Rule Of Claw
Crawl I Adverse weather and angry alligators in an action-horror with bite…
Two years ago I received Crawl,” says director Alexandre Aja. “I read the logline: ‘The story of a young woman in a category five hurricane in Florida, and the area is full of alligators.’ I fell in love. So simple. Alligators would not be in the ocean, like Jaws, or in the river… they would come inside your house.”
The script, by Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, took place in a crawl space – imagine Ryan Reynolds vehicle Buried, but underwater, with alligators. Yet Aja envisioned something bigger. It should still be claustrophobic, still set in one location, but that location would be the storm, meaning the action could swish around town before zooming in on one house where our hero, Hayley (Kaya Scodelario), is attempting to rescue her father. Aja promises an intense ride.
“Piranha was a guilty pleasure movie, puerile, funny, gory, un-PC, and Horns was a dark fable,” he says of his previous work. “But for all those years since High Tension [aka Switchblade Romance] and The Hills Have Eyes,
I never lost sight of wanting to come back with something really scary.”
Cujo, Aliens and The Impossible were his reference points as he set out to make the ultimate alligator/crocodile movie, pointing out that the likes of Alligator, Lake Placid, Rogue, Black Water and Tobe Hooper’s Crocodile all have their moments, but none of them are the one. The beasts are state-of-the-art CGI (“No animatronics will give me that kind of movement, and there was no way to shoot with real alligators and actors…”), but the pain is real.
“It was a giant soundstage, 80 metres by 60 metres and three metres high with water,” he says. “Lashing rain, 100 miles [per hour] winds. We shot for 40 days in the water. There wasn’t one day when I didn’t curse myself for writing the scene, in my underwear, in Paris, not realising how crazy it would be.”
And was it worth it? “The intensity here is bigger than Hills Have Eyes.” You’ve been warned.
ETA | 23 AUGUST / CRAWL OPENS THIS SUMMER.