Smith, Chris (Creep)
Blood is being spilled in the UK again. You may have gotten a splash of the red stuff on you by now thanks to films such as 28 Days Later and Dog Soldiers, or the lesser known wartime fright fare Deathwatch and The Bunker. Well, don’t stow away your raincoats yet, fiends. Two more installments of Dog Soldiers is haulin’ ass into production with the first, a sequel (the other a possible prequel), due sometime in early ’05. Before then, however, Dan Films will release a film entitled Creep in the UK around Halloween. Oh, you’ve heard of it, have you? That’s good, because we’ve been eyeing this one since it was announced. Up until this point not a whole helluva lot was known about Creep other than it took place in the London underground and concerned a young gal, played by Anatomie‘s Franka Potente, being pursued by a maniac. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, shades of Gary Sherman’s Deathline (a.k.a. Raw Meat) are apparent, but how similar in vein is Creep to that 1973 film?
For that answer your devoted Rotten one tracked down Creep‘s director, Chris Smith.
The international call I place to him routes me directly to a London-based editing suite where the director is working on a cut of the film. This is a perfect time to catch up to any director as post-production is usually a process when excitement for the project is renewed following tiring weeks of principal photography. When we talk its days before the American Film Market opens its doors in Santa Monica where Dan Films has sent a Creep preview reel to lure potential international distributors, but right now that’s the farthest thing on Smith’s mind as he focuses on getting his grimy opus ready for October.
Consider this an advance interview, a precursor of sorts to much more coverage of the film that we’ll be offering as we near its release.
Ryan Rotten: Give me the lowdown, Chris. What’s Creep about, where’s it coming from?
Chris Smith: The basic back story is that under London there are hundreds of miles of disused tracks, old war rooms, laboratories. In World War II, for example, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were kept in these huge catacombs under London. Before D-Day they were brought to the surface and shipped off to fight. All these old areas that were once going to be used for lines are still down there. So if you venture off the track of the London underground and you get out of a train and go through one of the little cubbyholes, you’re going to find yourself in a maze. And they are genuinely there, we went down there. I know a movie like ‘Deathline’ kind of touched on the idea of people being trapped underground but they only showed a small side of it. So what I did was come up with a story that features these hidden areas and imagines a scenario that they might have been used for in the past. And that’s what’s so great about horror, you can really let your imagination run riot.
RR: Was there a mandate, tonally, that you set for yourself before running amok underground?
CS: I wanted it to be real. There are so many movies out there that kick themselves in the ass – like Jeepers Creepers – where you engage in what you think is real and then it gets all blown out of the water. I was very keen not to do that, in this movie we try to keep the realism. When you see who or what the killer is you’re not going to be disappointed. It’s awesome, absolutely awesome.
RR: Who pulled makeup effects duties for you?
CS: Hybrid, they did some stuff for Lord of the Rings. They’re a young company but they’ve done an absolutely fantastic job. [Creep actor] Shaun Harris’ makeup was like six to seven hours long, but when you see how amazing it looks that time span doesn’t seem that long time. I remember when I first saw him fully made up, I was taken to this dank little room in the underground, to find him sat in a corner behind an 
old boiler. Except it wasn’t Shaun it was Creep. And I’m not being all arty farty when I say that, but the transformation was incredible. Naturally that’s not just because of the make up, I mean Shaun’s a great actor, but why the make up is so good is that it didn’t impair his performance. He’s not a Jason or a Michael Myers, he’s not hiding behind a mask.
RR: In a recent UK genre magazine you’re quoted as saying Creep is a cross between Brigette Jones’ Diary and Alien. That’s a strange combo that I know, while we were setting up this interview, you wanted to clarify…
CS: Here’s where that came from. Basically when I was coming up with the original idea for Creep I thought: What would it be like to throw a pushy English girl, a Brigette Jones-y character, who needs her London lifestyle, into a world where someone like Ripley can survive in and see how she can get on? Because Ripley’s already a butch chick, so what would it be like if you took someone who needed her cell phone, her lipstick, and her designer clothes and put her in this dangerous situation? If anything ‘Creep’ is more like Martin Scorcese’s After Hours. It’s got much more of that mad nightmare ‘When’s this all gonna end?’ vibe. Plus it takes place over the course of a night.
RR: Care to explain Creep‘s origins?
CS: I had written another film, a thriller, that I was trying to get made. It had a crime element and at the time there had been a lot of bad British gangster movies being released, so no one was looking for anything with a gangster element. So someone said to me, ‘You should go and make a horror movie, horror movies are gonna be the next big thing.’ I had this idea for a long time about making a movie in the London underground, which, I never knew had ever been done. I mean, Deathline is a cult movie but it’s not anything that comes to you right away. Most people remember An American Werewolf in London. So I literally sat down and in six weeks knocked out a script that I thought worked. I gave it to Dan Films, who were originally going to be the producers of my crime film, and they said, ‘We should push this one, it can get made.’ We sent [the script] to Robert Jones and he called just after the Cannes Film Festival saying he wanted to make the film, from there it just rolled really quickly because three months later we were shooting.
Creep going to offer us that’ll set itself from the pack?
CS: In all nightmares you get to the point when you wake up. For me great horror movies are when you get to that point and you don’t wake up. The movies I remember as a kid are the ones that take you to that extra dark place like the crucifix sequence in The Exorcist or the girl on the hook in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – and it’s not all about splatter, but I like to go someplace really dark. What I think ‘Creep’ does is offer a slick opening, it’s a ‘Franka Potente film’, then we start layering it on. The fear of the dark. The fear of being alone. Until you’re literally in this human experiment lab and things are totally demented. People thought Blair Witch Project was so clever because you don’t see anything, I thought it was clever too, but it was clever for that movie. In Creep you don’t see anything for a bit, but the reveal is not disappointing. A lot of movies I grew up with, the splatter movies, they’re pretty badly done. But that was part of the pleasure. There’s one particular scene that’s in our film where we’re in a laboratory for five minutes and it could well prompt people to walk out of the theater.
RR: Sounds nasty. That doesn’t leave much room for humor now, does it?
CS: There’s a lot of black comedy. Our German producers looked at the film and said, ‘Chris this is really dark and scary.’ I’m like, ‘there’s some comedy in it!’
RR: Many of our readers out here are probably eager to know, since this sounds like a film that goes back to the stalk ‘n kill basics, what the grue quotient will be like. How far do you take the violence?
CS: We’re close to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. You feel more than you see. That’s not to say the film’s not gory, it most definitely is. You see torture and suffering, and there’s some close-ups, but these things are much more twisted when they are off camera. Like the ear cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs. 
He’s getting his ear cut off and he’s going to be covered in petrol but it’s his suffering that makes it unpleasant. Creep is kind of in that zone. I know where the edge of the cliff is. Here in England you can go a lot further than you’re used to. I think the things that become cult are films that go right to the edge. Look at The Exorcist, not only does Regan stick a crucifix in herself but then she grabs her mom and sticks her head between her legs! I mean, how did that ever get made?! I was explaining to the producers a scene I shot that made them say, ‘Whoa, I know that’s in the script, but you’ve really made that real and painful’. I was like, yeah!
RR: Now you managed to snag Franka Potente who dabbled in a little horror with Anatomie, and its sequel, then she went all Hollywood on us…
CS: Yeah, well, the part she plays is a girl who works for a model agency. She flies around the world, so I was free in the casting process. I could have anyone. I could’ve hired an American girl and put her in this English film, but that’s been done before. So I thought, let’s try and get a European girl. I saw her in Run, Lola, Run and I just thought she was a good actress and an interesting choice. She got to dress up and look nice in the beginning then gradually look rough as she grinds down. What I wanted to do, and this is something 28 Day Later did, is you go in with handrails: You go in knowing the star, the production value, the budget…but I gradually shift things away. The handrails are gone, you’re left in the dark. You find yourself in this environment that you’d usually find in a ’70s film. It’s like The Poseidon Adventure, she’s trying to get to the surface of London, she knows that humanity is only a few feet above her, but she’s being terrorized by this complete lunatic.
RR: Did you shoot completely underground?
CS: We did. That’s another pleasure of it. You’ll get to explore all these places beneath England no one usually sees. We used this disused station that was closed down in the ’30s. And anything that’s closed down has just been abandoned. Everything’s still down there. I don’t know why they don’t do tours down there. I mean there’s old World War II posters and cigarette machines down there.
Many thanks to Keeley Naylor, Chris Smith, Dan Films, and the rest of the Creep crew!
Categorized:Interviews News
