EXCLUSIVE
NIGHT SWIM Kerry Condon battles a malicious spirit in Blumhouse’s, uh, haunted-pool movie.
The latest spook-’em-up from producer Jason Blum and the horrormovie magnates of Blumhouse is their haunted swimming-pool movie. Based on a celebrated 2014 short, this extrapolated feature follows an all ‐American family who discover their pool is home to a malignant spirit.
Night Swim’s journey to feature length came after Blumhouse director and producer James Wan (Insidious, The Conjuring) found himself profoundly unsettled by its original iteration: ‘He was swimming in his pool that night afterwards and thought he saw a figure from the short film standing there,’ writer-director Bryce McGuire tells Teasers. ‘The next day when I met with him, [he said] “Dude, your short scared me. We have to talk.”’
Stars Kerry Condon and Wyatt Russell play the parents beset by their pool spook: an athlete, battling careerending injuries, and his wife. But, taking the leading role, Condon is more than just The Wife. ‘The first time I met Kerry, that morning she had swam a mile off the coast of Santa Monica. She wanted the challenge of that physicality. She loved the water,’ McGuire explains.
In the depths of the film’s Olympicsized swimming pool, the performers were able to tap into the primal properties of an elemental co-star. ‘No one’s a bad actor in water. You’re trying to survive… I’ve always been drawn to the way water shapes this kind of urgency,’ McGuire says.
The director is more evasive when it comes to his supernatural threat, deferring to a universal terror. ‘It’s about mining that fear I felt as a kid swimming in the water at night after watc
