Mind the werewolf: the London underground in film

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/09/the-london-underground-in-film

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The freshest image of the tube in moviegoers' memories is not an encouraging one: a train crashing through the walls of an underground chamber and crumpling into a heap right where James Bond should have been standing. Luckily (and implausibly), the train in Skyfall was empty: although Javier Bardem was a villain, he had at least checked the schedules to cause minimum disruption to the service.

The cinematic possibilities of the tube are as myriad as its destinations. It's a great place for action and chases (The Bourne Ultimatum and Patriot Games got there before Skyfall). It's a realm of concealment, strangeness and subterranean nightmares, but it's a refuge, too. For film-makers, the tube is also very convenient: not only does it boast controllable light and a steady climate, it can also provide a mirror image of the city above. And it's a great place for your characters to bump into each other.

These qualities were evident to film-makers from the start, judging by Anthony Asquith's 1928 silent film, Underground, rereleased this week, and the first film ever to feature the tube. As the movie's opening title proclaims: "The underground of the great metropolis of the British empire, with its teeming multitudes of 'all sorts and conditions of men', contributes its share of light and shade, romance and tragedy." In the first scene, a jack-the-lad falls for the girl he sits next to. Moments later, so does the handsome attendant who picks up her dropped glove on the escalator. Before you know it, dark undertones are in play, as desire turns to jealousy, deception and revenge. It's contrived, of course, but no more so than Gwyneth Paltrow's romantic fate hingeing on which train she caught in Sliding Doors.

With its liveried workers, smoke-filled carriages and wooden escalators with instructions to "step off right foot first", Underground seems charmingly antiquated today, but the film serves as a reminder that, even back in 1928, the tube was a place of thrilling modernity. Cinema, like its audience, was captivated by the novelty of the urban experience. Murnau's Sunrise, Lang's Metropolis, Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera – all were made around the same time as Underground, and all grappled with the pleasures and pitfalls of the modern city.

Asquith's great contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock, was also drawn to the world beneath London. He features characters using the Underground in 1927's Downhill and 1931's Rich and Strange; and he makes his cameo in 1929's Blackmail as a commuter trying to read a book while two boys steal his hat.

As the shock of the new wore off, the dark side of the underground has come into its own, most memorably in An American Werewolf in London, where an unfortunate commuter is chased through Tottenham Court Road station by … well, a camera. You barely saw the werewolf, and you didn't need to. Eerie moans emanating from the black mouth of the tunnel and a panic dash through the tiled labyrinth of passages adequately conveyed the horror.

In 28 Weeks Later, it was zombies who brought the fear; and in 2004's Creep, Franka Potente comes up against a tunnel-roving cannibal (having missed the last tube home, of course, just like in Werewolf). The movie wasn't all that scary, but the poster – of a bloody hand sliding down the window of a train – was. It ended up being banned from stations. But the award for tube horrors must go to 1972's ludicrous Death Line, in which the trapped 19th-century builders of the original tunnels have evolved into carnivorous sub-humans whose only remaining vocabulary is the mangled utterance: "Mind the doors."

Countering such terrors, though, is the tube's history as a place of safety. The image of fearful wartime masses huddled in tunnels during the blitz is now imprinted on the collective memory, partly thanks to its frequent re-creation in movies set during the second world war: The Krays, the Dylan Thomas biopic The Edge of Love and, most recently, Atonement. If you see a historic-looking station in the movies, it's probably Aldwych – that anomalous spur of the Piccadilly Line that finally closed in 1994 but continues to serve as a filming location. There's even a 1972 train permanently parked in the tunnel for movie scenes (it's the one in the Creep poster).

Other favoured stations for filming include East Finchley (which has a spare platform) and the defunct Jubilee line platforms of Charing Cross (for a more up-to-date feel). There's so much demand that London Underground has a dedicated film office to handle requests. On average, they deal with about 12 big features per year, plus numerous shorts, documentaries, photography shoots and student films. Prices start at £500 per hour, though something like Skyfall costs considerably more; its tube scenes took about five nights of shooting at Charing Cross, spread over several months.

"It doesn't take that many people to make it look like a working station, maybe 250 to 300 extras," says Kate Reston, head of the film office. "But add in crew and we had about 450 people down there for Skyfall. It's a closed-off part of the station, so they had complete privacy." No actual trains or stations were harmed in the filming of the crash scene, she adds (it was done on a sound stage at Pinewood), though there were "long conversations" about how London Underground wanted its property portrayed.

Real stations aren't always what is required, however. There's a whole parallel network of imaginary stations, including Vauxhall Cross, the secret lair from an earlier Bond movie, Die Another Day; you might discover a buried Martian spaceship at Hobbs End station, too, as they did in Quatermass and the Pit, or stumble across the masked anarchist's secret HQ at Strand, as featured in V for Vendetta.

What's harder to find is a depiction of the tube simply as itself. The best candidate can be found in a series of underground-inspired films from 1999 called Tube Tales. The majority were forgettable efforts directed by the likes of Jude Law, Ewan McGregor and Bob Hoskins, but Armando Iannucci turned in a gem called Mouth that recreates the familiar cross-section of a late-night tube carriage: excitable hen party, bickering teens, lads about town, tired family. A smartly dressed woman, played by Daniela Nardini, sets off a series of fantasies among the other passengers, including a young man who stands with his crotch in her face. Then Nardini starts to vomit – all over her would-be suitor and fellow passengers, until everyone in the carriage is spattered. Horror, romance, fantasy, comedy, collective suffering – in other words, just another trip on the tube.