2019 has been a pretty stellar year for horror. It’s also the year studios have begun to get savvy with how they screen genre for critics. While I have heard some individuals claim studios are “hiding” these films by not screening them, I happen to think they’ve just figured out they don’t have to. This also saves a lot of drama in the struggle for that all mighty Certified Fresh Tomato Score. See, when they screen a horror film for critics, you of course get the fans, but you sometimes get the prestige-y critics. See, if they don’t have anything else to watch that night, they will usually sit through the film just to take a 3-4 paragraph shit on it for click bait. So the studios are just not screening these films, knowing the critics that are so inclined or want to review them will seek them out, just like I did Friday night at my local AMC with Crawl.
Crawl is Alexandre Aja’s second “when animals attack” film, his first being the severely underrated Piranha 3D, this time produced by none other than horror legend Sam Raimi. The film stars Kaya Scodelario as Haley Keller, a swimmer for the University of Florida who goes looking for her estranged father Dave (Barry Pepper) during a Category 5 hurricane. She finds him in the crawlspace of their family home with a broken leg, and when she tries to drag him out she discovers a very large alligator is now preventing her from getting back up the stairs. This becomes problematic as the crawlspace begins to flood thanks to the hurricane. It’s a very direct A to B to C plot that is super effective, as the stakes here are slowly raised throughout the film amid some great scares that at times seem to come out of nowhere.
Crawl is a nearly perfect horror film. It runs 87 minutes; there isn’t a single wasted frame of film in the entire runtime, and every setup gets the payoff you’d expect. The script just hums along and is thing of beauty to behold, and exposition is delivered in a way that doesn’t feel force fed or awkward, but does what it’s supposed to do, giving you the backstory on Haley and her Dad and why you should care about them rekindling their fractured relationship. That’s not an easy task, but one that Crawl does well as it doesn’t get lost in being anything more than what it needs to be, a pretty damn good horror film. I also have to say it’s refreshing that the film makes you afraid of these alligators without the need to give predators doing what predators do any bizarre ulterior motivation.