Rating: 7.5 out of 10
Credo is a low-budget horror film directed by Toni Harman, written by Alex Wakeford and set in London. The film starts off with a group of Catholic students attempting to summon the devil himself. Of the five, Simon (the late Stephen Gately, who carries himself very well) is their leader, with his roots in Irish Catholicism; he’s seemingly obsessed with finding Satan, so as better to defeat him. Poor old Seth however, gets cold feet and runs away from the séance. Next morning, his four friends are all dead from suicide…

We then cut to another group of students, several years later, and they’ve just been evicted from their flat. Jock, a boisterous American… um… jock, has held one party too many and the landlord boots them onto the streets. Alice (MyAnna Burning) is a practical and dedicated psychology student who spends all her time in the college library studying for exams. Timmi is a shy brunette who has a secret crush, and Scott is a well intentioned nerd, who also has a secret crush. With their somewhat token and underwritten black friend Jasmine in tow, the five of them break into Eden Catholic Halls to spend a weekend of boozy fun and Ouija board tinkering.

Hands-down the best thing about Credo is this, and if you really don’t want a slight spoiler then skip to the next paragraph: It’s old-school, it’s cerebral and it’s scary, but there is no horror except that which is suggested. I live for a film that can scare me without resorting to buckets of gore, grotesque make-up or weak CGI, and once Credo gets going, it’s really an effective horror film. After a shaky start which has some pretty dodgy acting, the film finds its feet and we follow the characters through a terrifying journey in which Satan will try his best, through hallucination and time-shifts, to convince each person to commit suicide, so they die in sin and he claims their souls.

Harman has wisely chosen an incredible location for Eden, it’s a huge complex of run-down bedrooms and hallways, full of old mattresses and filthy radiators, broken lights and years worth of dust and grime, and it helps to perfectly set the tone and atmosphere for the film. Scott attaches cameras around the building too, and we get shots on his laptop in night-vision which are used effectively and add to the chills. The music and sound design warrant mention too, as they are simply terrific in turning-up the fright factor and keeping the audience tense as to the next scare, especially the microphone that Scott uses to pick up signals that humans can’t normally hear, that freaked me out completely!

In all – An effective and chilling horror film that uses inventive camera work, imaginative sound design and that overlooked little technique known as suspense and suggestion to create some real scares.

The other great thing was seeing  MyAnna, Credo’s leading lady there. We haven’t seen her since we were in the last throes of post production a very long time ago, so it was lovely to catch up with her. The occasion was all the more special as she hadn’t seen this UK version at all. In fact she had only seen what turned out to be a first cut of the film which has changed massively since then. And I’m happy to report that she hid behind her hands throughout most of the screening, being way too terrified to watch properly!

Afterwards we had a fun question and answer session in a room filled with severed heads, bloody limbs and disemboweled sheep (amongst other gory horror mementos!). I definitely saw Pinhead eyeballing us from the back of the room too!

The occasion was tinged with sadness too, however, as it was Stephen Gately’s cinema premiere too. We really missed him being there, but seeing his performance up on the big screen brought back a lot of happy memories and we will be eternally grateful for everything that he did for us and for the film.

Big respect to the Grimm Up North (Grimmfest) Horror Festival team! It was the inaugural occasion of this festival and  the organizers have done an amazing job. They clearly love horror and they know what they’re talking about. I hope it turns out to be the success that it deserves and they can make it an annual event. And thank you Sim and Rachel not only for putting on the Credo screening, but for getting us up to Manchester and back in the first place.

There’s definitely a real thirst for blood oop north!

After days of deliberation and having taken advice from Credo’s UK distributor, we have decided not to fight the Odeon and so Credo will remain in the festival line up. Stephen was a massive supporter of the film and he has been instrumental to the success that Credo has enjoyed over the last few months and hopefully this screening will be an even more special occasion. It will be, after all, his and Credo’s cinema premiere.

I will be there as well as Credo director, Toni Harman,  to say a few words before the screening in memory of and in gratitude to Stephen. There will also be an opportunity to talk to Toni and leading lady, MyAnna Buring, straight after the screening in a Question and Answer session.

All inquires should be made to the festival web site.

Take 5 students, a degree in the occult, a creepy old halls of residence, and what do you get? The perfect setting for a bit of ouija board and devil worship.
From the onset, it’s easy to think that you know how it’s going to pan out. But this little flick has more to offer than you might expect.

It has been a while since we reviewed a British film, so we were glad to receive Credo. There’s no doubt that I was a little sceptical when I saw that it starred Stephen Gately, but seeing as the lead was MyAnna Buring (Descent, Lesbian Vampire Killers) I put aside my hatred of cheap pop music and hit ‘play’.
A halls of residence at a Catholic university is chosen by Gately and his student friends as the perfect setting for an experiment. The object of which is – to discover whether the devil exists.
Armed with some candles and limited knowledge of demonology the group of 5 head up to a remote tower in the building to begin contact with the ‘other side’.
Early on in the proceedings, one of the gang goes chicken and walks out, leaving his friends unprotected (5 members are essential for this type of ritual) and as a result all but he are dead by morning, after supposedly committing suicide.

Some years later Alice (Buring) and her friends are students attending the same university. After losing their accommodation, they resort to staying in the spooky, abandoned halls of residence. Strangely they are also a group of 5, and predictably, familiar events start to unfold as the apparent evil forces reveal themselves.

Generally, the film is of a good standard. For an independent British film, it’s glossy, it’s professionally finished and it’s of a standard which you could easily mistake for being Channel 4 or BBC funded.

The cast are decent, each holding their own in this ‘bordering on the formulaic’ (for the most part) storyline. Gately as Simon is even pretty good, although fortunately he doesn’t feature much (I have nothing against his acting, I just can’t see beyond Boyzone!).
Myanna Buring is excellent, and really takes the film away from mediocracy. The script is a little odd at times, but she works around that and makes the role her own.
On the downside, I wasn’t too sure about the inclusion of an American character, Jock (that’s actually his name, not a reference to his high-school status). It seemed a bit unnecessary and as if it may have been a ploy to appeal to the American market. His stereotyped ‘whoop whoop! Paaartay on dudes’ behaviour was a little distracting. When the blood-letting began, I was eager for him to get ‘offed’ quickly.

The story itself is solid enough. Group of students, scary demons, a crazed stranger who could be a killer. And in the group, your typical teen horror movie characters: the cute lead, the brash jock, the withdrawn geek, the ethnic minority and the religious one.

And so I was lulled into a false sense of security, happily watching and correctly predicting events as the film bubbled on before me.
But just as the film approached the end, and I began to feel a tad unsatisfied, it took a big twist that I wasn’t expecting. A twist that actually made the film for me.

You know, one of those events that can keep you thinking for a while after the film, coming up with different explanations and serving as good conversation between you and your film buddies.

And there’s nothing more that I love, than a movie that does the unexpected.

Credo is a film that stands proud with the best of British horror. What it lacks in budget and finesse, it makes up for in grit and imagination. It’s solidly shot, constructed and communicated, and should serve as inspiration for any other British horror movie makers who aren’t pulling their weight at the moment.

For the elements of originality, gets a lot of kudos (or should that be credos) from me.

Check it out on DVD and Blu-Ray now. Quick! Before it gets exorcised back to the dark realm from whence it came!

Movie Rating:

But we weren’t defeated just yet. We still resolved to shoot in there, so we put together a small crew and arranged to shoot a full camera test in the house. We were going to be shooting on the Viper Filmstream camera, a new digital format that hadn’t been used for feature filmmaking before. We needed to see how it would perform on location, specifically this location.

So, a few weeks later, we returned to the house on a Saturday morning with ten willing volunteers and over half a million quid’s worth of equipment. And yes, both Toni and I were a little nervous that “he” might make his presence known. We were insured up to our eyeballs but someone later told me that insurance complanies can refuse to pay out if there is a suggestion of paranormal activity involved in any damages!

We started in the basement and did a few standard horror shots of a girl creeping along the passageway and into the room with the hooks in the ceiling! We moved from room to room to see how it would photograph on this digital system.

I have to say, no one felt spooked at all. Maybe it was because of the movie lights pouring in through the windows and the fact that we were all gathered together. We moved upstairs after lunch and grabbed a load of shots using no lights at all, just to check the camera’s exposure range. Before we knew it, the sun had sunk over Marble Arch and the day was over. And what’s more, nothing untoward had happened.

But as the crew packed up and headed home or to the local pub, Toni and I found ourselves overnight prisoners of The Lodge. The problem was that our equipment insurers had insisted the kit was guarded at all times and as it was Saturday night it couldn’t be returned until Monday morning. So a volunteer was required to sit with the kit over the next thirty-six hours and guess who that would be! Very quickly, the high spirits and excitement of the day’s shoot evaporated. As the darkness and silence once more fell on the house, Toni and I took refuge on the top floor with just our torches to ward off any evil spirits!

We didn’t get much sleep that night as we listened to creaks and groans echoing through the house. It’s a very old house, so I guess it moves an awful lot. But our imaginations were racing with every eerie sound, but nothing physically happened to us. My father insisted on taking over for a couple of hours to give us a break and rejoin the land of the living for a couple of hours. He’d bury himself in a book he was very much into while we were gone. When we returned, however, we found him pacing the hallway by the front door waiting for us to come back. His face was white as a sheet and his eyes were out on stalks. He wished us luck and squeezed past us out onto the street. The door slammed behind him and once again we found ourselves alone in the house, preparing for another fear-filled night.

It was probably only because our senses were razor sharp due to our nervousness, but the house sounded even more restless that night. More than that, it sounded impatient, as though it was getting ready to “do” something. Toni and I didn’t sleep a wink that night and we both regretted the EVP session we had conducted a couple of weeks prior. What had we been thinking? Rather than settling the angry spirit, we seemed to have provoked it.

At first light we were both standing on the pavement waiting for the lighting and grip companies to come and pick up their kit. We didn’t want to spend another unnecessary minute in that place if we could help it. Once they had come and gone, we locked the house up and vowed never to return. There was no way we were going to put the health and safety of our cast and crew at risk just for the sake of a film. Even though we couldn’t specifically explain why, we both just had a very, very bad feeling about the place.

And so, it was with a sense of relief that we continued our search for our movie location. Even though we wanted a “haunted” house, we didn’t want one that was really haunted! We eventually came upon two fantastic buildings that we could make out was one enormous building by using some simple editing techniques.

But little did we know that once we took up occupation of these buildings, the production would be plagued with some truly terrifying events. We really should have known better!

To be continued…

We have just finished a stand alone web site for our Brighton based film workshops. You can visit us at brightonfilmworkshops.co.uk where you’ll find all the details of our November workshop programme.

Due to a deluge of inquiries, we are planning on expanding our programme to include other film-making subjects. If you want to have a say in what workshops you would like to see in the future, then CLICK HERE to choose your favourite topics.

Star of both films, MyAnna Buring will be there as well as Credo director Toni Harman.

The  four day event looks set to be a heady mix of the usual blood ‘n’ gore as well as psycho chills and zombie thrills!

Credo is screening on Friday 30th October and Descent 2 will be the festival’s opening film on Thursday 29th October.

More news on the Grimm Up North festival as soon as we get it.