MOVIE NEWS – In the thriller Night Swim, a family is terrified by the secret of a swimming pool: something lurks in the dark depths of the water. Director Bryce McGuire, who expanded his 2014 short horror film into a full-length film, credits producer James Wan with making him want to take on the larger venture.

Among others, horror fans can thank Wan for the creation of such horrors as the Saw franchise, the Insidious series and the Between Demons series (this basically twenty films in total), and most recently M3GAN, in which a robot doll equipped with artificial intelligence starts running amok (and of course, given its success, it won’t stop there for a while, a sequel is already in the works).

“James has a habit of taking something that’s seemingly safe and working well and completely screwing it up because it makes him happy,” McGuire told SyFy. “Last time he brought the baby home, now we’ve taken out the swimming pool.” It’s such a pleasant home accessory that we seem to know well, we love it, we trust it, and then it turns out that it’s secretly invading our lives.”

According to McGuire, the killer doll awakening to self-awareness destroys our most beautiful childhood memories, which the audience is genuinely happy about, and this was the ulterior motive behind the creation of Night Swim. “Everyone has a favorite childhood pool and beach experience, and we are now walking into it, suggesting that we should be afraid of what we don’t really know. Because if you can’t see the bottom of the pool, maybe he doesn’t have one… It can be a gate opening into dimensions from which harmful demons are released into our world. But it may be that these demons only embody the evil that resides in us in the first place.”

(Night Swim – domestic premiere: January 11, 2004)

Source: UIP