Who knew chopping an arm off would be so tough? Whack. Whack. Whack.
That’s how The Swallow starts off: a couple camping in the woods are forced to commit unspeakable, violent acts against each other to survive. Something is coming after them, and someone needs to be 127 Hours’d so they can escape. The audience will quickly find out if their strategy is effective or not.
Nevertheless, the movie doesn’t really let go after that cold open.
Written and directed by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer (the duo behind Starry Eyes and the recent Pet Sematary remake), the movie tries to recreate the monster flicks of yore we all love. When the film was first announced to Deadline last year, they said in a statement, “The Swallow is a tonal throwback to the type of horror that made us excited about this genre in the first place. Something pure, visceral and absolutely harrowing.”
It definitely feels familiar in parts: five teens in the woods getting drunk and smoking cigarettes and making out in public before everything goes wrong. It’s that typical horror high school experience–at least for me, because I was cool as hell in high school. (Don’t fact-check that with people from my high school.)
Grace Van Dien (familiar to genre fans as the titular Chrissy from the “Chrissy, Wake Up” Stranger Things meme) leads the group as Ziggy, a typical teen rocker who doesn’t really want to be camping in the woods anyway… and that’s before she and her friends fall into a giant living pit of quicksand. This specific spot in the woods had been scoped out by Rich (Jack Wright), who had once visited it as a kid and still holds onto the memory fondly.
But now it’s fenced off and ominous, a perimeter literally burned into the grass. At first, the other members of the group aren't necessarily alarmed, content to drink, smoke, and make out (as detailed above), until kid stepsister Kim (Kayla DiVenere) sulks into the forest and becomes the first to get swallowed up by, well, The Swallow™.
The Swallow is the movie’s monster–a glorified, goopy pit of mud, its mucus effectively digesting the teens, melting whole limbs at a time. It is wildly effective, and it's great to see low-budget, traditional techniques used for scares. It takes quite a bit of acting to sell the horror, and all members of the cast do a fantastic job at doing so.
Mix that with some goopy practical effects from the legendary Tony Gardner (The Blob), and you’ve got a killer combo. Gardner also did the actual 127 Hours amputation effect, so maybe that comparison was even more apt than I originally planned.
The woods (as filmed on location in Astoria, Oregon) get increasingly claustrophobic as the film progresses. Nature is out to get this band of friends, and the sightline through the trees seems to narrow and narrow as more goes wrong. How do you even combat something that is directly under your feet?
At times, the character shows a certain lack of desperation. The mud can only move so fast, and sometimes the leisurely nature of the rescue attempts left me frustrated. You’re faster than moving mud! Right? But the cast remains consistently exciting to watch, as they each go through their various stages of acceptance and defeat when facing The Swallow. Kölsch and Widmyer wring their premise for everything it’s worth, delivering the scares and squelches needed to make it a rather perfect Closing Night Film for this year’s Fantastic Fest.
So, settle in for The Swallow. Remove your disbelief. And to avoid fainting, keep repeating: “It’s only a patch of mud. Only a patch of mud. Only a patch of mud…”
