The high concept supernatural thriller Night Swim is out in theaters now, plunging a family into an aquatic nightmare thanks to a haunted swimming pool. It also happens to be based on a 2014 short film of the same name by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, and you can watch it right now.
When speaking with McGuire ahead of Night Swim‘s theatrical release, the filmmaker said of the short’s inspiration, “The short was really just Rod Blackhurst and I hanging out in a pool one night and being like, ‘Remember when you were a kid, and you got freaked out because you couldn’t see the bottom anymore?’ And you thought that something was beneath you. It was like, ‘Yeah, I still feel that.’ Then, ‘Let’s see if we can capture that in a short amount of time, in a short format.’”
The 2014 short stars Megalyn Echikunwoke (Emily the Criminal, “Damien”) as Eve, a woman who finds herself stalked by a dark presence when she decides to take a leisurely night swim.
Clocking in at just under four minutes, the short film cuts right to the terror. No mythology, no narrative, or explanations; just pure aquatic scares. Watch below.
Writer/Director Bryce McGuire’s feature expansion stars Wyatt Russell (Overlord, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”) as Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home with his concerned wife Eve (Oscar® nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin), teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead).
Secretly hoping, against the odds, to return to pro ball, Ray persuades Eve that the new home’s shimmering backyard swimming pool will be fun for the kids and provide physical therapy for him. But a dark secret in the home’s past will unleash a malevolent force that will drag the family under, into the depths of inescapable terror.
Night Swim is written and directed by Bryce McGuire (writer of the upcoming film Baghead) and is produced by James Wan, the filmmaker behind the Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring franchises, and Jason Blum, the producer of the Halloween films, The Black Phone and The Invisible Man. The film is executive produced by Michael Clear and Judson Scott for Wan’s Atomic Monster and by Ryan Turek for Blum’s Blumhouse.
