Alexandre Aja’s Crawl (2019) is a dark, tense, and claustrophobic animal horror film. It delivers on its promise of alligator attacks, scary scenes (I even shrieked once in the theater), and visceral horror. Its premise is simple: a young woman, Haley (Kaya Scodelario), drives to her family home to find her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), as a Category 5 hurricane approaches. When she arrives, she finds him unconscious and injured in the crawl space beneath the house after an alligator attack.
Because the premise is so simple, if what it describes is what you want from the film, you will be satisfied. Most of the film takes place in the cramped, dark basement as Haley and her father try to keep from being eaten by the invading alligators and make it out of the slowly (and then more and more quickly) flooding space before they drown. This setting and premise allow for lots of close calls and slow, building tension. The tension is amplified by the darkness of the space and the murkiness of the water, neither of which is ever so dark or murky that you can’t tell what’s happening. Aja is clearly invested in the alligator attacks themselves, and they are frightening and impressive. (Brian Fanelli’s Horror Homeroom post about the film provides excellent commentary on the film’s success in these terms.)
Crawl is not just gator attacks and trying not to drown, however. It is also fundamentally about competition. Haley is – the opening scene informs us – a competitive swimmer, and this identity has shaped her life as well as her father’s life. She has had to fight to win, and, as a swimmer on a college scholarship, she is now concerned about losing not only her swim meets but also her scholarship and her path to a better life. Her father encourages her to think of herself as a competitor, a fighter, an apex predator, and they both see their ability to escape the alligators and the hurricane as tied to her ability to keep fighting and to win.
However, Haley’s behavior in the film is not that of an apex predator. She has one physical skill: swimming fast, faster than the alligators. This is not the behavior of a predator but of prey. So despite her cry after outswimming several gators — “Apex predator all day, baby!” – she has escaped the predators by becoming a more effective prey animal, not by becoming a predator herself. As Emma Stefansky writes for Thrillist, “as soon as the water reaches your knees, humans are no longer the apex predators. Survival merely boils down to how well you can sneak by.” Despite the rhetoric of the film, this is the reality Crawl depicts.
Haley and Dave’s attempts to escape rely not only physical speed but also a trait often thought of as particularly human: intelligence. As Dave says, during one of his pep talks to Haley in the basement, “Let’s get those pea-brained lizard shits!” Perhaps, then, it’s not Haley’s speed but both of their human intelligences that make them alpha predators rather than prey.
But intelligence does not save them, either. Their attempts to be smart are thwarted repeatedly, and they survive not because of their cleverness but because of luck. In fact, any claims to human intelligence are undermined by the overwhelming stupidity of most human characters’ actions during the movie. Yes, let’s drive into an active hurricane, into an area that has been evacuated. Let’s go outside and swim through the alligators instead of taking refuge in the attic or on the roof. Or, even before the action of the movie, let’s choose to build homes in a hurricane-prone floodzone, and let’s put a bunch of alligators next door. While we’re at it, let’s install a flood drain in the basement that connects to those alligators. No, the humans don’t win here because they’re smart.
Nonetheless, Crawl works hard to reinforce this narrative of human superiority: “apex predator all day, baby!” This representation of humans as apex predators extends the theme of competition further. Here, it applies not just to Haley’s swimming but also to the relationship between human and nonhuman. There is a long tradition of reading nature through the lens of competition, focusing on “Nature, red in tooth and claw” (from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s 1849 poem “In Memoriam”) as a way of both justifying human treatment of the nonhuman world and also setting ourselves above that world. The natural world is savage, but we are not. This is the philosophy underlying Haley and Dave’s need to proclaim themselves apex predators and winners, not simply survivors.
This is troubling. Despite Aja’s comments about Crawl as commentary on climate change, he doesn’t seem ready or willing to really challenge the underlying anthropocentrism that has led to climate change. Aja has said, “There is something about the world we live in, the disasters coming more and more often, not only in the U.S. but everywhere in the world. . . . Sometimes the floodwater brings the 60 million-year-old neighbors back into our place.” Even this acknowledgment turns ultimately to a comment on “our place.”
While considering the insistence of Crawl on our “apex predator” status, I keep returning to Val Plumwood’s essay “Being Prey.” Plumwood describes her experience of being attacked by a crocodile while exploring the Australian bush. She is bitten and subjected to multiple death rolls in the river, but she eventually manages to climb out and escape. She, like Haley and Dave, got lucky. Beyond simply telling her story, though, Plumwood reflects on how others wanted to tell her story (as a cautionary tale about women in the outback, as a monster story, as a justification for slaughtering crocodiles), arguing that these frameworks are appealing because they allow us to maintain our separation from nature, our positioning “outside and above the food chain, not as part of the feast in a chain of reciprocity but as external manipulators and masters of it.” She writes about the ways that we “deny that we humans are also animals positioned in the food chain” and identifies this “deep-seated dread of becoming food for other forms of life” as a key part of many horror narratives.
Haley and Dave and Sugar – equally prey as they try to evade the alligators
Crawl’s insistence (despite its own evidence) on Haley as an apex predator and Dave’s dismissal of the alligators as “pea-brained lizard shits” do precisely this. They deny reality. Haley and Dave are – as terrifying as it is to consider – prey. This does not mean that they must give themselves up to be gator food – after all, prey animals fight to survive too. But acknowledging the difference between those actions – attacking as an apex predator vs. fighting for your life as a prey animal – is a valuable step toward survival. Acknowledging our place in the ecosystem means we can more productively live within it and live alongside our neighbors – whether they’re cute companions (like Sugar, the dog) or “60-million-year-old” alligators.
And check out our episode of HorrorHomeroom Conversations on Crawl.
You can stream Crawl on Amazon:
Christy Tidwell is an Associate Professor of English & Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. Her research most often addresses speculative fiction (primarily science fiction and horror), environment, and gender. She is co-editor of (and contributor to) Gender and Environment in Science Fiction (Lexington, 2019) and a forthcoming edited collection on ecohorror. For more, check out her website or follow her on Twitter.
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