- Stare. Nothing says ‘creepy’ so much as a dry, fixed, glittering, inflexible eyeball. Set your face into a single expression, or one of a limited range, for long enough and the lines of your face will radiate the unsettling, the uncanny and the existentially repellent. ‘The inexpressive face is the mirror of a shallow soul.’ The cruder, less expressive, less nuanced the muscles of your face (particularly around the eyes), the more your face will take on the look of that creepiest of objects, the mask.
- The smirk — the up-and-coming creep should favour the thin, knowing, cheerless, tight-little smirk above all other laughs. Do try not to laugh fully. If you have to, make it a terrifying, desperation-tinged shout of triumph, or the kind of lascivious cackle that reveals unexpected crudeness.
- For added creep, repeat the smirk. Any kind of minor or polite laugh — chortle, smirk, burping guffaw — instantly takes on a intensely disturbing hue if you repeat it exactly.
- Just be there. Don’t leap out at people or make them jump — that’s for amateurs — far more chilling to just be standing in an unexpected place, ideally in a slightly unusual position. Facing the wall works very wonderfully.
- Want sex, want it hard and want it constantly. The more you want the more this wanting will ooze out of your pores in an oily, unctuous, repellent hard-to-define but easy-to-detect atmosphere of spiritual sickness. (nb. Take no pleasure in such interactions for themselves — this is the mark of the playful and admired flirt, a completely different species to the creep; all interactions must be fuelled by your dry, hand-rubbing plans for getting).
- Constantly fixedly wanting power works too, although really it’s the same thing.
- Slowly, slowly, turn your head…
- …in fact unnatural speeds and sizes can be marvellously creepy. If you have extremely long thin legs and gigantic hands suddenly scuttling up a road at 4x ordinary speed produces a top-notch creep, bordering on gut-sucking terror, or slowing your voice down to a slurry drawl; but be careful that you don’t spill over into comedy — you’d be surprised how similar the two can be.
- Setting is important. Hovering a few feet in the air on the beach – not creepy. Hovering a few feet in the air in a huge deserted building – creepy. In the middle; Tescos.
- Possession. At the top of the creepy sycamore-tree is possession by the devil, but you don’t need to aim so high to achieve the same kind of effect. Certain emotions — intense fear, anxiety, desperation, anger, over-excitement and that sly provocative cruelty that can come over children — are quite diabolic enough. Anything that gives the impression that you have been taken over will strike subtle horror into the hearts of those who know and love you.