Creep (2004)

Christopher Smith's Creep arrives from 2004, a year when a slasher film could still be simply a slasher film. A German professional named Kate falls asleep on the Charing Cross platform, wakes to a locked station, and descends into the tunnels beneath London, where a deformed hermit named Craig keeps cages, rats, and a bone saw. The premise is lean, the atmosphere is wet and industrial, and the film has no interest in explaining itself. It wants to frighten you and then go home.

The cast includes Franka Potente and Vas Blackwood, and the film treats their presence as unremarkable fact. George is a sewage worker with a job to do, not a statement. Kate survives through blunt, mechanical resourcefulness, which reads as slasher arithmetic, not a thesis on womanhood. There is no romantic subtext, no environmental anxiety, no economic sermon about the homeless characters who wander into the killer's path, no sympathetic account of mental illness, no historical argument, no closing monologue instructing the audience on how to feel. The film is, in the language of our filing system, almost entirely blank. It is mean. It is ghoulish. It is indifferent to your politics.

One sequence has Craig don a surgical gown and mime an operation before the camera, a moment of pure Grand Guignol with no message attached. Critics of the era split on it. Time Out called the whole affair trashy. Others found the nastiness bracing. Both camps agree on the essentials. This is genre craftsmanship with a cold heart and no lecture at the end. A reboot is reportedly underway. We will be watching.