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Argento's Latest! Creepers
By Philip Nutman
Fangoria #49 (11.85)
It begins, as is to be expected, with a murder.
A low-angle shot of a pine tree, its branches buffeted by a strong wind. The camera moves steadily, sensuously upwards over the tree tops while on the soundtrack we hear the haunting strains of "Valley", a piece of music performed and composed by Rolling Stone Bill Wyman. We are not, however, in familiar Argento territory--this is the Swiss Transylvania.
A harassed teacher ushers a party of school children onto a bus. As the bus pulls away, a young girl runs down the road behind it, calling out desperately. But the vehicle does not stop.
The 14-year old girl finds an isolated house that appears to be deserted. But inside there is movement. Chains are fixed to the wall, and someone, or something, starts to pull on them.
The girl enters through the back door. Suddenly, there is a crash. Frightened, the girl runs to the front door. It's locked. Banging against the frame, her hand is suddenly impaled by a pair of scissors.
The hysterical, blood-splattered girl yanks out the scissors and races from the house to a nearby mountain stream. Something movies in on her, and she falls back to become victim to the brutal, mauling force that pursues her...
And so begins Dario Argento's latest shocker, Creepers, called Phenomena in Europe. The Italian Master is back, with--need it be said--a vengence [sic].
Creepers is a new departure for Argento, the "Italian Hitchcock" and undisputed king of Latin horror, the man who almost singlehandedly [sic] created the giallo (or yellow cinema) sub genre of brutal, stylish psycho-thrillers which came to prominence in the early 1970's. He now turns his attention to psychic phenomena, hence the film's original title.
The movie tells the story of Jennifer Corvino, the young daughter of an American-Italian actor (you know, your basic DeNiro/Pacino type). She has tremendous psychic powers which, in this case, means she can communicate with insects. When dad signs up to star in an epic that is shooting in the Philippines (the new John Ashley/Eddie Romero monster movie?), he sends her to the Richard Wagner Academy, an exclusive girls boarding school situated just outside Zurich in the Swiss-German region in the land of the cuckoo clock. This area is known as the Swiss Transylvania because of a peculiar wind that disturbs the mental equilibrium of the inhabitants of the region. Argento explains: "This wind can have a highly disruptive effect on people. It can actually make them crazy. Some medical doctors have suggested the environmental changes could cause birth defects in pregnant women as they seem rather susceptible to the effects. It's quite something to witness, the wind suddenly coming between two mountains, along the valley, hitting the plain at a terrific speed."
Jennifer (played by Jennifer Connelly, last seen in Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America as the teenage sweetheart of Noodles, the DeNiro character) arrives in Zurich during a reign of terror: a maniac has been periodically slaughtering teenage girls. The police are baffled and can find no apparent motive for the attacks. Not only that--they can't find the bodies! So far, only a few assorted body parts have been discovered.
John MacGregor [sic] (Donald Pleasence), a crippled entymologist [sic], is brought onto the case because the only way the police can accurately determine the time of one of the deaths is by examining the insect larvae that inhabit the gruesome remains left behind by the killer. The maggots in question belong to a species known as the Great Sarcophagus, a type of fly only attracted to rotting meat, preferably human.
Jennifer, in the mean time, arrives at the Wagner Academy and has problems setting in. First, weirdo dreams, then she starts sleepwalking, wandering the grounds and climbing along narrow ledges high above the ground. During these nocturnal excursions she discovers the next victim, one of the girls at the school. Her empathy with insects, particularly flies, means she can see events through their eyes while in this dream state. The killer realizes someone is onto his/her/its antisocial activities, and so Jennifer looks like the next victim...
In the past, Argento has specialized in two types of plot, either the Hitchockian [sic] giallo, such as Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red, or the supernatural thrillers, like Suspiria. Creepers is a new venture for the director in that it combines scientific investigation with the supernatural. The concept for the film came together quite quickly, as Argento explains:
"I was inspired to make the film after I read various news reports. First, in America some doctors discovered that certain schizophrenics have the capability to communicate with insects, which I thought was an incredible thing to discover. Second, while I was in France I was listening to the radio one day and I heard an item concerning a murder case. The police had enlisted the aid of a scientist, and by using insects they unmasked the murderer. Fantastic! I found the ideas exciting and they seemed to come together quite logically. Then, when I was in Switzerland for a vegetarian convention--I don't eat meat--I found the perfect location around Zurich, and the other elements fell into place. I think it's a very unusual story, and a very unusual film, being a thriller within a horror story, expansive, yet very claustrophobic."
The screenplay was written in the fall of 1983 shortly after Argento had completed Tenebrae. He collaborated with Franco Ferrini, then supervised the story-boarding. "I find it a necessary process that helps to simplify the processes involved," he says. With specific locations in mind he then had to decide on the visual style. In his previous films Argento has mainly shot locations in and around Turin, in the north of Italy, or Rome. These locations have always contributed to the style of his stories. With Creepers, Argento has taken a new visual approach. "I wanted the film to have a cold feel to it, the colors muted, sparse. Not just because we were going to film in the Alpine region, but because the expressionism of Suspiria and Inferno, the deep colors, would have been wrong," he explains.
Argento comes from an artistic background, his mother and uncle being photographers of some note, which explains his attitude towards film, composition and color. "A lot of my inspiration comes from them," he adds. "And on Creepers I was very influenced by the work of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl who made films like Triumph Of the Will during the days of the Third Reich. Not politically influenced, of course, but visually."
To achieve this look Argento had director of photography Romano Albani use a special film stock that works in conjunction with a processing technique called ENR developed by Technicolor. This processing involves a 50 percent subtraction of color from the original material, giving the final print a cold, washed-out appearance. "The process converts the most vivid colors. But you must also arrange this during filming; in the production design, the costumes, the lighting. For example, I instructed Giorgio Armani, the famous fashion designer who has work on some films, most recently Walter Hill's Streets Of Fire, to make clothes in black, white, and gray, while the production designers kept primary colors to a minimum. In this way we were able to freeze the colors, managing to obtain the cool greens of Switzerland, yet giving the rest of the film a black and white tonality."
Once the screenplay was finished and preproduction work was underway in early 1984, Argento began his search for the right teenage actress to play Jennifer. He spent the new two-and-a-half months in America auditioning hopeful applicants. During his quest he considered Lynn Ullmann, daughter of actress Liv Ullmann, famous for her roles in the films of Ingmar Bergman. But Lynn Ullmann didn't have the right qualities Argento required, so he was stumped. By chance he saw some of Sergio Leone's audition tapes for his gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America and thus found Jennifer Connelly. "As soon as I saw her tape I knew she would be great for the part," he says. "She is beautiful, tremendously beautiful! In my opinion she is an angelic vision of womanhood, which is something I wanted to convey in the film. And she was marvelous to work with. Her face and form are really powerful, and she's almost sexless. Again, this was something I wanted in the film as the character of Jennifer Corvino is very virginal, almost passive. That is why the insects aren't afraid of her; in fact they love her. Jennifer is a wonderful actress who has a great career ahead of her."
Once he had found his star, Argento completed the other casting. He chose Donald Pleasence because "he's a great character actor;" Argento regular Daria Nicolodi (his former wife--they recently separated) as the sinister Miss Bruckner, one of the teachers at the Wagner Academy; Dalila DiLazzaro as the headmistress; and actor Patrick Bauchau (A View To A Kill), as inspector Rudolph Geiger of the Swiss police force. All that remained was a special makeup effects artist to provide the rest of the cast: the rotting bodies of the killer's victims.
The man responsible for the stomach-turning effects was Sergio Stivaletti, a former medical student turned makeup artist, whom FANGORIA readers are likely to hear a lot about in the near future. For Stivaletti, Creepers proved his big break, having worked uncredited on several other Italian films. With his medical background he was perfect for the film since Argento wanted total realism as far as the severed limbs, heads and corpses were concerned.
(A warning to those readers who don't want to know the murderer's identity or have the surprise shocks of Creepers revealed in advance; skip the next couple of paragraphs.)
Work on the designs for the killer, a human monster suffering from a birth defect, and the other effects, such as the hand through which the scissors had to pass, a decapitated head, several decomposing stiffs, and the odd maggot-infested limb, began in March 1984. The fake hand was fully articulated so the fingers could spasm as the actress (Argento's daughter Fiore), tries to pull the offending implement out. Four separate heads were made for the actress' death scene, using the normal procedures of life-casts and prosthetics. For Patau, the cannibalistic killer, Stivaletti had to make 12 different masks for Davide Marotta, the actor, to wear. The defect depicted in the film is real, though highly rare, and sufferers have no desire to eat people (or at least, we hope not!), and it was here that Stivaletti really brought his talents to the fore. Argento has nothing but praise for the 27-year-old artist: "I'm really pleased with the way the makeup effects turned out. It was such a relief as the character is obviously important to the plot, and I think Sergio did a marvelous job."
Shooting started in June 1984. Since the film required a lot of special insect photography, the second unit commenced work before the main unit. Luigi (Starcrash) Cozzi was assigned to direct the second unit because of his effects background, handling the optical effects and the macrophotography [sic] used for closeups [sic] of the insects. Principal photography followed two months later, and the filming wrapped up in October.
Argento decided to experiment with the music soundtrack, using a variety of heavy metal and punk groups in addition to the original compositions by his usual group, Goblin, and Claudio Simonetti. "I originally wanted Tangerine Dream to do the score," the Italian explains, "but they had just arranged to do a tour, so were unavailable. I had used Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer for the soundtrack of Inferno, but I wanted to do something different, although Keith did some excellent music for that film. All my films have strong soundtracks, yet this one had to be the strongest! That's why I chose groups like Motorhead and Iron Maiden. Goblin has contributed, too, and so has Bill Wyman, who is a very old friend. I wanted a mixture of gentle, atmospheric music and driving rock for the murders to give the film momentum."
Also on the Dolby soundtrack are compositions by Anti Sex Gang [sic], and, on the soundtrack album released by Cinevox Records of Italy, "Two Tribes" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which Argento finally decided not to use in the film.
When Creepers opened in Italy in February of this year it was a box-office success, reportedly grossing more than Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The same situation happened recently in France where Argento is regarded as one of the top directors of the world. The soundtrack album also went to number one on the Italian charts.
Right now Argento is busy finishing the screenplay of his next film, the final chapter in the Suspiria supernatural trilogy, and is producing Lamberto Bava's Demons, a no-holds-barred horror movie from the son of Mario Bava that is full of special effects and innovative makeup. The budget for Creepers was $3.8 million; the proposed budget for his new film, as yet untitled, is likely to be something over $10 million. 1985 may prove to be the year of breakthrough success for Italy's master of horror.
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