Creep

I like horror, with my tastes running to slasher films and zombies. Sometimes I will branch out into some of the more extreme versions of horror but for the most part they leave me cold. A bonus of being a horror fan is coming across the occasional gem of a horror movie, and this is one of those. It's also a film that will have added scares for anyone who travels on the London Underground.

We meet 2 sewage workers, who discover an abandoned tunnel.. They decide to explore but they get attacked by something that was lurking down there. We then switch, rather abruptly, to a party in a house and Kate, a German woman who decided to head away from the party. She jumps on the tube but falls asleep waiting for her train and to her dismay she is locked in. That's when her REAL trouble starts and she gets stalked by the same thing that attacked the sewage workers, one of which survived and is locked in a cage. Several other people are dispatched in increasingly grisly and graphic ways, with a homeless woman being given a home made abortion and her boyfriend being beheaded. Suffice it to say that our German girl is the only survivor but at the end there is a truly haunting shot of her slumped on the station platform, bedraggled and exhausted and the first commuters of the day mistaking her for a homeless person.

This is not a film for the faint hearted, nor is it one you should watch just before taking a trip on the Underground. This is nasty, scary and at the same time, a brilliant horror film that does exactly what all horror films should do, it scares the bejeezus out of you. There are moments of gore but the overarching tone of this movie is of terror 'creeping' up on you, that terror that comes from not knowing what's going on or what is coming after you. The monster is only revealed fairly late on, and even then we only glimpse him through the flickering glimmer of a failing lighter which adds to the tension and heightens the jumps. The tone of this movie is grim but at the same time, that's exactly how it should be. I understand that this movie was inspired by (or ripped off!), an earlier English horror film called Death Line but this is one horror film that achieves scares and jumps in equal measure AND tells a good story.