Creep (2004 film)

Arthur (Ken Campbell) and George are London sewage workers who discover a tunnel in one of the walls. Arthur starts exploring the tunnel alone, while newbie George stays behind. After a while, George enters and discovers Arthur, injured and in shock. A similarly injured woman jumps out, crying for help, only to be pulled back into the darkness.

A young German woman, Kate (Franka Potente) decides to join her friend at a party and heads to Charing Cross Underground station but falls asleep on the platform while waiting for the train. When she awakens, she is alone; and the entire station has been locked up for the night. An empty train arrives, and she boards it; it abruptly stops and the lights go dark. She meets Guy (Jeremy Sheffield), a coworker who followed her and whose awkward advances she kept rejecting. Guy attempts to rape her, only to be stopped by an unseen aggressor who drags him out of the train. Guy briefly reemerges, covered in blood, warning Kate to run.

Kate flees and runs into a homeless Scottish couple living in a storeroom, Jimmy and Mandy, and their dog Ray. Jimmy reluctantly agrees to help her by taking her to the night guard after she pays him. They find Guy, horribly maimed but still alive. Mandy, left alone, is attacked and kidnapped, triggering Jimmy's sorrow-fueled escape into a heroin-induced stupor. Kate manages to communicate with the security guard through intercom, but the man gets killed before being able to call for help. Guy also dies of his wounds. Kate and Jimmy decide to walk through the tunnel to the next station. A train stops near them; Jimmy decides to face the killer to avenge Mandy, but he is slaughtered as well.

Fleeing, Kate falls into the sewer system below, where she finds Arthur's body. She also finds a storage facility with hundreds of boxes, where she is captured by the killer, the titular "creep"—a hideously deformed, mentally ill hermit named Craig (Sean Harris), who keeps his victims in semi-submerged, rat-infested cages until they're dead, after which he eats them. Kate is put in one of these cages, along with George. They escape and end up in an abandoned medical facility (looking like an illegal abortion clinic with a series of fetuses lined up along a wall), where they find an unconscious Mandy strapped to a surgical chair. Thinking she's dead, they move on. Craig appears, puts on a surgical gown, and mimics the gestures of a surgeon in front of a terrorized Mandy before he disembowels her with a bone saw, mimicking an abortion procedure.

Kate and George find the disused railcar where Craig lives. The dog, Ray, is there, along with old pictures of a medical doctor with a deformed child. Craig ambushes them and kills George. In a last, desperate effort, Kate sinks a hook and chain into Craig's throat, then has a running train rip it apart, and Craig bleeds to death. Disheveled, she gets back to the initial station, by which point it's morning. She collapses on the platform, and Ray curls onto her lap. Mistaking her for a beggar, a man waiting for the train leaves her a coin, and Kate breaks into hysterical giggles and tears.

• Franka Potente as Kate
• Vas Blackwood as George
• Ken Campbell as Arthur
• Jeremy Sheffield as Guy
• Paul Rattray as Jimmy
• Kelly Scott as Mandy
• Joe Anderson as Male Model
• Sean Harris as Craig, the "Creep"
• Morgan Jones as the Night Watchman

The storyline has been compared to the 1972 film Death Line, also set on the London Underground and featuring a cannibalistic killer. Director Smith, who had not seen Death Line, attributes his inspiration to a scene in An American Werewolf in London set in the London Underground.[3]

Creep has received generally mixed reviews from critics. It currently holds a 43% 'rotten' rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 14 reviews.[4]

Time Out gave the film a negative review, writing, "this London Underground-set slasher squanders a promising premise [...] for trashy shocks, old-school nastiness and a fistful of genre clichés."[5]

AllMovie's review was favourable, writing, "this pared-down shocker might be light on plot, but it's packed with creepy frights and psychopathic attitude from its mean main monster."[6]

Matthew Turner ViewLondon said "The performances are good, particularly Potente, who avoids scream queen clichés by making her character surprisingly unlikeable - Kate is rude and arrogant in her early scenes and the fact that she's German is, of course, a coincidence."[7]

• List of London Underground-related fiction

• Creep at IMDb
• Creep at Rotten Tomatoes