Audiences are quick to classify anything with a “creature” in it as a certain type of movie, but director Alexandre Aja ensured 2019’s Crawl broke the mold by turning an alligator movie into a home invasion thriller.
Crawl was a sleek, claustrophobic film that had audiences holding their breath while Haley (Kaya Scodelario) and her father Dave (Barry Pepper) fought to escape and defend their home from alligators during a Category 5 hurricane in Florida. While honoring tropes in the “disaster movie” and “creature feature” sub-genres, Aja’s film is undoubtedly a home invasion thriller at its core, and Aja knows a thing or two about making those films effective; his previous work, which includes the remake of Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension, and Horns, earned him a spot on the radar of many genre enthusiasts as someone to watch. Sam Raimi, famed director and creator of The Evil Dead movies, signed on as a producer, and fans were sold.
While the alligators were CGI, their realism added breathtaking scares - and even some successful jump scares - to every frame, allowing for complete immersion in the catastrophe that Aja adeptly built. While home invasion thrillers usually conjure up thoughts of films like The Strangers and Funny Games, the director managed to connect all the right wires to make alligators just as terrifying as any masked killer.
Crawl Follows All The Classic Home Invasion Tropes
Typically, home invasion thrillers are modeled after simplicity: a couple or family is going about their daily lives, completely normal, when something - or someone - decides that they are going to tilt their world completely upside down in the most violent ways. In 2008’s The Strangers, a couple are home for the night when suddenly, three masked strangers start trying to break into their house; they end up being hunted, stalked, and tortured for one, bone-chilling reason: “… because you were home”. Films like Fede Alvarez’s Don’t Breathe flip some of these tropes on their head, as his film follows a group of young criminals who are trying to rob who they perceive to be a harmless, older blind man only to discover they’ve put themselves in harm’s way by daring to enter his home.
In an interview with Collider, Aja discusses his return to the home invasion sub-genre after diverting his focus to other films. His 2003 film, High Tension, is widely regarded as one of the best - and most disturbing - examples of this sub-genre of all time. His interest in Crawl, according to Aja, was due to the film’s log-line and its suggestion that alligators could function like villains in a home invasion thriller typically do. Said Aja, “The idea of the woman saving her dad during a hurricane, Category 5, in a flooded place and infested with alligators. That was everything I was looking for, and a great opportunity for me to go back to something really scary”. Traditionally, in home invasion horror movies, there is some aspect of a familial relationship as well - the urge to protect one’s spouse or children - and so the father/daughter dynamic brings that to fruition as well.
While alligators certainly don’t have the same level of eerie terror that a human monster who chooses to torture and kill an unsuspecting family does, it still is effective due to the film’s setting; Haley and Dave are stranded in the middle of a disaster, their house is slowly filling with water, help is nowhere to be found. It’s the same element that has made The Purge franchise so scary; temporarily, anyone who might want to be saved from their attackers won’t be. Help isn’t on the way. To survive, one must rely on their own wits and fortitude in order to survive the night - or, in the case of Crawl - to weather the storm.
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