Alexandre Aja’s Crawl is a film about a young woman trapped in a crawlspace with an alligator in the middle of a hurricane. But it’s also the story of a dog named Sugar, played by a dog named Cso-Cso, who’s probably even more frightened than his owners.
The life and ultimate fate of Sugar surprised us here at Bloody-Disgusting, so in our interview with Alexandre Aja we asked about it, and found out why the dog’s role turned out the way it did.
Be warned… SPOILERS LIE AHEAD.
Given how absolutely deadly the alligators are in Crawl, and how utterly hopeless the situation turns out to be for Sugar’s owners, we found it surprising that Sugar escaped the entire movie unscathed. But it almost didn’t work out that way.
“We were back and forth with, should the dog sacrifice itself? Should the dog be fed to the alligators to save someone? Should the dog lose a part of his body?” Aja recalled.
That’s a bunch of horrifying ideas. At least if the dog sacrificed itself it would have been a noble end, but the idea of throwing Sugar to the alligators to save another person probably would have made audiences turn on the protagonists.
“But I think at the end we chose to not do it because the interesting part was to make people feel that the dog was not going to make it, for the whole movie,” Aja said, alluding to the fact that so much goes wrong in Crawl that it’s shocking that the dog makes it out at all. Which is, in all fairness, the reason we asked in the first place.
And yet, there’s one more reason Sugar survives in Crawl.
“And also to keep him alive for the sequel,” Aja probably jokes, “where we see the whole movie through his eyes and all the alligators he was fighting on the surface while they were in the crawlspace.”
It’s likely that Alexandre Aja was joking, but let’s be honest: that’s one hell of an idea for a sequel! The pitch of “Benji vs. Man-Eating Alligators” is genius on its own, and the gag of telling the exact same story from another character’s perspective is novel for the horror genre. If done right it could make for one of the greatest double-features ever.
Crawl is now playing in theaters.
