With Arms Wide Open – In Terror! A Review of ‘The Creed’
I have one question for your Hollywood horror movies… Can they show you HORROR?! To a place you’re blinded with fear?! Can they show you Horror?! To a place you’ll wet your sheets?!
It is with these questions that we present to you The Creed, a twenty minute short film about a woman who mysteriously wins tickets to a Creed concert and inexplicably can’t escape. Before I begin I have to state that Kevin James and I, the writer/director of The Creed, know each other and have collaborated in the past.
The plot of the movie is that Linda, a mid-twenty/early-thirty something woman has won a radio contest she never entered. As her prize (tickets to a concert of the early 2000s rock band Creed) arrives no matter what she does she is unable to escape her winnings. “The original idea,” James said to me in an email interview, “was always to have this unrelenting object haunting someone, but make it something really mundane. Confronting a weakness and having that great combination of comedy and horror is what made the idea stick with me and escalate into a 20-minute short film.“ The loosely pieced together plot continues with Linda attempting to find any way to remove, destroy, and even exorcise the relentless phantom tickets from her life.
The crowning achievement of the short piece is both in how James continues to up the ante, and from the performance of Julie Becker (Linda) who, regardless of how low stakes the piece is, treat the piece and it’s strange nature as real and absolute and (only occasionally, and usually as a quick visual gag) don’t play the piece up for comedy. “Julie Becker is the real hero of this project,” James continued, “It might be easy to take her talents for granted when you first watch it, but consider the absurdity of the story and the conviction she brings to it (not to mention the physicality).” The piece is ridiculous because it takes ’80s and ’90s horror tropes and applies an almost Ionesco style of reality within the absurdity as it retells the tale of “The Cat Came Back,” (You know, the one about the guy trying to kill a cat but it keeps showing up on his doorstep). When asked about his influences James offered;
“I think it’s safe to say there’s some Drag Me To Hell in the movie, enough to the point where I actually had to rewrite it a few years back after I realized how much that movie was quietly influencing me. There’s also a lot borrowed from the glory days of Are You Afraid of the Dark, the classic Canadian kids’ horror show from back in the early ’90s. It felt appropriate to have a modern woman’s life regress into that type of poppy terror when faced with the ghosts of her past, and I have a real soft spot for that show still.”
The story itself is nothing new and as a “horror,” movie it isn’t scary, but it is the attention to horror tropes and honesty within storytelling that keep this short film relevant in horror markets. When asked about critical and audience reaction James mentioned;
“When it was screened earlier this year at the Boston Underground Film Festival… I was taken back by just how well it went over. We’ve been screening all over the US and are always pumped when we find the movie gaining more fans. People in the right age gap seem to really identify with the idea of being haunted by the bad taste of your early teens and we don’t seem to be alienating people outside that age gap either, which is reassuring. I’ve actually had a few people question why we hone in on this one band so much, which is kind of funny in its own way. Someone on the YouTube trailer posted a comment along the lines ‘What’s wrong with Creed?’ Film Threat reviewed the movie recently and wished that the movie went in a less humorous direction, so I suppose that was an avenue I hadn’t even considered.”
My only other issue, and it’s more of a worry, is that to the best of our knowledge Creed (the band) has no knowledge of this indie short. While the film does a lot to praise the band it also criticizes them pretty heavily and uses their songs (I believe performed by a sound-alike band) and their words.
Hopefuly, Scott Stapp and the gang have a sense of humor. Either way if you go in expecting a horror movie you may be disappointed, but if you’re a fan of horror movies and nostalgia The Creed is right up your alley. A full release date is right now unknown/unavailable but it will be shown at the New York City Horror Film Festival, November 14; the Ithaca International Fantastic Film Festival on Sunday November 16; and at some point during the SNOB Film Festival in Concord, New Hampshire on November 6-9.
Check out the trailer for The Creed:
