Film Name: The Creeping
Director: Jamie Hooper
Writers: Jamie Hooper and Helen Miles
Starring: Riann Steele, Sophie Thompson, Jane Lowe, Jonathan Nyati, Taliyah Blair, David Horovitch, Phillipa Peak, Peter MacQueen
The Creeping is the debut feature from award winning writer/director Jamie Hooper. Starring Riann Steele (Debris, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Doctor Who, Crazyhead), Olivier Award winner Sophie Thompson (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Emma, Gosford Park, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) and Jane Lowe (Jonny Briggs, Bad Girls, Coronation Street).
Due to a traumatic childhood experience Anna is estranged from her family and hasn’t returned home for many years. With her ailing grandmother and only living relative, Lucy, suffering from increasingly worse symptoms of dementia, Anna moves home to look after her. Soon after, strange things begin happening. Though benign at first, events soon escalate into a nightmarish fight for her life against a malevolent presence. She discovers the ordeal is linked to a dark family secret, a tragic past that’s haunted Anna her whole life… and Lucy’s fading memories could be the key to solving the mystery and surviving the nightmare.
The Creeping is a horror drama that places as much emphasis on the story and characters as it does on the scares, told with emotional performances, striking cinematography, with evocative sound design and music.
Q. Your film The Creeping has been selected to play at the Arrow FrightFest Film Festival. Can you tell us what we can expect from the film?
Family, trust, and the bonds we form are integral themes of THE CREEPING. Families are supposed to protect and love you. When that trust is broken, and you learn dark secrets about your loved ones, how does it change you? That’s the journey our protagonist, Anna, goes on. At the core of THE CREEPING is the idea of inescapable evil. Home is the place we all feel safe, a sanctuary from an increasingly scary world. If your home is invaded by a malevolent force then where do you go? Home and family are universal themes everyone can relate to, and it’s within these subjects I wanted to explore the creeping thoughts that keep us all awake at night.
FrightFest audiences can expect an old-school creepy film that hopefully reminds them of classic spooky movies from the past. It’s got plenty of atmosphere and some good, old-fashioned scares. It’s a film with a dark mystery at the heart of a story about family, trust, and how past events sometimes catch up to haunt us.
Q. You co-wrote the story with Helen Miles. What was the process for you writing the script together and what were some of your influences?
The process of writing THE CREEPING initially began when Helen’s parents decided to move out of Greater London and ended up buying a stunning cottage in the Somerset countryside. I still remember the day Helen sent me some photos of the location. I messaged her saying, “you know what I’m going to say?” She responded, “we’re making a feature here.” So that was the initial spark of how the film came to exist. Helen’s parents were gracious enough to agree to let us use their home to make a film (thankfully I don’t think they were fully aware of what they were agreeing to). So we set about writing a story based around the location. The cottage itself is nearly 1000 years old, and has a Gothic church and cemetery right next door, so the location immediately screamed of classic horror and lent itself perfectly to a spooky story. Helen and I came up with the story together and I wrote the script based on our ideas. We reverse-engineered the story to fit the exact location, which is why I wrote scenes involving an outdoor swimming pool and private orchard, purely because the location had them. You don’t find many 1000-year-old cottages with outdoor swimming pools overlooking a Gothic church and cemetery, so we wanted to make use of everything the location provided. Being both idyllic and haunting in appearance, it was the perfect setting for an atmospheric horror feature.
My influences for THE CREEPING were wide and varied, but mostly come down to a handful of films and books such as The Others, The Changeling, The Innocents, The Uninvited, Poltergeist, The Woman in Black, The Amityville Horror, The Entity, The Orphanage, The Devil’s Backbone… not only some of my favourite horror films but some of my favourite films full stop. I feel The Uninvited (1944) is particularly overlooked but is a fantastic film. It deals with similar themes and ideas as The Creeping, such as taking place in a remote location that’s been home to violence in the past, with a person somehow related to the crime who returns to have the sins of their forebears visited upon them.
Q. What were some of your influences for the look and style of the film?
THE CREEPING is set in the eighties so that heavily influenced the look and style. I really wanted THE CREEPING to feel like it’d sit comfortably in the same category as The Changeling, Poltergeist, and other 70s/80s spooky films. I wanted to keep the 80s setting very subtle and not too in your face, so no pop culture references or synth music. We created the look and style with an effort from all departments from costume, hair & makeup, cinematography, set dressing, etc. I wanted the cinematography to emulate the look and feel of 80s films. Along with Ben Hecking, the cinematographer, we settled on shooting with some vintage Canon K35 lenses to give the film an authentic vintage look. Our Colourist, Megan Lee, graded the film with 80s films and film stock in mind. I also wanted the music to sound very orchestral rather than synthy, and the composer, Stephanie Taylor, did a great job of referencing old school horror films. Most of the films and TV set in the 80s usually take place in America and THE CREEPING takes place in the British countryside, so already that makes it a bit different to other “retro” stories. The combination of cinematography, colour grade, costume, hair & makeup, music, etc, really helps to sell the time period our story is set in.
Q. Did you make any changes from the original script during filming?
The script itself stayed exactly the same throughout production. Being a low budget indie film we had to plan everything precisely and didn’t have time to deviate from the script or create new scenes on a whim. We actually had to cut a few things from the script in order to capture the scenes we really needed, but they were mostly transitional scenes such as a character walking from one place to another. It was a good lesson in writing and filmmaking in general… if a story can work without a scene then get rid of it.
Q. What were some of your favourite moments during filming?
The entire cast and crew were fantastic so just working with them all and seeing the collaboration of their various skills was constantly great. We had two weeks of night shoots which was always interesting. We usually finished filming around 5:30am when the sun came up and then all sat in the garden having daily wrap beers at 6am. Peter MacQueen, who plays William, is a keen lepidopterist, so every morning we’d inspect his moth traps to see what he’d caught. Some of my favourite moments were with the three main cast members of Riann Steele, Sophie Thompson and Jane Lowe. Having those three women on screen and capturing their performances, then hanging out with them in-between takes, is definitely something I’ll always remember.
Q. Did you experience any issues during filming?
Like all low budget indie films the main issues were always not enough time. That becomes especially compounded when you’re doing night shoots during summer hours. We had to wait for sunset, film as much as we could throughout the night, then rush to finish before sunrise. Other than that the shoot went surprisingly smoothly considering how ambitious we were being with our schedule.
Q. What makes The Creeping stand out as something different in the horror genre?
I wanted THE CREEPING to be a much more personal film that you generally see in the horror genre. A lot of the time horror films have a random family move into a random house and strange things begin happening, but they have nothing to do with that particular set of characters, the scary aspect of the story could happen to anyone. I wanted THE CREEPING story to be specific to my characters, the darkness haunting Anna is explicitly related to her and wouldn’t happen to anyone else.
Q. What do you hope people take away after watching the film?
What attracts me to horror is the idea of exploring what scares us, the universal primal fears that we all feel. A creaking floorboard in the dark of night, an unrecognisable noise at the end of the hallway, something saying your name as you fall asleep. That feeling of something lurking in the dark, you can’t see it, but you can feel it, you know it’s there. The sense of foreboding, the creeping dread that something terrible is about to happen. For me that’s what the best horror films do, the ones that linger in your mind long after they’ve ended. I hope the audience come away feeling like they’ve been creeped out and scared, all whilst watching an intriguing story with captivating and human characters.
Q. Do you have any other projects which you are currently working on?
Like most filmmakers I have numerous scripts at various stages of development. I have one script in-particular I’d love to make next, I call it a psychosexual body horror, think Possession meets Black Swan via Cronenberg. It makes the most sense for me in terms of scope, budget and ambition. So if any financiers are reading give me a call 🙂
Q. If someone was looking to write and direct their own film what advice would you give them?
It’s been said many times but it’s worth repeating… if you want to make a feature then go make a feature. Over the years I tried a few times to get feature scripts off the ground with no luck. As a truly independent filmmaker who comes from a working class background and has zero contacts within the film industry, it’s incredibly difficult (some might say almost impossible) to get financing, especially from all the established places. You’re also battling people not wanting to give filmmakers money unless they’ve already “proven” themselves by having made a feature. So it’s this very strange chicken/egg situation of not being able to get money for a feature unless you’ve already made a feature. So my advice is think of an idea that’s achievable within your means, whether that’s money, time, access to unique locations, having friends of friends with a famous actor, use any opportunity you have to make a film and go for it. Technology is now so accessible that you can make an amazing looking and sounding film for not very much money at all.
THE CREEPING
Twitter: @TheCreepingFilm
Instagram: @TheCreepingFilm
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10929458
Website: http://thecreeping.com
Published in various websites, Philip is a reviewer who is best known for his interviews and media coverage of independent projects including; films, books, theatre and live events. Always on the lookout for something different to cover!
