The Love Horror Credo review in full
Here’s the Love Horror review of Credo in full:
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: 
Interview with Credo director Toni Harman
Here’s an interview Toni did with LoveHorror.co.uk
As you could probably tell from our recent review, we liked Credo – it was the best British horror film that we had seen for a while.
And so it made sense to unleash one of our hideous, monsterous interviewers unto the outside world and allow them to chat to director, Toni Harman. The goal: to find out more about the movie without devouring her or damaging her mentally.
Zombie1 was allowed out of the office for a limited amount of time to conduct the interview.
How did you get into directing?
I went to the London International Film School (now called the London Film School) in Covent Garden and specialised in directing. After graduating, I worked as a Producer / Director on documentaries and factual programming and also made my own short films. The short films did quite well and were distributed internationally and broadcast in over 40 countries.
The next step was to make a feature film. Together with my writer / producer partner Alex Wakeford, we formed a production company, Alto Films, and wrote a few feature scripts. We came close to getting a bigger budget feature off the ground but the finance fell apart at the last moment.
So we thought ok, let’s just make a low-budget feature film using whatever resources we could lay our hands on. To be honest, we had nothing to lose and everything to gain!
How did the idea of Credo come about?
Credo started with the locations.
We knew we wanted to make a low budget “haunted house” style horror film and we were on the lookout for a suitable location.
We already had a relationship with a London property company as we had shot a short film in one of their empty properties. It just so happened that at the time we were looking to make our feature, this property company had two huge derelict buildings that were about to be renovated and they agreed to lend them to us to make a film!
So we had the locations, we had a time-frame in that we had to be out of the buildings in four months before renovations began, now all we needed was a story.
We kicked around some ideas and very quickly, we had the gem of a story.
Then things moved very quickly. Alex wrote a very rough draft of the script, we found crew, we did a deal with a company to supply HD cameras and online post-production and we even found the finance – all within about 3 weeks. Whilst I started casting, Alex worked on the script.
Meanwhile, architects were drawing up plans to turn the derelict buildings into luxury apartments and we were drawing up plans to shoot in them.
It was a race to see who got there first. I remember one day in the middle of the shoot, surveyors turned up in hard hats and after every take, they’d start writing in chalk on the walls. As soon as they’d move on to the next room, we’d wipe the chalk off and go for another take! I often wonder now if the new luxury apartments aren’t quite as luxury as they’re supposed to be because of us!
That sounds pretty intense, so how did you go about casting for the various roles?
Casting was pretty straight forward. We had a casting agent who short-listed actors and then we whittled down the short-list. Part of the audition process was to test the actors fears by taking them down into the really scary basement. If they survived that, they could survive anything!
In fact, during filming, one of things that seemed to work really well was to make the actors terrified for real. Just before a scary scene, I would send an actor down into the basement for five minutes on their own, armed with just a torch. They came back completely wired, psyched up, terrified and ready to shoot!
And how did Stephen Gately get involved?
Our casting agent contacted all the London agents asking which of their clients might be interested in being in a UK horror film and Stephen’s name was put forward.
He’s a huge fan of horror and one of his burning ambitions was to die in a horror film and so, watch the film to see if we made his dream come true!
Stephen was was fantastic to work with, incredibly hard-working, really receptive to my direction, always good-natured, and had a great sense of humour. More importantly, he could really act and he delivered a fantastic performance.
Even though he has had huge success with Boyzone and has done over 10,000 media interviews, he never acted like a “star” but was just one of the gang.
Are you a fan of Boyzone?
I love Boyzone! Though admittedly I haven’t bought any of their singles or albums or been to a concert. But then again, I haven’t bought any single or album for over twenty years – I’m just not that into listening to music.
Be honest, was he singing all the time?
During down-time, occasionally Stephen would click his fingers and maybe sing a line of a song to himself, more just to relax than anything. But never really in front of anyone and never to attract attention to himself. But during the shoot, he was absolutely professional and really focused on acting.
Was it difficult as part of a British production company to get your film ‘out there’ and noticed?
Making the film was relatively straight forward, selling the film afterwards has been much harder!
It is really difficult to raise your first feature above the parapet especially if it’s a genre piece made on a very low budget with no A-list stars.
Our route to market was to secure a UK sales agent who premiered the film at the American Film Market. This led to some international sales and a Lionsgate release in the US. Then Guerilla Films came onboard for the UK.
However, the film was pirated even before it had been released in the US (the pirate copy was the US version and not the UK version which features more of Stephen Gately).
The way we found out was that one day we googled the film and suddenly we discovered that it was no.1 in the illegal download charts above “The Dark Knight” which had just been released. Tens of thousands of people had watched Credo illegally (or The Devil’s Curse as it’s called in the US) and yet, it hadn’t actually been officially released. This dealt a huge blow to our future international sales.
We never thought our film would be pirated. We thought piracy only happens to big Hollywood blockbusters, not tiny little budget UK indie films! Especially before it had even been released! That’s a big lesson to us and next time, we’ll do things differently. Still, the positive is that it did get our film out there and noticed.
Ouch… it’s crazy how fast people seem to get illegal content online.
So, was there a sneaky motive in using an American character in the film?
We have to admit, we thought it might slightly improve our chances of selling to the US market. But saying that, the American in the film, Clayton Watson, who played “The Kid” in The Matrix trilogy, is actually Australian.
And maybe our strategy worked as we did make a US sale and maybe having an American character did help in some small way. Given the same situation, I would do the same again as any little thing that helps make your film more attractive to the US market is worth doing on a commercial level.
There are accounts of supernatural happenings on the sets of many horror films. Did anything spooky or strange happen during the making of Credo?
One of the locations we filmed in was a derelict townhouse built in the eighteenth century and by the time we got to 
it, it was in a very poor state and had an eerie and oppressive atmosphere about it.
The basement was by far the creepiest one I had ever been in. The layout itself is confusing. Huge, cavernous cellar rooms are interconnected by long, winding passageways. Some of the walls are covered in dirty white tiles, giving the feeling of an abandoned psychiatric hospital. And then there’s the smell; a rotting stench stemming from years of neglect.
As there’s no power in the building, whenever we walked around the place during pre-production, we would have to do it by torchlight. The odd thing was that almost every time we went down into the basement, the torches would fade. It was so dark down there that we had to use the light from our mobile phones to navigate our way out. The moment we started climbing the steps back up to the hallway the torches would suddenly come back on.
Pauline, the art director, would sometimes have to work on her own down there, preparing the set for the demon’s lair. She said she would often hear a distant howling coming from upstairs. We would check the place out, assuming it must have been the wind howling through the building, but we found no reasonable cause for it.
During production, filming had to be stopped when we had to search the building for a mysterious figure that several members of the crew had seen watching us from the shadows. No one was ever found. “He” was seen several times since, but to this day no one knows who he was.
In Credo, things start go bad for the group of teens when they set out to prove whether the devil exists. Do you believe in him/it?
I don’t believe in the devil but I do believe in evil. I don’t view evil as an outside force, but rather evil lives within humans and we have the power to choose to be evil or not.
Belief is an interesting concept and I’m interested in what it is that each of us believes in this modern, hi-tech, consumer led world.
Millions of people around the world believe in demons and the film hangs on the question, what would it take you to make you believe there’s a demon in your own home.
Do you have a favourite horror film?
I’m a huge horror movie fan, but only of a certain type of horror flick – deadly serious horrors where there are no comedy one-liners and surprisingly for a horror fan, no gore (ok, a bit of blood but no gratuitous decapitations!). I don’t have a single favourite but this is my list of all-time favourite horror movies that absolutely hit my horror g-spot.
My favourite type of horror is J / K / H-K horror. I love Asian horror as it’s atmospheric, it tends to be psychological and it’s steeped in a strong cultural identity.
So in no particular order: The Eye, Audition, The Rings, The Grudges, Reincarnation, Dark Water and A Tale of Two Sisters.
Next, I love old-school Polanski, Hitchcock and 60’s & 70’s horror, where it’s more about what you don’t see than what you do see.
So again in no particular order: Psycho, The Birds, Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby, The Tenant, Black Christmas, The Haunting, The Exorcist, The Shining, The Omen and Amityville Horror, Don’t Look Now and Alien.
Then coming on to more recent horrors which are atmospheric, clever and terrifying: Blair Witch, REC, Cloverfield, P2, The Orphanage, the first 20 mins of Jeepers Creepers.
Toni and writer, Alex Wakeford
Okay, your horror loving credentials are proven (with some rather nice choices). What advice would you give other aspiring British horror movie makers?
The only way to learn is to do it yourself. No matter what anyone says, unless you experience something yourself, it’s impossible to take advice. So go out, shoot a low budget feature, work your socks off, make mistakes, be driven crazy doing jobs yourself because you can’t afford to pay anyone else to do it and go through the roller coaster ride of securing international sales. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain!
What can we expect to see from you in the near future?
I am really attracted to films that explore the dark side of human psychology and my next project is a dark urban psychological thriller with a vexed teenage girl as the main character. It’s a Hitchcock style “knots-in-your-stomach” teen thriller and I’m really excited about and I can’t wait to get shooting! We’re attaching cast at the moment and we’re looking to shoot next year.
Additional Information:
CREDO is screening at this year’s Manchester Grimmfest Halloween Horror Festival on Oct 30th at the Odeon Printworks – http://www.grimmfest.co.uk/
CREDO is available to buy on DVD from Amazon and from the film-makers themselves – www.credothemovie.com
The Devil’s Curse is out there!
The Devil's Curse
Here’s an ultra quick post to mark the occasion of the great big glorious day.
Fanfare if you please… The Devil’s Curse has been released!
Yes, thanks to the lovely people at Lionsgate, it’s finally out there, gracing the shelves of Quickie Marts all over America.
And it’s even in Canadia too!
Lionsgate trailer for The Devil’s Curse!
I just saw this online at the Lionsgate site. It’s the trailer for The Devil’s Curse which Lionsgate are releasing on DVD on the 18th of November. I’d be interested to know what you think of it. Leave a comment.
Credo / The Devil’s Curse review
Let’s start with some good news! Here’s a review to The Devil’s Curse, which is the new title given to the film by Lionsgate who are releasing it on DVD on the 18th November. Thanks porfle!
Devil’s Curse, The
porfle rates it: (4/5) Community rates it: (no ratings yet)
My personal indicator of how scary a movie is consists of how scared I am to walk down the dark hallway that leads to my bathroom while I’m watching it. THE DEVIL’S CURSE, aka CREDO (2008), didn’t quite put the indicator needle into the red zone, but it came pretty darn close.
This modest but effective UK effort begins with five college friends getting thrown out of their apartment house, which renders them homeless until they break into an abandoned building and set up temporary residence. It’s a huge, decrepit old place that was once a Catholic boarding school, and where, according to urban legend, four previous occupants all committed suicide (a fifth went mad) after screwing around with the dark arts and inadvertently conjuring up evil forces. But that’s all just poppycock, eh wot?
A pretty, overly diligent student named Alice (the likable MyAnna Buring, THE DESCENT) keeps her nose in the books while her four housemates do just about what we expect them to, which is to start messing around with a Ouija board. Before long, strange happenings and unexplained noises begin to occur, and when one of the group is found hanging by an electrical cord, the others decide it’s time to vacate the premises forthwith. But the only exit is now chained shut, and whatever stalks the dark hallways of the creepy old building is coming for them.
The other characters besides Alice seem disposable at first, but we gradually get to know them. There’s Jock, the fratboy American (Clayton Watson of THE MATRIX II and III), whose stereotypical party animal exterior hides some deep insecurities; Scotty (Mark Joseph), the sensitive nerd who secretly pines for Alice while guiltily observing her with a hidden camera; Jazz (Rhea Bailey), the cool black girl with a secret phobia that will come into play in a big way later on; and Timmy (Nathalie Pownall), the shy, suicidal lesbian. Each is eventually confronted by a sinister presence and made to face their innermost guilt and fear, which some will find too much to bear.
Unusual for a modern horror film, THE DEVIL’S CURSE has just a few of the usual shock cuts and hardly any gore, relying instead on loads of eerie atmosphere and spine-chilling sound design. This harkens back to the old days in which the most frightening things were the ones you didn’t see. We’re kept on edge waiting for something to come around the next corner or jump out of the dark at any moment, while distant screams echo along with other dreadful, unknown sounds. This makes for a BLAIR WITCH type of experience which generates an overall feeling of sustained expectation and unease rather than a series of violent setpieces and visceral shocks.
Director Toni Harman (DADDY’S BOY) makes great use of one of those lucky “found” locations that really elevates the film to a higher level. The direction and photography are fine, and writer Alex Wakeford generally refrains from indulging in the usual teens-in-peril cliches (for one thing, the “party to end all parties” that Jock keeps gushing about never happens, and for another thing–amazingly–nobody has sex). Certain characters may act silly at times, but the film itself maintains a sober, dead-serious tone throughout which is a major element of its effectiveness. And finally, there’s a twist ending which, while not on the level of THE SIXTH SENSE, still managed to set my “WTF?” nerve a-tingle for a while.
Undoubtedly, there are a lot of modern horror fans who require endless scenes of evisceration and dismemberment in order to be “scared”, and THE DEVIL’S CURSE will probably drive them straight to IMDb to start yet another “worst movie ever” thread. But if you can appreciate a film that establishes a spooky premise and then gradually fills it with a strong sense of dread, then this flick may push the needle of your personal scare indicator fairly close to the old red zone.
Added: Thursday, October 23, 2008
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