My streaming gem: why you should watch Creep
Is there anything creepier than someone who’s just a little too friendly? Think about the stranger who tries to chit-chat on the Tube, the colleague who stands too close, or the friend’s unblinking new partner who tells you about the risen Christ over a carbonara. That frightening line between sociable and sociopath is one that Creep plays with to thrilling effect throughout every second of its 80-minute runtime. It’s short but not sweet.
Filmed in a found footage style that’s mercifully unobtrusive, we see the movie from the perspective of Aaron (Patrick Brice) – a struggling videographer looking for easy money. The payday he’s driven to a creepy house in the woods to find, is the offer of $1,000 to spend the day filming Josef (Mark Duplass), who has terminal cancer and wants to make a video diary for his unborn son before he dies. Josef is an oddball from the word go and we know this because within seconds of meeting Aaron he’s got his arms around him in a tender embrace saying, “Trust me [at the end of the day], that’s not going to be anything weird at all”. It’s enough to make you physically shiver. A hug from the wrong person is somehow much more unsettling than a brandished knife. You know where you are with a blade, a hug could be anything. And it’s this constant uncertainty that makes the film so effective and frightening. Duplass, who also co-wrote the movie with Brice, has the comfortingly familiar face of a man you shared a house with at university but haven’t seen in 10 years and uses it to continually lull you into a false sense of security that you can’t even be sure is false. It’s a charismatic study in unpredictability. One minute he’s funny and charming, the next he’s making you film him in the bath, and the next he’s taking a practical joke too far. If there was ever a personality trait that’s an indicator of potential psychopathy, it’s an overzealous practical joker. They don’t want you to laugh, they want you to cry.
Aaron never cries but we do share his growing unease as the drip, drip of cumulative dread gradually pools at the base of his mind, insistent but just about ignorable. It’s easy to scoff at Aaron’s apparent naivety for driving into the woods to meet a total stranger and for ignoring what seem like red flags, but when you actually think about it, you start to see how plausible his predicament really is. In real life, if you saw an axe in a tree stump outside a house in the woods, as Aaron does at the beginning, you wouldn’t immediately think a murderer lives inside. When you see a shadow you don’t assume it’s a ghost. And once you’ve met the person and established rapport, it then becomes virtually impossible, even if you have suspicions, to confront them or run away. You might be wrong and the fear of social embarrassment is sometimes a more powerful force than the urge for self-preservation. No one ever really thinks that the weirdo is actually going to kill them. And the chances are, they won’t. There’s one moment, after several more fairly major warning signs, where Josef, silhouette in the darkness, stands ominously at the top of the steep steps leading to his house and tries to persuade Aaron to come inside for “one drink”. You’re screaming at him to say no but no is a hard word to say unless you’re absolutely certain being rude is the only option.
Made by Blumhouse – the company that also produced Paranormal Activity – Creep has their distinctive lowbudget minimalist feel that works so well for horror. A lot of genre filmmakers lazily assume that violence and gore will scare people the most but it never seems to work that way. Atmosphere, dread and the power of suggestion are much more disturbing and this underseen movie deftly uses all three to palm-sweating effect. It feels grounded in reality by refusing to go over the top. Like in many of Duplass’s movies, the dialogue is in large part improvised and the authenticity this gives it really does make it uncommonly believable. One or two all too easy wrong turns and Aaron could be you. The troubling question that lingers long after the film is: how would I react? Would you really heed the supposed warning signs or would you in fact be polite and go inside for that “one drink”? After all, kindness costs nothing.
Creep is available on Netflix in the US and UK
the outline of the song and then let them play live over it. We programmed the bass drum and the snare, then played them through loudspeakers and told the drummer to play everything else but those drums. So he could let fly without having to do the hard work of keeping time. It was one of several tricks I did with them.
I wanted to package them as gloriously pop with deeper layers. The band wanted to be more punky and we met nicely in the middle.
I thought the title Baby I Don’t Care was an emotive statement, so a young girl singing it was great. Then I had to deal with the problem of the riff. All my mates of my generation went “How could you? The riff is straight from [the Troggs’] Wild Thing.” I told them it wasn’t a rip-off, and in any case Nick’s riff was faster, had a different groove and that gave way to the lovely melody. The band were playing around with something. That’s what pop music is about.
In the studio, Wendy slept on the sofa, and if the guitar was out of tune or not quite right, Nick would play it 50 times to get it perfect. I sent the rest of the band home so I could work on the vocals with Wendy alone. It was obvious that she was new to this, but you can hear her energy, soul and passion on the record.
The famous scream at the beginning was an accident. Luckily, I always turn the record button on 20 seconds before a track starts, and she just let out this huge scream just to loosen up her voice, like a boxer entering the ring. I remember the engineer and I looking at each other and going “That’s great!” We asked her to do a few more but her initial roar had something raw, so that’s the one we used. Pop songs don’t normally start with a scream. I don’t think Madonna did that.
• Wendy James’s new album, Queen High Straight is out now. She tours the UK in September.
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I rediscovered reading
Shaad D’Souza
I know it’s something of a cardinal sin for a writer-by-trade to not really be a reader, but for the past few years, I’ve never really been able to find the time (or drive) to read books. Since I started writing and editing, my day-to-day has been a constant jumble of thinkpieces and corrections, news aggregation and email sending. By the time I clock off, there’s little I want to do less than read.
Most years, I’m lucky if I finish five books. When the pandemic hit, my fulltime contract was cut by about 75%, and many of the outlets I would usually freelance with cut budgets, so I was suddenly left with a lot of spare time and a lot of books I’d accumulated and never read.
Now, one of my lockdown joys is reading books again; I re-read Melissa Broder’s The Piscestwo weeks ago, and will probably finish Natasha Stagg’s Sleevelesstonight. I’ve got another two books lined up to read after that, and, even though restrictions are slowly lifting, I don’t think I’ll kick this habit too quickly. It seems obvious, but I’m finding that reading challenges me to sit with silence and helps build an attention span that’s been getting shorter and shorter.
Most of all, reading provides a kind of true escapism, free of notifications and news updates. And nowadays that, above all, is what I crave most.
My hands are finally clean
Alyx Gorman
Sometime in late February, well before lockdown, we were taught a simple way to stop the spread: don’t touch your face. As this super-cut of people touching their faces immediately after telling us not to makes clear, it’s an impossible directive.
But the other “stop the spread” suggestion – regular hand washing – is incredibly achievable. And I wasn’t doing it. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always washed my hands after using the bathroom or before I cook (I’m not an animal), but that was it. I didn’t wash my hands after handling money. I didn’t wash my hands after grocery shopping. I didn’t wash my hands after being on public transport. And then, because it’s impossible not to, I touched my face.
Now I wash my hands routinely and diligently, just like WHO tells us to. It costs nothing, takes little time, and I’ve come to find the ritual quite pleasant. I’m a relatively frequent coldcatcher, but even as the temperatures have dipped, I’ve not gotten sick.
It shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to teach me to do this – primary school should have done the trick. I’ll never stop touching my face, but even when a vaccine is found, I’ll be poking at my cheeks using freshly washed hands.
Have you developed any habits in lockdown you plan to stick with? Let us know in the comments.
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