Hal Kitchen
The Creeping
Perhaps the most traditional chiller Panic Fest 2022 has yet brought us, The Creeping is well earthed in the tropes of classic ghost stories, to such a degree that it even has a specter in a white bedsheet, O! Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad style. The film seems well aware of its pedigree and makes up for it by grounding its familiar tropes in an emotionally charged dramatic mystery, exploring themes just as well worn in this subgenre: hidden family secrets, repressed traumas, memories, and grief.
Echoing the similarly themed (though it must be conceded, far more successful and innovative) chiller Relic, The Creeping begins with a young woman (Riann Steele) arriving at her grandmother’s (Jane Lowe) cottage to look after her, as she is suffering from dementia and has reached the point of requiring constant care. Once in the house though, childhood memories of her late father (Jonathan Nyati) begin to stir, as does something more malevolent, existing within the house.
The Creeping has a good handle on what scares people, and on what moves them, with some suitably chilling and intense nightmare scenes (though admittedly, Dawning remains tough to top in that regard) and even some surprisingly exhilarating effects sequences towards the end. Though the majority of its power lies in the strength of its reliable mystery formula as granddaughter Anna tries to uncover the truth about what’s happening in her grandmother’s house and what happened between her parents and her grandparents all those years ago.
Both Anna and her Grandmother Lucy are living with a kind of grief that never fully goes away, Lucy for a husband and a daughter, and Anna for a father and a mother she never knew, and for whose death in childbirth she blames herself. This sense of shame is something that unbeknownst to her, her grandmother shares, but for very different reasons, and the two have limited time left to bring the truth into the light before it is lost forever in the maze of Lucy’s aging mind. There’s a lot of potency in that story, but it’s not the main one that The Creeping predominantly focuses on, there’s another conflict that lies in the nature of that mystery, which is frankly a little more pedestrian, but comes to a head nicely in the film’s climax.
There is perhaps some material in The Creeping that could’ve benefited from a more detailed and rigorous exploration, and it does all unfold a little predictably, but the performances are generally strong and with their feature directing debut, Jamie Hooper does a good job stretching the film’s budget to create some well composed and engaging set pieces. It might not give you anything you’ve not seen before, but there’s a firm basis for a story here and it’s told well enough.
Some Visitors
Although it’s included in the feature films category for Panic Fest, Some Visitors runs at short film length of under half an hour. I’m sorry to say that’s probably for the best as I don’t think I could really have stood a truly feature-length version of this. The debut of writer-director Paul Hibbard, Some Visitors starts well enough with some De Palma-y gallows humor and some even more De-Palma-y use of split screen, both of which do a good job of establishing the self-parodic tone the film maintains. Given that it’s not a very good comedy though, there’s always the possibility that it’s actually an even worse horror film and the stilted acting, dialogue, and comical shot geography are unintentional. Even if I give the movie the benefit of the doubt though and say “how could anyone think this was sincere?” there’s still not a lot to be said in favor of Some Visitors, beyond its so-bad-it’s-good absurdity and endearingly D.I.Y. flavor.
The film follows Jennifer (Jackie Kelly), a young woman at home alone in the aftermath of the loss of her baby and desertion by her husband. We hear on the news about a spate of recent home invasions in the area and sure enough, a knock comes at the door from the blatantly untrustworthy Jeff (Clayton Bury), with a thoroughly unconvincing non-sob story about having been in an accident and needing to use the phone. Lots of the inconsistencies in the story and lapses in logic where characters ignore obvious solutions are in fact explained away by an endgame twist, but this doesn’t do a lot to save the movie from being pretty pedestrian.
Unlike something like The Strangers, Some Visitors at least seems to know how schlocky and absurd it is, but that sense of being in on the joke actually makes it less funny than the unintentionally kind of hilarious The Strangers. It’s just kind of running through the most cliché and annoying tropes of one of the most cliché and annoying subgenres, with barely any novel surprises to disrupt them. Fans of so bad they’re good movies might get a kick out of Some Visitors, but the material is frankly just too mean-spirited, one-note, and exploitative to really laugh at.
