At 5, This Toothy Horror Flick is More Frightening Than Ever
Did you know hippos kill an estimated 500 people each year? They do so pretty graphically, too. They often trample or gore their victims, though in the most extreme cases, they’ll drag them into the depths of the water, first letting them drown before they bite down. They’re herbivores, but every animal gets a little desperate. It’s interesting because, in the grand pantheon of animal-attack horror, there aren’t any hippo movies. More broadly, there aren’t very many animal-attack horror movies at all. There used to be dozens every year. Now, we’re drip-fed what few offerings trickle onto streaming at arbitrary points throughout the season. One of the best, Alexandre Aja’s Crawl, turns five this month. It’s a stellar alligator horror flick, and more importantly, a rallying cry for more big animals attacking humans on multiplex screens.
Crawl was a critical and commercial success when first released, prompting speculation of a sequel that has yet to materialize. The gist was simple. University of Florida star swimmer Haley Keller (Kaya Scodelario) drives to her estranged father’s condo to ensure he’s evacuated from an encroaching Category 5 hurricane. Dave (Barry Pepper), her dad, hasn’t left, but not because of distinctly Florida immortality (seriously, no one here evacuates, and it stresses me out). Turns out, several alligators have made their way into the home’s crawl space, and Haley, Dave, and the family dog (the GOAT), must combat the massive tempest and some toothy predators if they hope to survive.
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It’s simple, high-concept horror at its best. The title adroitly captures everything Crawl endeavors to do. There are people. A hurricane. A crawl space. And a surfeit of hungry alligators. That’s it. French Extremist progenitor Alexandre Aja, much like he did with Piranha 3D, augments familiar material with Grand Guignol excess and carnivorous punctuation. Bodies are shredded and poor passersby are graphically ripped open. It’s a sight to behold—a $91 million sight, to be exact.
Aja and writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen keep the conceit simple, eschewing the possibility of something more probing beyond familial dysfunction, but it remains on the periphery intentionally or not. In a lot of ways, Crawl is a natural extension of the ecological horror of the 1970s. I wrote once about Joe Dante’s Piranha and the solidification of aquatic horror. Those ecological tales were driven but the natural world’s pushback to human encroachment, a kind of horror fable whereby the movies made it clear their monsters were there first.
Biologists have speculated alligators have lived in Florida for about 28 million years. The interstates and condominium developments, truthfully, belonged to them first. They’re Crawl’s bad guys, but Aja gives them plenty of winning moments. After all, in an ecological twist of fate, Dave and Haley intruded upon them first.
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Crawl generates extra mileage with its hurricane. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the forthcoming 2024 hurricane season is going to be worse than normal. It’s been that way for a while, with climate change and the steady warming of earth’s oceans proving ideal for tropical storm formation. The ecological horror of prior decades often had cartoonishly embellished bad guys. They were regularly dumping toxic chemicals into rivers or brazenly tearing through protected habitats. The ecological horror of today, much like Crawl, is more subtle yet simultaneously frighteningly existential. Haley and Dave aren’t responsible for the climate crisis, yet they’re poised to endure its wrath. While Crawl ends with them surviving the night, their microcosmic victory means nothing in the grander scheme of a warming planet and considerable ecological devastation.
Baltasar Kormákur’s 2022 killer lion flick Beast was a little more on the nose. There, Idris Elba’s Dr. Nate Samuels and his family contend with both poachers and killer lions. Beast’s politics are a little more questionable (though it does generate some goodwill when Elba fist-fights a lion), though the undercurrent of nature fighting back remains the same. Nate and his family are, after all, attacked while on a restricted reservation.
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Yet, beyond Crawl and Beast, the theatrical landscape has seen few, if any, instances of nature striking back. If horror endeavors to be a reflection of our time, it should be more inclined to probe one of the most considerable horrors we face. I’m reminded of that one red carpet vine. Comedian Jus Reign and rapper Desiigner riff on polar bears before Reign interrupts, “Polar bears are dying. The ice caps are melting. Humans are depleting all the natural resources.” The bit was done for laughs, though the implications remain painfully, horrifyingly true.
So, why not have some hippos tear through a crowd of people? Why not have some errant polar bear, unable to find food, drift toward some remote settlement and start chowing down on some Alaskan visitors? Better still, bring Crawl’s gators back to decimate some more Floridians. Theatrically, horror could stand to interrogate our role in destroying the planet with a few more toothy predators. If we’re going to fight back, why not let the lions and alligators join us?
Crawl is presently available to stream on Paramount+ and Pluto TV.
Categorized:Editorials
