Having your home and neighborhood slammed by a massive Category 5 hurricane is terrifying enough on its own, but that’s not where the true nightmare lies in the trailer for Paramount Pictures’ upcoming horror film Crawl. In the midst of trying to save her father from rising waters, a woman will come face-to-face with a creature that has been around for hundreds of millions of years, a perfect killing machine who won’t let them escape. The question is, what will kill them first: the seas or the alligator who has them trapped in their flooding house?
In this trailer for the film, Kaya Scodelario’s Haley tries to find her father, played by Barry Pepper, as a massive hurricane begins bearing down on Florida. She finds him hurt in the crawlspace of their family home, but before she can find out what happened to him, a terror even worse than the raging storm outside attacks. From there, it’s a race to see if they can find safety from the floodwaters consuming their home before they are both killed by the alligator hunting them.
Okay, this is going to sound like an insult at first, but it’s not: this feels like smart Sharknado. It takes the awful experience of trying to survive a terrible storm and combines it with the fear of being eaten by an ancient monster. But it’s like someone watched Sharknado and said, “Yeah, but what if this made sense and was scary instead of funny?”
And it does look scary! Alligators haven’t survived on this planet for as long as they have because they’re mostly harmless. They are horrifying, and the idea of being stuck in your house with one is a big enough nightmare for a horror movie even before adding a hurricane to the equation.
You know you have a good premise when “hopefully we’ll drown before we are eaten” is a reasonable hope.
Crawl, directed by Alexandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes) and produced by Sam Raimi, takes a bite out of theaters this summer, July 12.
Featured Image: Paramount Pictures
