What Lurks Beneath

Why Night Swim is not just an “evil swimming pool movie”

- JACK SHEPHERD

JAMES WAN WAS SWIMMING around his pool late one night when he thought he saw someone watching him. A shiver ran up his spine. The malignant mind behind the Saw, Conjuring and Insidious franchises was scared. Yet he knew where he had seen this scene before: in a short film. “When you scare James Wan, there couldn’t be a higher compliment,” Bryce McGuire, the director of Night Swim, tells Red Alert.

Nine years on, his terrifying viral short has been expanded into a feature-length film, produced by Wan and horror super-producer Jason Blum. “It’s been a long and somewhat winding road,” McGuire says of Night Swim’s journey to the big screen. The initial problem was that the filmmaker – along with the short’s co-creator Rod Blackhurst – couldn’t come up with a compelling reason why