An international poster has been unveiled for upcoming alligator horror movie Crawl, directed by Alexandre Aja and produced by Sam Raimi. This follows news from a couple of weeks ago that revealed the first poster along with the initial trailer for the film.
Crawl follows a young woman (Kaya Scodelario) who ignores a hurricane evacuation order to stay behind and search for her missing father (Barry Pepper). After she finds him, the two become trapped in their home by the flooding brought on by the high winds and torrential rain, and must survive attacks from a large and relentless alligator stalking them. Soon, the rising water affords increasingly fewer places for them to stay out of the reach of the menacing and hungry creature.
Shown on Bloody Disgusting, the international poster for Florida-set survival horror movie Crawl is a single image that perfectly encapsulates the facets of the film that will drive its tension. Scodelario’s Haley perches precariously atop an upturned boat, her bloodied arms and legs exposed by torn clothes, as the alligator soars through the water beneath. Its single reptilian eye casts about for the smallest movement, and its mouth stays open in readiness for effortlessly chomping through unprotected flesh. All the while outside, trees struggle to remain upright in the powerful winds, a bolt of lightning splits a sky obscured by ominous storm clouds, and unforgiving rain lashes down upon the empty town left defenseless against the ravages of nature.
The horror pedigree of Crawl’s creative team speaks for itself. Aja has dealt almost exclusively in horror, with his filmography tending toward the more viscerally brutal end of the spectrum, making his name with the likes of splatterfests High Tension and the remakes of Piranha and The Hills Have Eyes. While Raimi is probably best known among mainstream audiences for the three Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies, he's famous among horror fans as the director of the notorious Evil Dead trilogy and its recent TV continuation Ash vs Evil Dead, as well as the gruesomely fun ride Drag Me to Hell.
Horror is often an unfairly maligned genre that people judge without ever fully understanding it, to the extent that a slew of recent titles that have captured the imagination of the general moviegoing public, often produced by either Blumhouse or A24, have led to the application of invented terms to justify their enjoyment of a genre they believe should make them feel dirty. Crawl is something of a throwback in the wake of such releases, in that it looks to be a straightforward survival horror about people against a seemingly unstoppable creature refusing to grant them a moment’s respite, absent of any sense of irony or pretense that the film is anything other than what it appears to be on the surface level. While it doesn’t seem that the film will contain the same ludicrous volumes of gore with which Aja made his initial impact, it certainly won’t be skimping on a high level of pervasive tension to replace it, the same kind that the artwork of the new poster depicts with such sinister efficiency.
Source: Bloody Disgusting