Lives a Tribe of Once Humans. Neither Men Nor Women...They Are the Raw Meat Of The Human Race!' promised Death Line's tagline. Creep marks a return to this tradition, initiated by a director reared on video nasties in the 1980s.

The finished product is an uneven romp around the London underground, where Kate (Franka Potente) sets out to meet George Clooney and get famous for being famous. Instead she is pursued through a nightmarish subterranean hell, far away from the private-public partnerships pursued by Ken Livingstone. Nodding off at Charing Cross station, she finds herself locked in (as opposed to ripped off). Not to worry, here's the predatory Guy (Jeremy Sheffield), her yuppie drug dealer. But he's become a rapist. A chase ensues. Then something - Craig the Creep (Sean Harris, Ian Curtis in 24 Hour Party People) - turns them both into prey. An hour of frantic pursuit follows, pausing to take out a mixture of homeless people, sewage workers and jobsworth London underground employees along the way. (At a recent Frightfest appearance, Smith told me that he got around London Transport's notoriously prudish film policy by not telling them much about his movie's gruesome content, even though it was all there in the approved script.)

The film is rich in production design. Smith's cast are planted deep in a succession of grim environments: storerooms, waste reclamation plants, a secret medical research facility. The Creep acquires some vague motives for his actions and, against the backdrop of his signature entourage of rats dwindling in size, viewers shift from a seemingly string of chases to a prolonged spell of torture. The climax is in this vein, leaving sufficient ambiguity for a sequel.

In fairness to Smith, he does take some risks. He creates a bunch of instantly dislikeable characters, including the shallow Kate and the whinging George (Vas Blackwood), attracting a lot of criticism in the process. The Creep is unpleasant but seldom scary, despite Harris' great bit of physical theatre. The guerrilla warfare in Smith's contract negotiations have apparently opened things up for future Underground filmmakers.

So like a fair number of recent British horror pics, Creep is comfortable living inside the constraints of the genre while episodically kicking against them. It begs the question of why someone would continue filmmaking, preaching to those of the converted who still remember Death Line. Working along these lines may produce the odd breakout with mainstream audiences, but the question 'what's the point?' was never far from this critic's mind.