Crawl is a 2019 American natural horror film directed by Alexandre Aja, who produced with Sam Raimi and Craig Flores. It stars Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper as a daughter and father who, along with their dog, find themselves trapped in the crawl space of their home and preyed upon by alligators during a Category 5 hurricane in Florida.
Aja rewrote the spec script from the Rasmussen brothers to expand upon the story's length and characters. The film was officially announced in May 2018, and production started that August in Serbia with cinematographer Maxime Alexandre. It was primarily shot within a warehouse facility in the Port of Belgrade and wrapped after 41 days. During post-production, Max Aruj and Steffen Thum composed the score, while Rodeo FX completed the visual effects in three months.
Distributed by Paramount Pictures, the film opted out of conventional press screenings before opening in the United States on July 12, 2019, to critical and commercial success. It received generally positive reviews for its action, direction, pacing, and visual effects, earning a nomination for Best Wide Release at the 2020 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, and grossed $91 million on a $13.5–15 million production budget. A sequel is scheduled to be released in July 2027.
Plot
University of Florida swimmer Haley Keller receives a call from her older sister Beth advising her to leave the state due to the imminent arrival of a Category 5 hurricane. Concerned for the safety of her estranged father Dave, Haley checks on him at his condo but finds it empty except for the family dog, Sugar. Against the instructions of Beth's ex-boyfriend Wayne, a Florida state trooper, she ignores evacuation orders and goes with Sugar to their old family home in Coral Lake, a location at risk of flooding.
Haley finds the house empty. She enters the crawl space under the house and finds her father mauled but alive. She attempts to drag him out but is stopped by a large American alligator. She and her father retreat back where she found him, in an area that the animal cannot enter, but she drops her phone. As the house begins to flood, she attempts to retrieve the phone but encounters a second gator that crushes it and injures her leg. She retreats back to the safe space. Peeping outside through holes in the wall, she sees three looters at a nearby gas station. She gets the attention of one, but then all three are attacked and devoured by alligators swimming in the rising floodwaters.
Wayne and his partner Pete arrive at the old house searching for Haley and Dave. Wayne enters the house, but Pete is ambushed and torn to pieces by the alligators. Wayne locates the crawl space. Haley and Dave warn him of the danger, but he is pulled in and devoured. In a last-ditch effort to escape, Haley swims to a storm drain, where she discovers the alligators have made their nest and laid eggs. An alligator attacks her, but she kills it with Wayne's gun.
With the floodwaters almost filling the crawl space, Haley swims out into the flooded street through the storm drain, enters the house, and uses a crowbar to make a hole in the living room floor, saving Dave. They take the dog and make their way to a boat outside as the hurricane's eye moves over the neighborhood. However, the floodwaters break the nearby levees and crash them back into the house, separating them.
As Dave and Sugar make their way up the stairs, an alligator attacks Dave and bites off his right forearm. Haley navigates around the kitchen and uses a police radio floating in the floodwater to call for rescue. An alligator closes on her, but she traps it in the bathroom's shower stall. While making her way to the attic, she is attacked by another alligator that attempts to kill her with a death roll. She stabs the alligator in the eye with a flare and all three reunite on the roof. After narrowly avoiding another alligator, they rest briefly on the roof just as a rescue helicopter flies overhead, having received Haley's call. She lights a flare and flags it down, turning her eyes on her father in triumph and relief as he proudly watches.
Cast
Kaya Scodelario as Haley Keller, a University of Florida swimmer Barry Pepper as Dave Keller, Haley and Beth's father Morfydd Clark as Beth Keller, Haley's older sister Ross Anderson as Wayne Taylor, Beth's ex-boyfriend and a Florida state trooper Jose Palma as Pete Flores Colin McFarlane as The Governor George Somner as Marv Anson Boon as Stan Ami Metcalf as Lee Cso-Cso as Sugar, Dave's dog
Production Development
Brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen wrote the film's spec script, which producer Craig Flores gave to French filmmaker Alexandre Aja in 2017. Aja was initially intrigued by the logline but became disappointed with the story's actual length, which took place in one location, the crawl space, and followed the characters as they were antagonized by a single alligator, with a second alligator appearing in the third act. He ultimately departed a James Wan–produced project to rewrite the script over a year to introduce new locations and expand the characters. He worked with Flores and Dana Stevens to improve the screenplay, making Haley Keller a skilled swimmer and her father Dave her former coach to make their journey and survival in the film realistic.
The scene where Haley goes against the instructions of several people to retrieve her father was influenced by a scene in Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). It was added in to highlight her determination and give audiences the "[feeling] that something is coming and building up" in an "old school" fashion. Aja aimed to put each character in the worst-case scenario possible so he rewrote the screenplay as a "home invasion movie" where the hurricane was an antagonist. He did extensive research on hurricanes and alligators and looked through "hundreds of hours" of real-world footage to find examples of both topics in their "ferocious" and "powerful" nature. The design of the alligators were based on a stuffed Mississippi alligator located at the American Museum of Natural History and a sheltered alligator in Miami nicknamed "Godzilla".
On May 1, 2018, Paramount Pictures announced it had acquired the rights to the film, and described the antagonists as the "most savage and feared predators" in Florida. Aja, whose previous credits at the time included the horror films Piranha 3D (2010) and Horns (2013), came on board to direct the thriller produced by Flores and Sam Raimi. The project had previously been in development through Lakeshore Entertainment and Annapurna Pictures before moving to Paramount to benefit from the success of A Quiet Place (2018), another low-budget horror film from the studio. Aja listed the one-location styles of Alien (1979) and Cujo (1983) and the setting in Raimi's The Evil Dead (1981) as inspirations for the film. With Jaws (1975) serving as "the blueprint", Aja wanted the film to feel similar to riding a rollercoaster: suspenseful. Paramount agreed to keep the runtime short, and ultimately decided on 87 minutes. Aja went against the advice of multiple executives to introduce the alligators early on in the film, as he believed this would be unexpected to the general audience. One idea considered for the ending would have seen the main characters get eaten by an alligator. Aja also said there were several discussions on "whether the dog would live or not"; alternate scenarios involved an alligator biting the dog's tail off, the main characters feeding the dog to the alligators to escape their home, and the dog sacrificing itself to save its owners. The happy ending was picked to evoke a positive response from audiences.
Casting Kaya Scodelario entered negotiations to star in May 2018. Paramount executive Wyck Godfrey gave her the chance to join the film in a leading role without having to audition. Accepting the part, she said she picked the film based on "the material and the character, and if it's going to empower me or teach me or test me." To physically prepare for the role, Scodelario was trained to swim by coaches from England and Serbia, including a former Olympian, who helped her for six to seven weeks at the London Aquatics Centre. Her training progressed from her having to swim in a kiddie pool with floaties to swimming at a "good speed and quite good stamina". Barry Pepper, having previously worked with Scodelario in 2015 on Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials, was added to the cast in June 2018. He also underwent months of training to improve his swimming, and said he enjoyed the idea of working on a film about a father-and-daughter relationship.
Design and filming Crawl is the first Paramount film to be shot in the country of Serbia. Principal photography began in August 2018 and concluded in September after 41 days. Maxime Alexandre was the cinematographer. The majority of filming took place in the city of Belgrade, particularly on a set located in a warehouse facility for shipping containers in the Port of Belgrade. On July 30, 2018, days before production officially began, the set was visited by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and United States Ambassador to Serbia Kyle Randolph Scott. Vučić said he was "extremely glad" of the studio's decision to film in the country.
Using Arri Alexa cameras, including an Alexa SXT and an Alexa Mini, the film was shot with Leica Summilux-C lenses and Alura lightweight zooms on a Steadicam and a Technocrane. Within the facility, three soundstages were equipped, "the largest one for the exterior house and neighborhood, another for the house exterior and interiors, first and second floor—also used for underwater filming—and a third stage for the basement and roof scenes". Pepper mentioned that the warehouses used were the size of football fields and that the houses, gas stations, and trees were built on set.
Alan Gilmore was the film's production designer. To make the usage of water realistic, he watched several photo documentaries from New Orleans to research natural disasters and the effects a hurricane could have on houses without sustainable protection to make sure "it looks exactly right and causes the right damage and the right effects". For the main location, a house was constructed inside one of the warehouses and the production crew added a water tank they were able to fill to flood the house as filming progressed.
Overall, seven water tanks were built, of which two were filled simply to carry water, four were used for each section of the house, and a larger three-meter tall 60-meter by 80-meter tank was used for the neighborhood. According to the Serbia Film Commission, most of the film was shot after the house was flooded with the main water tanks, with 5 million liters of water being used on a daily basis. Scodelario found the shoot "the most physically demanding" of her career: "I was broken at the end of every day. We were shooting 16- to 18-hour days. I was on set all day, every day. I lost about 12 pounds shooting the movie, but I gained some of it in muscle, which I was quite impressed with. I broke a finger; I came home every day bruised, bloodied and cut open." She has spoken of how she "beefed up" her character as much as she could, eschewing makeup and playing most of the film in her bare feet, explaining: "I fought to have her barefoot [...] I didn't want protection on my feet. As a girl who's a swimmer, she's going to wear flip-flops and once she has to crawl around, she's going to kick them off." Additional filming took place in the United States, specifically around Tampa Bay in Tierra Verde, Lake Maggiore in St. Petersburg, and Thonotosassa, where exterior scenes and B-roll footage was shot. Scenes involving characters driving were shot in front of green screens, with some footage being filmed with stuntmen while actors were still in Belgrade.