Director Mike P. Nelson (Wrong Turn, V/H/S/85, Silent Night, Deadly Night) takes on the creature feature for his latest, Beware Boiúna.
The Lionsgate horror movie releases in theaters on October 2 and follows a medical mission that turns into a fight for survival against the colossal ancient snake, Boiúna.
Deep in the Amazon jungle, it’s Boiúna who decides who lives or dies.
The Titanoboa-inspired horror movie dangles a promising premise in a sparse subgenre, but it’s a project that Nelson admits he initially passed on until he developed the idea for Beware Boiúna with frequent collaborator Alan B. McElroy (Wrong Turn), who penned the script after fleshing out the story with Tony Giglio.
“We definitely have a giant snake in this movie, but I don’t want it to be a giant snake movie. I want it to be a great movie with a giant snake in it. That was where we started building from,” Nelson told Bloody FM’s Boo Crew podcast.
That started with the characters.
Kiana Madeira, Jessica Rothe, and Logan Marshall-Green Battle for Survival
A medical mission goes catastrophically awry deep in the Amazon, prompting a harrowing standoff that awakens an ancient predator. It was important to the filmmaker that audiences get invested in the characters’ plight before unleashing Boiúna. That’s not to say the film is without intensity or action, but more that Nelson wanted to maximize fear.
He explains, “If I’m going to do a creature feature, it’s got to be grounded in something that we care about. Whether it’s the characters, the location, the strife in that part of the world, these things play a huge role in then, we’ll just say it, announcing or presenting you with this brand new, and it’s not even new, it’s an ancient legend, legendary creature, but this kind of new iconic snake. But it needs that. It needs that sort of presentation, that opening, to give what this is. Now you’re going to see these people put in front of this enormous, incredible, incredible monster.”
Going toe-to-toe with Boiúna are a trio of horror stalwarts in the Fear Street trilogy’s Kiana Madeira, Happy Death Day‘s Jessica Rothe, and Upgrade and Prometheus star Logan Marshall-Green. According to Nelson, his leads bring committed ferocity to this sweaty, grimy creature feature.
“Boy, we’ll start with Kiana,” Nelson says. “She was one of the first ones that I talked with. Just seeing her rugged strength. She had this vulnerability, but she’s so good at playing characters also that just don’t give any fucks.”
He also extends praise for Rothe’s performance, too. “Jessica brought a real keen eye, taking Alli to places that I think even later renditions of the script that were pretty close, she massaged those moments with her in the script to really give us a well-rounded version of who Alli is. That, of course, is very important for her and for what her character goes through. You need to be. I mean, honestly, she’s the audience’s eyes and ears.”
Opposite Maderia and Rothe is Marshall-Green as the not-so-nice guy Brennan who runs afoul of the missionaries before nature unleashes hell: “Then you have Logan, of course, who is just, dude, what he brings is the intensity level.”
Boiúna is Rooted in Titanoboa Lore and Research
The true star for horror fans, of course, is the giant predator slithering through the jungle and leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. The eponymous creature, Boiúna, was born of research and Titanoboa mythology that Nelson, McElroy, and Giglio built upon for their killer snake. “God, 90% of the Amazon hasn’t even been discovered yet. So there’s so much mystery involved. Within all that mystery, our stories, legends, lore. Not only is there this stuff about spirits in the jungle, strange dolphin men and all this crazy stuff, but there are so many interesting stories about snakes.”
“What we did with Beware Boiúna is we did our research on all these different lores, and we came up with this idea of what another story could be about this lore. So it’s rooted. It’s based on all these stories that are out there. That was super exciting to read and learn about. That’s how we then blended the two to make our own mythology of something that’s real, that scientifically was found. So could it exist today? Almost like a cryptid. Like Bigfoot, it’s something that could exist in that 90% that we haven’t seen. But also rooted in the people who have the stories out there that live in the jungle or near it.”
The mythic predator Boiúna is female, and in her film, she’s the one who decides who lives and who dies. That makes encountering her all the more unpredictable, though likely to end in brutal evisceration.
Again, it all goes back to characters for Nelson: “The scariest things happen when you are with the characters. Not when you are showing big, broad things, not when you are with a monster. When you are right with the character, perched on their shoulders, seeing what they see right up in their face, looking at their eyes, peering through the trees and just seeing that movement that they are seeing at the same time, that’s when shit gets real.”
As for the snake itself, Nelson took design cues from nature itself, wanting to play it straight to avoid one annoying trope: “Even in ginormous blockbuster movies with huge budgets, snakes just always look wrong. There’s just something; we either see too much of them or they’re too anthropomorphized where their eyes are kind of set forward, and they kind of are given human features and the way that they act, and they look angry.”
The Cast and Crew of Beware Boiúna Trekked Deep into the Dangerous Jungle to Film
While Boiúna itself is mostly a VFX creature, Nelson employed plenty of practical tricks, like pulling a giant piece of HVAC through the jungle to emulate weighted movement or using giant printouts of the snake’s head for eye line. There’s also no shortage of practical carnage, either, including a rather gnarly vision of a botfly extraction from flesh.
Moreover, Nelson’s latest was shot in the actual jungle; the actors’ constant sheen of sweat isn’t makeup here.
He explains, “You have to get on a plane, and it’s a two-hour plane ride from Bogotá to Leticia, or you’ve got to get on a boat. That’s, I don’t know, a couple days, a few days, something like that. Getting there and transporting everybody and all the gear and everything down there was a huge logistical thing, but we made it happen. I have to give so much credit to our production team that put that together. The way their minds work, I’m glad that I just got to sit there and nod while they figured that out.”
“Granted, we’re not venturing right in the middle of the Amazon with hundreds of miles around us,” he continues. “We are going to these protected places, these reserves that you go deep in, and you’re going to find stuff. I think I was more scared going in being an outsider and not knowing what that meant. I have a newfound respect for the jungle. Holy buckets. I’m not as scared of it, I think, as I was maybe going in the first time. I think it was because you realize that you’re surrounded by life.
“It’s not that everything’s there to kill you. It’s that so much there could kill you.”
So much so that the production’s MVP was an animal wrangler who scouted for the ever-present danger, “a snake expert who was always 10 steps ahead of us, who was always searching, finding anything venomous, anything poisonous. He found anything that could have been potentially dangerous. He would take those things to his truck, and he would drive them far away, place them back in the jungle, and come back and continue doing his. He kept us alive.”
Discover who Boiúna deems worthy of survival when Beware Boiúna arrives in October. For even more about the film, listen to the full Boo Crew episode below.
