MOVIE NEWS – In the thriller Night Swim, a family is terrorised by the secret of a swimming pool: something lurks in the dark depths of the water. Director Bryce McGuire, who has now made a feature-length film expanding on his own 2014 short horror, credits producer James Wan with the desire to embark on a larger-scale undertaking.

Wan is credited with the creation of such horror flicks as the Saw franchise, the Insidious series, the Among Demons series (that’s twenty films in total) and most recently M3GAN, in which an artificially-intelligent robot baby goes on a rampage (and of course, given its success, he’s not leaving it alone for a while, with a sequel in the works).

“James has a good habit of taking something that seems safe, works well, and completely messing it up because it gives him pleasure,” McGuire told SyFy. – ‘Last time he threw the baby home and now we’ve got the swimming pool out. It’s such a nice home accessory that we seem to know well, we love it so much, we trust it, and then it turns out it’s secretly trying to take over our lives.”

According to McGuire, the self-aware killer doll ruins some of our fondest childhood memories, which the audience genuinely enjoys, and that was the ulterior motive behind making Night Swim. “Everyone has a favourite childhood pool-swimming experience, and we’re walking into that now, suggesting that we should fear what we don’t really know. For if you can’t see the bottom of the pool, it may not have one… It can be a gateway to dimensions from which harmful demons are unleashed on our world. But it may be that these demons are only the embodiment of the evil that is inherent in us.”

(Night Swim – domestic release: 11 January 2004)