Interviews
‘Night Swim’ Director Bryce McGuire on Bringing His Haunted Swimming Pool to Life [Interview]
This week brings the arrival of Night Swim, a high concept horror feature from writer/director Bryce McGuire that follows a family who awakens a terrifying supernatural presence in the backyard swimming pool of their new home.
Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, the film stars Wyatt Russell (Overlord, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”) as Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home with his concerned wife Eve (Oscar® nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin), teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead).
Bloody Disgusting spoke with Bryce McGuire ahead of the film’s theatrical release on January 5, 2024. The filmmaker shared how Night Swim evolved from its short film origin and the challenges of featuring a swimming pool as the central villain.
McGuire didn’t initially plan to create a feature-length film from the 2014 short. The director explains how fan prodding and research eventually unlocked a story worth expanding.
He tells us, “We did not have a full mythology or full sense of the story when we did the short. The short was really just Rod Blackhurst and I hanging out in a pool one night and being like, ‘Remember when you were a kid, and you got freaked out because you couldn’t see the bottom anymore?’ And you thought that something was beneath you. It was like, ‘Yeah, I still feel that.’ Then, ‘Let’s see if we can capture that in a short amount of time, in a short format.’
“We found out that we were not alone, that other people still shared that kind of irrational fear of the pool and this contained body of water. Basically, for three years after we made the short, and it came out online, people would keep asking, ‘Is there a feature? Is there a bigger story?’ For a while, I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ It is not that I don’t think there couldn’t be, but you don’t just want to spread that limited idea over 90 minutes because it would get really repetitive and kind of lame.”
Wyatt Russell as Ray Waller in Night Swim, directed by Bryce McGuire. © 2023 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
McGuire continues, “So, it took a few years to think about. I was researching different worlds, folk horror stuff, like world mythologies of how people would sacrifice things to the water and worship the water. Different cultures had their own connection to different types of bodies of water. Out of that came those big ideas that you see now in the film, which are who this family is, what they want, what they have to gain from the pool, what they have to lose from the pool, the history of the water that goes back beyond the pool. I feel like we really needed those big ideas and those big mechanisms and kind of mythology elements to be excited about making a feature film.”
With the story in place, the next major hurdle to clear was finding the perfect swimming pool to feature as the central force of evil.
McGuire recounts the challenges, “It’s the main character. We were going to build the pool, and then basically, the weather was so crazy that building something, getting it filled in, and rain washing out the construction side became just a logistical nightmare. We went on the hunt for Southern California; there are a lot of pools. There has to be the right pool out there. We just started virtual scouting and physical scouting, going from house to house to house. I mean, probably looked at hundreds, I mean literally hundreds and hundreds of houses to find this pool because I didn’t want it to be classic Southern California ranch style with palm trees. That was not the vibe. The vibe was more like Midwest, middle America, anywhere America, kind of the big oak trees. That’s what we’re trying to tap into, an environment that more of the country could relate to than if you didn’t happen to live on the coast. There’s something about that that felt like more nostalgic and more universal to me. So that took some real hunting.
“But we found this amazing house in Altadena, and I remember scouting inside the house, walking up to the parents’ bedroom, looking out the window, and seeing the view of the pool. I literally sat down on the bed. It took my breath away because it was so close to what I had imagined in my mind.”
(from left) Izzy Waller (Amélie Hoeferle), Elliot Waller (Gavin Warren), Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) and Eve Waller (Kerry Condon) in Night Swim, written and directed by Bryce McGuire. © 2023 Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Finding the perfect swimming pool wasn’t just about bringing a main character to life on screen; McGuire intended to capture the horror as practically as possible. The filmmaker shared why that choice was more about worldbuilding and authenticity.
“Once we committed to doing this as practically as we can, to me, I just felt that it would,” McGuire starts to explain. “Okay, so you’re creating an impossible space beyond the pool, around the pool. There’s a space that’s like we’ve never seen before, we’ve never been to before. Because you’re taking the audience somewhere they’ve never been before, it’s working against you in the sense that they’re looking for things to not feel real or be real or be grounded in reality. So, you have to work extra hard to sell that to them. To me, it’s like if the physics of the way the water moves your hair and the way you move through water, all of that stuff has to feel right, even down to the ghosts.
“We did use green screen techniques to integrate them into different parts of the background. We shot ghosts on a green screen, but they are practical cosmetic creatures that we built and shot. And that, to me, was just, philosophically, that’s how you make an impossible world feel possible: by grounding it in tactile reality and tactile physics as much as you can. That dictated everything that we did, all those choices.”
Night Swim splashes into theaters on January 5, 2024.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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