WATER TORTURE

NIGHT SWIM Kerry Condon battles a malicious spirit in Blumhouse’s, uh, haunted-pool movie.

Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon’s characters get more than they paid for with their new home

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 watching Jaws,’ he says. ‘That there was no bottom and something beneath me was rising from the dark to take me down.’

But when it comes to the core concept, McGuire was aware that he would have to use his (pool) noodle. ‘How do you keep people coming back to the pool in a convincing way?’ he asked himself. ‘Because that’s what can get a little groan-inducing if that’s not done right. There’s the low-rent, evil-waterbed version of a haunted-pool movie.’

‘No one’s a bad actor in water. You’re trying to survive…’

BRYCE MCGUIRE

Instead, the key to the film is its humanity. ‘If you believe the family is real, you’ll care so much more about them and everything that happens to them will be much more frightening,’ he says. ‘It’s all the fun that you get from the haunted pool. It’s earned it doing that head on, but there’s more to it.’

No matter how hard we push, McGuire won’t be drawn into revealing what the dreadful thing lurking in the water actually is, but he does promise one thing: ‘People are going to watch this movie and it’ll ruin the pool for them.’

NIGHT SWIM OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 5 JANUARY 2024.