Alexandre Aja teams with Sam Raimi for hurricane horror film Crawl

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Alexandre Aja has remade Wes Craven's THE HILLS HAVE EYES, followed in the footsteps of Joe Dante's PIRANHA with PIRANHA 3D, and brought a novel written by Stephen King's son Joe Hill to the screen when he made HORNS. Now he's associating with another master of horror with his latest project, a self-contained horror thriller titled CRAWL.

EVIL DEAD franchise creator Sam Raimi will be producing CRAWL with Craig Flores for Paramount.

Aja is directing the film from a script he rewrote. The initial draft was written on spec by Shawn Rasmussen and Michael Rasmussen, writers of John Carpenter's THE WARD. The story centers on 

a young woman who, while struggling to save her father during a Category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped inside a flooding house and fighting for her life against Florida's most savage and feared predators.

That sounds a lot like the 2010 film BURNING BRIGHT, which was about a young woman struggling to protect her little brother during a hurricane while trapped in a house with an escaped tiger. It sounds like the tiger is being replaced with an alligator for CRAWL – apparently the Rasmussens pitched their story as "DON'T BREATHE meets THE SHALLOWS with an alligator".

Even though it sounds familiar, I'm totally on board for this one. Aja, Raimi, ravenous alligator loose in a house – there's no way I'm going to miss a film that comes out of that mixture of elements.