Short film writer and director Jamie Hooper makes the transition to full-length feature with his debut film The Creeping. The film has just finished screening at this year’s Arrow Video FrightFest and has likely presented many audience members with a sleepless night.
Although now working in the realm of full-length feature films, Hooper hasn’t forgotten his short format background. The opening of The Creeping is a prologue to events that will follow and has a distinct air of short film to its tone. The sequence revolves around a father reading his daughter a bedtime story, but shortly after the story ends it teases more malevolent intentions. It’s a chilling start that works its way under the viewer’s skin and acts as an early acknowledgement that The Creeping is a film intent on giving the viewer a fright or two.
Following the strong opening, The Creeping settles down a little, allowing the viewer to relax a little. At this point introductions are made to the key cast of characters: Anna (Riann Steele), her nan Lucy (Jane Lowe), and her nan’s nurse, Karen (Sophie Thompson). With her nan’s health deteriorating, Anna has moved in to help look after her ailing relative. Lucy has developed dementia and her moments of lucidity are getting further and further apart. In the wake of her father’s death, Anna is determined to keep hold of her last remaining family member. However, the house into which Anna has moved is hiding a deadly secret, one the house would kill to keep contained.
The Creeping riffs off of themes explored in Natalie Erika James’s Relic. That film also casts an elderly dementia-suffering relative in the role of catalyst for events. Whereas Relic used itself as a vessel to explore the decay of the disease and its nature to erode, The Creeping opts for a different tact. The use here is much more straightforward; Lucy’s condition is an easy explanation to excuse the strange things that start happening in the house. Hooper shifts focus from the decline induced by dementia to literal ghosts of the past. Skeletons are hidden within the family history and as Lucy fixates on trying to finally reveal them, Anna finds herself the victim of an aggressive and invisible assailant.
A classic ghost story, The Creeping features plenty of extended scare sequences. An early highlight is a shot of an empty wheelchair moving unaided through the house in the dead of night. It’s a simple image, but the unnatural behaviour gets your hairs on the back of your neck standing. Hooper doesn’t keep the chills confined to the witching hour, nor does it only target Anna. There’s a great scene where Anna and Karen share a glass of wine. Their conversation turns to the topic of the afterlife, but before Karen can get the question, “do you believe in life after death?” fully out, the vacuum cleaner turns on. It’s an easy scare gag, but one that is effective. It’s entirely unexpected in the setting and puts the viewer on edge as it proves that Hooper isn’t always going to signpost a spooky encounter.
Midnight wanderings become the norm and as Anna uncovers the truth within the walls, the real horror of The Creeping is exposed. It’s an uncomfortable revelation, but one that holds a stark truth to more households than it should. This real-world horror combines with the supernatural set-ups to hammer home a story wrought with generational trauma and emotion. Proof that family secrets cling to those that house them, The Creeping confronts demons of the past in an imaginative and impassioned way.
The Creeping
Summary
An analysis of family trauma and how it impacts across generations, The Creeping is an astute study of demons of the past with plenty of classic scares to boot.
The Creeping was reviewed at Arrow Video FrightFest 2022.
