For anyone who wished that last year’s shark movie The Meg had an R rating instead of a PG-13 rating, then Crawl won’t disappoint. Director Alexandre Aja’s alligator flick is a fun and gory romp, a nail-biting thriller with naturalistic undertones. While the film may not have as much to unpack as other horror hits this summer, namely Ari Aster’s Midsommar, it’s a wild ride that should titillate horror fans and make for a fun time at the movie theater.
The plot of Crawl, which is expertly written by Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen, is straightforward. College swim star Haley (Kaya Scodelario) returns to her childhood home in Florida to locate her father, Dave (Barry Pepper), a recent divorcee who went missing after he was attacked by a gator while trying to fix a pipe in the basement, amidst a Category Five hurricane. It’s probably best not to question why he didn’t just evacuate instead of worrying about home repairs. The film includes some family drama and internal demons, but generally, the plot is straightforward without much subtext.
Checkout the trailer for Crawl, which opened July 12, 2019:
Generally, the film belongs to Haley, who earned the nickname apex predator by her father because of her swimming capabilities. Much of the film features her outsmarting the gators in cramped crawl spaces, storm drains, and a flooded kitchen. This is what Aja does especially well throughout the run-time and what makes it such a gripping monster movie. He puts the characters in such tight spaces, inches away from the hissing, snapping, and red-eyed creatures that the tension is nerve-jangling. The level of gore is reminiscent of Aja’s earliest films, especially High Tension and The Hills Have Eyes remake. The gore is never over the top, but when the gators sink their teeth into a leg or arm and the camera zooms in on a victim’s grimaced face, we feel it. The pain is prolonged for just the right amount of time to make the audience squirm.
Kaye Scodelario as Haley
Crawl also resonates because though it may be light on political and social subtext, it’s hard not to watch the superstorm engulfing Florida and not think of the extreme weather that’s battered the planet over the last several years due to climate change. In an article for the newest issue of Rue Morgue, scriptwriters Michael and Shawn Rasmussen mentioned how the news of super storms was ever present as they penned the script. “We were in the midst of the first couple of rewrites for Alex, and there was a story from Houston about a hurricane that was causing a huge storm surge, and they had to evacuate the alligators from an alligator farm because they were worried they were going to spill out into the city. We were like, ‘Holy shit, this is really close to what we’re doing!’” Michael said.
The film also has some nice nods to the ultimate creature feature, Jaws, specifically the imitative shots of the gators approaching below water and a few shots from their point of view. Additionally, there’s a glimpse of a shark car ornament gnawing on a surfer and another scene that highly resembles shark hunter Quint’s infamous and gruesome death, one of the bloodiest scenes in Jaws. However, unlike Steven Speilberg’s film, Aja makes sure we get several long and hard looks at the digital alligators. Forget the power of suggestion.
Like other naturalistic creature features, Crawl shows how indifferent and punishing the universe can be. Just when you think Haley and Dave are safe, another gator or two shows up, or the hurricane waters surge deeper into the home, busting through windows with brute force.
In a Horror Homeroom article from 2015 on shark horror, Dawn Keetley cities critic Michael Fuchs as a means to define “naturalistic horror.” This definition can also apply to Aja’s film in that it states naturalistic horror puts us in the terrain of the shark, or in this case, the gators, “in a world relatively indifferent to humans (except as food), in which the good guys don’t necessarily come out on top (or even alive), and death is random.” In the case of Crawl, no lengthy explanation is needed for why the gators have invaded the house, other than they entered the basement through a storm drain. They don’t care who they attack, including looters, police officers, and of course, the two protagonists. Essentially, anything that moves is fair game and food. To survive, Haley must embrace her apex predator nickname and either kill or be killed. Her raw strength that her father praises is their only way to survive. The nickname may make her uncomfortable, but she has to accept it and draw on her instincts and talents as an athlete to overcome the gator-infested waters.
Barry Pepper as Dave
Additionally, the very moment that Haley enters the basement is spine-tingling and establishes a naturalistic horror setting. She crawls through mud and filth and avoids scurrying rats before she even finds her father and battles the gators. Furthermore, father and daughter have to contend with the flood waters pushing through cracks and holes in the foundation before eventually making its way to other floors. Another scene features spiders crawling on Haley’s face and arms.
Keetley’s article also analyzes the work of naturalist writer Stephen Crane, specifically his 1897 story “The Open Boat” about four shipwrecked men. She writes that the story “embodies its sense of the indifference of the universe.” Even Crane’s opening sentences depict a relentless natural universe, in this case the ocean, and the waves that come one after the other, to the point that “the line between sky and water narrowed and widened, and fell and rose.” There are moments in the story when the men think they’ve found salvation only to be thwarted by the ocean yet again. The conclusion and the fate of the oiler is the ultimate gut-punch. Crawl is similar in the sense that every time the characters think they’ve caught a break, they’re besieged by even more gators and rising water.
Crawl certainly has a few not-so-subtle references to 1975’s Jaws, but it’s rooted in Naturalism, going all the way back to the short stories of Stephen Crane and Jack London (specifically “Love of Life” and “To Build a Fire”), whose fiction depicts everyday people faced with impossible odds, pitted against an unforgiving universe. Crane and London’s stories have endured because humans v. nature will always be a relevant theme, especially as the consequences of global warming become more and more pronounced. Crawl works so well because it plays with these classic themes in nerve-rattling fashion, upping the suspense from scene to scene and putting the two main characters through utter hell in the process. Crawl is bloody and enjoyable creature feature, a solid addition to Aja’s already impressive horror repertoire.
Related: Writers of Crawl, Michael Rasmussen and Shawn Rasmussen have previously written and directed a great indie horror film called Inhabitants (2015), reviewed here. They also wrote the 2010 The Ward, directed by John Carpenter and reviewed here.
You can stream Crawl on Amazon:
Brian Fanelli is a poet an educator who also enjoys writing about horror. His latest book is a collection of poems, Waiting for the Dead to Speak (NYQ Books), winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Poetry Prize. His writing has been published in The Los Angeles Times, World Literature Today, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Main Street Rag, and elsewhere. He’s also a past contributor to Horror Homeroom. Brian has an M.F.A. from Wilkes University and Ph.D. from SUNY Binghamton University. He teaches at Lackawanna College an blogs about horror films at www.brianfanelli.com. Brian has written for Horror Homeroom on Mohawk and Downrange, on Hereditary, and on Revenge.
Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” 1897.
Gingold, Michael. “It Came from the Hurricane.” Rue Morgue. July/August 2019.
Keetley, Dawn. “Shark Horror, Part 1: Naturalistic Horror.” Horror Homeroom. 6 July 2015.
Web. 13 July 2019.
