The swimming pool is a crucible for social, sexual, and self-reflective interaction. In coming-of-age films such as Water Lilies, Booksmart and Eighth Grade, it’s a setting for teenagers to frolic, flirt and splash around in search of their identity. In Showgirls, Swimming Pool and Spring Breakers, the pool represents desire, sex and excess. And in The Swimmer, the make-believe river is a glossy veneer for death and decay.
In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, the pool is a place of peace and introspection. It’s a safe space in which to escape suffering, mental and physical, and a womb-like locale in which to regress, if only temporarily, back to childhood and a mother’s love. This is the pool at its most serene, remedial and inviting. In horror, however, characters would do well to think carefully about accepting the water’s invitation – it’s often a trap.
The swimming pool is an exceptionally effective setting for horror. Here in the deep end of cinema, where polite society is pulled under and good taste holds its breath, the weightlessness and opportunity that pools symbolize in more palatable pictures is inverted. Freedom of movement and uninhibited expression instead equate to vulnerability, panic, and dread.
Shadows ripple along the walls in 1942’s Cat People. Something unseen but not unheard of is stalking Alice (Jane Randolph) from the pool’s edges. She is cornered – and whatever hissing, growling, roaring creature hunts her has the advantage.
Roger is the last uninfected occupant of a saturnalian apartment complex in David Cronenberg’s Shivers. While trying to escape, he is pushed into the pool, where his neighbors rush to get their hands on him. Resistance is futile. The film climaxes in one giant shivering orgy. The assailant also takes the plunge in 1998’s The Faculty, as an alien queen tears across the school pool in pursuit of her quarry. She cuts through the aqua quicker than her game can cover the distance on foot. The water is her domain.
In horror, the pool is a hunting ground for supernatural predators and a place of limited agency for their decidedly human prey. These, however, are all examples of public pools. Relocate the lido to private property, and its scares become more intimate and intense.
The swimming pool is the American suburban ideal: white picket fence at the front, an eight-footer with a diving board at the back. But its aspirational appeal belies some troubling statistics. Horror gives filmmakers license to wade right into that most primal of parental fears: thousands of children drown in US swimming pools every year – yours could be one of them.
Summer turns sour in Burnt Offerings. When a rundown mansion begins to exert its malign influence over the Rolf family, Ben (Oliver Reed) takes an instance of father-son roughhousing too far and almost drowns his son, Davey. Later, in every parent’s worst nightmare, Ben is left catatonic as the pool churns with cruel waves that threaten to suffocate Davey again.
The idea of a malevolent pool resurfaces in Night Swim, from writer-director Bryce McGuire. The Blumhouse flick opens in 1992, as a young girl is lured into her family’s pool in the dead of night. She will never emerge from its depths. Decades later, the Waller family moves in, enticed by the pool’s therapeutic potential. Patriarch Ray (Wyatt Russell) is a pro baseball player whose career has been stunted by multiple sclerosis. But before he can engage in hydrotherapy, the pool, choked with sludge after years of disuse, must be fixed up. Cue restoration montage set to “The Swimming Song,” whose bittersweetness mirrors the peril that lurks beneath the joy of every backstroke and butterfly: “This summer I went swimming,” sings Loudon Wainwright III. “This summer I might have drowned…”
The water does indeed prove beneficial to Ray, who regains strength, confidence and mobility. Meanwhile, his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) and their children Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren) report changes in his personality and strange goings-on in the water.
Throughout Night Swim – based on a 2014 short of the same name – McGuire makes judicious use of recognizable swimming styles and games. One early scare unfolds from Eve’s point of view. As she swims front crawl, her head pivots left, right, left, right, in and out of the water. The director uses this pendulous perspective to build tension before finally placing something where it shouldn’t be.
Veteran underwater DOP Ian S. Takahashi regularly takes us into the drink, placing us in the eyes of the protagonists, as well as whatever is watching them. Occasionally, his lens settles on the surface, half-submerged, so we can see two sets of negative space above and below the waterline to scan for shocks.
Forcing the viewer’s head underwater is not only an immersive way to help them emotionally identify with a character, it’s also a useful editing tool. By cutting below and above the surface, filmmakers can keep us in the dark about what’s going on and where.
When Oskar is lured to the pool by his vicious schoolmates in Let the Right One In, their leader orders him to hold his breath for three minutes. As the older boy holds the timid twelve-year-old’s head under, the camera cuts between the bullies’ anxious expressions and a ticking clock before finally resting on Oskar, eyes closed. The wait is agonizing. Suddenly, there’s thrashing, splashing, and blood in the water. The bully releases his grip on Oskar’s hair – but only because his arm has been severed at the elbow. Eli, Oskar’s vampire friend, has made the save.
Natural bodies of water – deeper, darker, wider – are surely more fearsome than any chlorinated playground, though, right? What does the pool offer that the ocean doesn’t?
When a character falls prey to something in a natural body of water, as in Jaws, Lake Placid or Piranha, they do so in its dominion. Is it scary? Sure. Sad? Sometimes. But it’s also a kind of kismet punishment for their trespassing. In pool scenes, the transgression is reversed. The swimming pool is a manufactured space invaded by a foreign threat. The monster – be it ghoul, ghost or lost crocodile – should not be here, which makes its presence doubly disturbing.
As in Poltergeist, the Wallers’ pool reflects the darkness circling the drain of bourgeois America. When the Waller family first views the house, Ray says that as a kid, he dreamed of having his own pool. The dream, it turns out, comes with a lot of responsibility.
The scariest part of these films isn’t the external forces at play. It’s the notion that any middle-class parent might, on any day, prove too busy, bored, or plain negligent to protect their children from harm. Worse still, that they might bring harm upon them.
Films such as Open Water generate foreboding through their characters’ sheer hopelessness in the face of the heaving sea. For them, the end is inevitable. In a swimming pool, escape is always tantalizingly close. Night Swim partly derives fear from its danger’s proximity to domesticity. Because the water is crystal clear, the victim can usually still see their house, sometimes even their loved ones. As they slip away, the pool’s white tiles and rectangular perimeter frame with picture-perfect irony the life they’re about to lose.
Night Swim is now in theaters, and if you’re in the mood for something to wash down your aquatic horror, check out our Pool Punch recipe.
