DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Why Night Swim is not just an “evil swimming pool movie”
→ JAMES WAN WAS SWIMMING around his pool late one night when he thought he saw someone watching him. A shiver ran up his spine. The malignant mind behind the Saw, Conjuring and Insidious franchises was scared. Yet he knew where he had seen this scene before: in a short film. “When you scare James Wan, there couldn’t be a higher compliment,” Bryce McGuire, the director of Night Swim, tells Red Alert.
Nine years on, his terrifying viral short has been expanded into a feature-length film, produced by Wan and horror super-producer Jason Blum. “It’s been a long and somewhat winding road,” McGuire says of Night Swim’s journey to the big screen. The initial problem was that the filmmaker – along with the short’s co-creator Rod Blackhurst – couldn’t come up with a compelling reason why Night Swim would make a good feature. After all, the basic premise is essentially “spooky swimming pool movie” – which, the duo thought, sounded like a one-scare wonder. However, after being approached countless times to expand on their story, they knew there must be something brooding under the water. “A lot of people shared our irrational fear of the pool, and we were like, ‘Thank god, we’re not alone,’” McGuire says. “Even as adults, there’s something ominous and evocative about that location.”
Two years later, McGuire had a eureka moment. “I had an idea that I felt was a big enough mystery, a big enough mythology, that it developed into a real story that needed to be told over an hour and a half,” he says. What, exactly, was that ghastly idea? Despite SFX’s best attempts to prise it out of him, McGuire won’t open up.
“There’s a plot twist that I think is better experienced,” he explains. “But I will say that I knew I wanted the film to be about what the pool represents, certainly here in America. It’s a little slice of the American dream.”
Night Swim centres on a dysfunctional family that moves from one side of America to another after its patriarch, a baseball player played by Overlord’s Wyatt Russell, gets ill and has to quit the sport. The new household gives them a second chance at stability, the pool becoming a unifying presence and offering them water therapy. As McGuire puts it, the pool felt like a prayer being answered.
“That’s what made it scary to me,” he says. “What’s the cost of this dream? The movie makes you root for that dream until your defences are down. You want that pool, too. It’s alluring. But that’s the Trojan horse. That’s when your defences are down. That’s what makes the pool most dangerous and deadly as i
