The recently announced Alexandre Aja / Sam Raimi project CRAWL has found its lead actress, and this piece of casting brings thoughts of strange coincidences to my mind.
Raimi will be producing CRAWL, which Aja will be directing from a script initially written by Shawn Rasmussen and Michael Rasmussen. Aja has done his own rewrite as the project heads toward production. The film will be about
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.
As I noted when CRAWL was first announced, this sounds a lot like the 2010 movie BURNING BRIGHT, which starred Briana Evigan as "a young woman struggling to protect her little brother during a hurricane while trapped in a house with an escaped tiger." This is the same scenario, but with a father in place of a brother and an alligator instead of a tiger.
Now in negotiations to star in CRAWL is actress Kaya Scodelario, who may be best known for her roles on the TV show Skins or in the MAZE RUNNER films and the most recent PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN sequel… But she first caught my attention in a 2015 home invasion thriller, in which she struggled to save her family while trapped inside a house and fighting for her life against a group of armed thieves. The title of that film? TIGER HOUSE.
Unlike BURNING BRIGHT, there were no tigers in TIGER HOUSE, just like there will be no tigers in CRAWL. TIGER HOUSE did prove to me that Scodelario can very capably handle an intense "trapped in a house with something dangerous" scenario, so I think she's a great choice for the lead in this film.