Right now all of Hollywood is fawning over the box office might of superheroes, but there’s just as many good tidings for the industry in last month’s little surprise darling, A Quiet Place. April’s thriller was released by Paramount on a reasonable budget of $17 million and went on to gross nearly $240 million worldwide. Hence why Paramount might be eager to team with well-known horror auteurs like Alexandre Aja and Sam Raimi for a new original concept. So enters Crawl.
As announced Tuesday, the film is moving quickly into pre-production with a greenlight from Paramount after previously having been developed at Annapurna Pictures. This again is unsurprising considering that Paramount put A Quiet Place into production around this same time frame last year to little fanfare, and look at the results. With Crawl, Aja turns his camera on the fictional story of a woman who becomes trapped inside her flooding Floridian house during a Category 5 hurricane. Given the frequency of such storms of the century becoming common place in an ever globally warming 21st century, the setup feels more terrifying than usual. However, this being a genre film, she also will have to contend with major apex predators from the Florida everglades, such as alligators.
The film is working from a screenplay by Aja and Shawn and Michael Rasmussen. It also marks his first feature-length directorial effort since 2016’s The 9th Life of Louis Drax. However, genre fans will likely know him best from his 2000s output, which included High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, and Piranha 3D. He also helmed the very underrated Horns in 2013, which starred Daniel Radcliffe.
Raimi of course is an old ham and legend in the horror field having directed the Evil Dead trilogy and Drag Me To Hell. He also continues to produce a variety of horror and genre fare on the side, including the 2013 Evil Dead remake and fairly recently 2016’s crackerjack thriller, Don’t Breathe.
No release date for Crawl has thus far been announced. We’ll keep you posted.