Real tube nightmares

Franke Potente in the chilling Creep

There's something hideous stalking the London Underground. It's scuttering through the dank tunnels, lunching upon hapless sewage workers. It's lurking in the final carriage of the last Tube home, picking off the drunks. It's dragging victims back to a subterranean lair, where it does unspeakable things to them with a surgical saw. And it's all my fault.

Next Friday, a new British horror flick slithers into cinemas. Its principal inspiration is an article I wrote in ES magazine.

Creep stars the German actress Franka Potente (Matt Damon's squeeze in the Bourne Identity and Supremacy) as a smart young woman who leaves a boring party in search of a less boring one, and never arrives.

Instead, she is pursued through the bowels of London by some lurching fiend with an affinity for rats and unconventional ideas about how to entertain visitors. That's all I can reveal about the film's villain - "You are kindly asked not to reveal the Creep's identity," reads a stern note on the cover of the pressbook.

The director and screenwriter, Christopher Smith, a former East-Enders scriptwriter, felt his creative juices flowing after reading my piece in ES 18 months ago about London's secret underworld - the tunnels and passageways that form the roots of the capital.

This includes the bomb-proof citadel under the Mall which houses the government's post-nuclear telephone system; the control centre under Goodge Street which served as General Eisenhower's European headquarters; the channel under Buckingham Palace that allows the royals to scarper down the Piccadilly line to Heathrow; the Hampstead sewers which certain Victorian sanitary workers believed were a breeding ground for a species of vicious black pig.

"After I read your article I realised that there hadn't really been a horror film that made much use of the Tube since An American Werewolf in London," says Smith, completely failing to offer me a percentage of the profits. "And I'd had this experience on the Northern line the day before: I was on my way to Balham when we got stuck in a tunnel and the lights went out and everyone screamed.

"So I started doing some research in the London Transport Museum. People are always fascinated by what lies beneath, particularly in London. We don't really know what's below us. There's so much history under our feet."

He's not wrong. There are 40 abandoned stations on the London Tube system - Creep was filmed at Down Street, near Green Park (closed in 1932 but used during the war as a bolt-hole for Churchill's cabinet) and Strand station (a defunct stop on the Piccadilly line, used in the past by the makers of Die Another Day, Patriot Games and Love, Actually).

Smith and his crew also took their cameras to the wartime deep shelter at Camden, a bunker designed to accommodate 9,000 Londoners during the Blitz - and once used to represent underground corridors of the planet Pluto in an episode of Doctor Who.

"We used Camden for a scene in which Franka runs past a lot of shelves loaded with boxes of documents," recalls Smith.

"The shelves weren't really shelves, though - they were bunk beds used by American GIs during the war. They slept on them on the night before D-Day." (If you fancy a look at the entrance to this tract of subterranean history, stand in the car park of the Underhill Street branch of Marks and Spencer, and look for a pair of blast-proof doors.)

"The great thing about the Tube as a location," says the director, "is that you're completely isolated from the outside world. It's like the Poseidon Adventure or Alien. You might as well be in outer space or at the bottom of the sea."

His voice drops ominously: "And you're never far from death on the Underground. When you're on the platform there's only a thin yellow line between you and electrocution. We all have to trust the people standing behind us."

Smith had his own brush with death during the shoot. When Sean Harris, playing the villain, walked on to location in his full special-effects make-up, the director was so pleased that he accidentally stepped back onto the track. A gaggle of London Transport officials yelled at him to move. Less than a minute later, the power was switched on automatically, and electricity flooded through the line.

SMITH has been itching to slake himself in gore since childhood. "When I was six or seven I used to sneak downstairs and watch the Hammer horror movies," he says. "Then I graduated to the early Eighties video nasties. Halloween and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre were my favourite films when I was a kid. I always knew that when I made a movie myself I'd do something really twisted."

After graduating from Bristol University's MA film production course in 1998, Smith cut his professional writing fangs on EastEnders. He was given the job of nurturing the relationship between Kat Slater and Dr Trueman - a story arc known to the soap's producers as the "Madame Bovary plot".

Since then, he has been pushing an unfilmed gangster script through the painful process of development ("it came too late," he laments), directing documentaries for the Universal Studio Channel, and producing Barry Norman's film review show on Sky. Then, in 2003, along came the deal that brought Creep into being.

It is a film, he hopes, that points the way towards a revival in the fortunes of the British horror picture. "We've always been good at horror in Britain, right back to Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. I think there's not just going to be a wave of horror movies, but it's going to become our staple diet again. Films like Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later - they were made by people who grew up obsessing over British horror movies."

And if any other aspiring horror director wants to explore the nasty possibilities of the Underground, then Transport for London, it seems, will be only too happy to help out - provided the script is sufficiently bizarre.

"If it had been about a group of terrorists taking over the Tube," says Smith, "there's no way they would have let us do it. But nobody's really going to think that if they get on the train to Cockfosters they're going to get put in a cage and tortured."

Absolutely not. Unless some mischievous journalist puts an idea in someone's head ...

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