Editorials
‘Crawl’ and the Apex Bond Between Daughter and Father [Father’s Day]
Almost a full year after making waves at the box office, Alexandre Aja’s Crawl is now available to stream on Hulu and Prime Video. It’s just in time for Father’s Day. Considering the plot centers around a father and daughter trying to survive both a Category 5 hurricane and territorial alligators that have trapped them in a flooded house, it’s the ideal feature to watch with dad this weekend. That’s not a mere recommendation, but perhaps a hard suggestion. Nearly a year ago, I took my dad to see Crawl in theaters, and the father-daughter relationship in the film holds a more profound, different context now then it did then. One that I couldn’t have anticipated.
Crawl functions as a lean, mean thriller, delivering white-knuckle intensity and Aja’s trademark brand of brutal suspense. Its simplistic plot doesn’t offer much depth, but it doesn’t need to. Kaya Scodelario stars as Haley, a young woman that heads into a hurricane to retrieve her father, Dave (Barry Pepper). She barely has enough time to find him injured in the crawlspace underneath his house before the alligators trap them in place, and the hurricane’s rising floodwaters cause time to be of the essence. It’s a survival thriller heavy on intense action sequences, so not much time is wasted expanding the characters. The audience is given enough to know that Haley and Dave have been estranged, that Haley’s an avid, competitive swimmer once coached by dad, and that dad might be a bit isolated and depressed in the wake of family strife. Through their fight to make it out alive, daughter and dad realize what’s most important; each other.
It’s earnest, and perhaps overly sweet. Especially when dad encourages his daughter to fight, to channel her competitiveness into a will to survive, and it results in cheesy dialogue lines like Haley affirming, “Apex predator all day, baby!” Even in the theater, amidst the pulse-pounding thrills, that line reads silly. Between the high-octane thrills and the compelling performances by Scodelario and Pepper, though, these minor quibbles don’t ultimately detract from the film. Not enough to reduce enjoyment, anyway, at least not for me. It likely helped that it was easy to relate to Haley, at least in terms of the role reversal between a parent and their adult child. Dave may be her father, but Haley is the one parenting him for much of the runtime. At some point in your adult life, you start to recognize that same shift in the relationship dynamic. You slowly realize you’re the one making sure they’re doing well, that they’re healthy, and scolding if they’re not—all of which to say, that it was easy to connect with Haley.
My dad loved the movie. That jump scare where the tree crashes through the window? He jumped so high, and it’d take a lot to get a visible reaction out of him. He was on the edge of his seat during our theatrical experience and was downright giddy when the credits rolled. All of that was high praise coming from him, a stoic, retired Army veteran who usually conveyed that he liked a movie with, “it’s okay.” So, taking my dad to see a film featuring a grown daughter fight off alligators with her father, and for him to have an evident blast watching it, made for a personal movie highlight of the year.
Crawl wasn’t the last movie I’d take my dad to see, but it was the final one he thoroughly enjoyed. On Thanksgiving, he fell violently, extremely ill. A few short weeks later, a biopsy revealed he had stage four pancreatic cancer that caught us all off guard. By the beginning of this year, he was gone after a swift, ugly, and painful battle that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
What was once a fond memory of giving my dad a fun movie-going experience became something more meaningful with the realization that it was the last father-daughter outing untainted by cancer. The last time I got to see him enjoy himself without the immense physical pain that he would endure just a handful of months later. I’ll be forever grateful for that. It can be all too easy to write off the value of movies as escapism, but escapism can be crucial.
Crawl excels at what it set out to accomplish, which is to keep you breathless for its brisk runtime. An earnest father-daughter bond grounds it. One that I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to initially until my own life experiences reframed it. On a thematic and personal level, Aja’s creature feature makes for the perfect movie to watch with dad on Father’s Day. There’s the familiar heartfelt relationship at the center, sure, but mostly Crawl ensures a good time. That’s what Father’s Day should be all about- making good memories with dad. Even if you don’t watch Crawl with dad, or your children for that matter, do something. Keep making memories while you can.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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