Night Swim Filmmaker Cracked The Script After His Friend Received A Real-Life Diagnosis [Exclusive]
If you've heard about "Night Swim" and its haunted swimming pool concept, your first reaction might have been to wonder whether something had gone horribly awry over at Blumhouse and Atomic Monster. Producers James Wan and Jason Blum are horror juggernauts, after all, and a film about an evil swimming pool initially seems to have a lot more in common with retro low-budget horror schlock like "Amityville Death Toilet" or "Death Bed."
But even minimal research into this upcoming horror effort from first-time director Bryce McGuire reveals something altogether more serious. Based on the filmmaker's 2014 short film of the same name, "Night Swim" follows an increasingly successful formula of transforming horror shorts into fully-fledged features. 2022's surprise hit "Smile," for instance, was based on the short "Laura Hasn't Slept," while the best horror movie of the last decade, "Skinamarink," started life as a 28-minute, criminally underseen YouTube video entitled "Heck." Perhaps a more well-known example would be "Lights Out" from "Shazam" diretor David Sandberg, which also started life as a YouTube short before becoming a successful movie and eventually traumatizing Netflix viewers.
But even if there weren't such examples, there's absolutely no reason why a serious horror about a haunted swimming pool couldn't work. If a house can be haunted, or even a doll for that matter, why not a pool? As McGuire has said in previous interviews, the whole concept is based on his own childhood fear of something lurking in deep water, which is as good a starting point as any for a horror movie. That led to the three-minute 55-second 2014 short that was "Night Swim." But taking the concept further required a lot more than just wringing as much out of McGuire's childhood fear as possible.
Taking Night Swim from a short to a film
"Night Swim" stars Wyatt Russell as Ray Waller, a newly-retired baseball player who suffers from a degenerative illness and moves into a new home with his wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), daughter, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle), and young son, Elliot (Gavin Warren). That new home comes with a suitably foreboding swimming pool which has clearly remained unused for years. Ray is determined to restore it to its former glory, but as the official synopsis explains, "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." If that isn't enough to convince you "Night Swim" is a 2024 horror movie worth watching, just check out the original short film, which manages to build an effectively creepy scene within its less-than four-minute runtime with clever use of a submerged perspective.
But while that short was undeniably creative and well-executed, it didn't give writer/director Bryce McGuire much to work with when transforming his idea into a full feature. Speaking to /Film's BJ Colangelo, McGuire explained that he was eager not to just "stretch it out for an hour and 40 minutes," instead setting out to ask "Does this want to be a feature? Is there actually more story to tell here?" He added:
"I'm just not interested in doing it if there's not enough there to grapple with — enough there, enough story, enough mythology, enough of a villain there to deal with. So that was the starting place. 'Should we do this?' And then, for about three years, the answer was, 'No.'"
How did McGuire eventually figure out how to expand his neat idea into a full movie? It had something to do with the character of Ray and his illness.
Night Swim draws from real life
Going into the feature version of "Night Swim," Bryce McGuire knew he wanted to expand on the backstory significantly. But for some time, he wasn't sure how to do that. That is, until he got the idea to draw from his own observations. As McGuire told /Film:
"I kind of had the realization of who this family was, what they were trying to overcome, and the dad's sickness and trying to restart their life and put down roots and start fresh and kind of what the pool could give and take from them. And I was like, 'Okay. So it's not just 'Boo!' in the pool again and again and again and again. There's a bigger history of the pool. There's a bigger mythological component to what the pool can do, and there's also what it can do to you.'"
That realization came when McGuire was working on a project alongside his grad school friend, Dan Myers. As the writer/director explained, Myers was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). McGuire continued, "Seeing that process with him and just thinking about that disease and just seeing how hard that was, I was like, 'What would someone give to be healed of that or be free of that?'" McGuire then used his experience of seeing his friend diagnosed and the journey he went on to inform his own project, adding:
"I think my job as a writer is to be just open and sensitive to that and listen to what life gives you and let life inform, because that's going to be the best idea anyway — something that comes from your life, from reality, you have an emotional connection to."
Thankfully, Myers is doing well and even lent his talents to "Night Swim" as an assistant editor.
Night Swim is serious stuff
Far from simply helping out on "Night Swim," Dan Myers has been working consistently since his 2012 diagnosis. As he writes on his website, he's served as assistant editor on a several horror movies in the past couple of years, as well as working on various documentary projects. He's also dedicated to helping "advance standards of excellence and inclusion for disabled filmmakers and other marginalized groups in our industry."
With McGuire drawing from as undeniably real a story as Myers' and waiting three years before he felt he had a narrative worthy of the source material, "Night Swim" takes on a whole new aspect as a serious project, despite its potentially absurd concept. Far from being yet another "Amityville Death Toilet," "Night Swim" appears to be at least trying to tell a grounded story, even if it does unfold within the framework of a film ostensibly about some sort of malevolent presence lurking in the drainage ducts of a pool.
With that in mind, there's every reason "Night Swim" could pull a "M3GAN" and similarly slay at the box office. Horror is about the only thing besides action/superhero films that has reliably brought audiences to the multiplex over the past decade, and with superhero movies seemingly on a decline, if there's a perfect time to try to make a somewhat serious film about a killer swimming pool work, it's surely now.
"Night Swim" hits theaters on January 5, 2024.