Drowning is the least of your concerns in these terrifying pool-based movies!
Hotels, campgrounds, and abandoned hospitals can instill fright upon sight. But what about swimming pools? These refreshing summer escapes can sometimes be just as terrifying as a haunted house. In Are You Afraid of the Dark?, a school’s abandoned pool holds a very dark secret. Strangers: Prey at Night sets a life and death struggle in a pool. Annihilation turns a dried-out pool into a horrific, fungal death site.
Pools are everywhere, from neighborhood community pools to backyard retreats. So too are the dangers. Next time you dip your toe in a pool for a summer refresher, make sure to avoid all and any obstacles that might be experienced in the following watery death traps.
Something isn’t right in the world Lena (Natalie Portman) enters to locate her missing husband Kane (Oscar Isaac). She experiences the strangeness within the Shimmer, along with the other women in an expedition group. Once they step in, there’s a sense of the uncanny. Time jumps happen without warning. Plant and animal life mutates in ways not biologically possible. As night falls, they take shelter at an empty military base, finding a camcorder.
The hand-held footage reveals Lena’s husband and the Green Berets he joined slicing into a chunk of a soldier’s stomach. It’s deep enough to see the intestines, which slither like snakes. Obviously, this isn't normal. Lena and her group find the dried-out pool where the footage was filmed. The soldier's corpse remains, horribly transformed. The fungus-covered skeleton looks like it has exploded and frozen in place, like a morbid work of art. Something much worse than algae has grown in this drained pool.
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In 1954, a young boy jumped into a school’s pool, thinking it’s a great idea. Wrong! Something pulls him down and doesn’t let go. The pool is drained and left to rot behind a hidden door. Fast-forward to 1994, when Zeke (Kaj Eriksen) finds it and decides to try to impress his crush, Clorice (Margot Finley). She loves it. While it needs the grime scrubbed off, it’s perfect spot for her swim team to practice. The pool is cleaned and refilled. But that only awakens the horror that has lingered.
When Clorice finds out about Zeke is afraid of water, she lets him float in a raft to ease his jitters. Something attacks. The haunting in Poltergeist(1982) happened because of homes developed on a cemetery. In “Dead Man’s Float,” the school was built on land that was originally made to lay souls to rest.
A parasite, part aphrodisiac and STD, makes its way through an apartment building called the Starliner. No one is safe — not even elderly neighbors, young couples, and children. It’s a science experiment gone wrong, or right depending on the goals of the mad scientist who triggered it. The movie is bloody, full of sexual and twisted imagery. Which isn’t too shocking, considering it's an early film from director David Cronenberg. Before he made a man-fly hybrid melt to pieces and telekinetic abilities exploded heads, he unleashed a parasitic chaos.
The climax in the complex's pool becomes one messed-up orgy. Nearly all of the Starliner residents get turned into sex maniacs. By kissing, consensual or not, the parasite infects the next host. One victim gets tossed into the pool, and all the lustfully infected jump in and surround the unlucky victim. They can do nothing but submit.
The Final Destination franchise is all about the intricate game to collect and recollect the next name on Death’s list. Laser eye surgery. Elevator doors. A dentist’s chair. These and so many other mundane scenarios turn into final resting places. So it was only time before Death took a dive. Nick (Bobby Campo) sees the premonition that saves lives; now he has to try to keep them alive. Water threatens to end Hunt (Nick Zano) and Nick is too late to help.
Hunt accidentally triggers the drainage system to the country club pool. He lunges in, sealing his fate. The strength to the suction pulls him down, pinning him there. Unable to get free, drowning is enough of a worry. But this being a Final Destination movie, Hunt gets positioned in just the right way that suddenly his insides end up on the outside.
Two siblings get stuck in a trailer park with three killers stalking them. Luke (Lewis Pullman) tries to hide as two of the killers hone in on him. He stumbles out to what ends up being the public pool. Palm tree signs and a speaker light up the area. These killers do love their stylized aesthetics, after all. Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” plays when Luke takes down one killer. The next isn’t so easy.
The Masked Man (Damian Maffei) swings an ax, narrowly missing Luke each time. The only problem is, the boy gets too close to the pool edge. When the two end up in the water, they thrash around. The ax sinks, then the Masked Man pulls out a knife. Bonnie Tyler’s vocals are clear and then muffled as the camera emerges and submerges with Luke. Once again, if the knife doesn’t hit its mark, drowning is the next possibility. The tropical neon lights and the '80s pop rock needle drop create a fever dream with a slasher spin.
Kai (Booboo Stewart), son of a community pool owner, doesn’t walk by the water without having flashbacks that keep his aquaphobia alive and well. Dreams plague him of Nanaue, a creature from Hawaiian mythology that is a man on land and a shark in water. His father, Lonny (Patrick Gallagher), doesn’t like that his son fixates on these scary stories. But the more the dreams haunt him, Kai can’t let it go.
And then, one night, he sees something in the public pool. A fin slips above the surface and then below before anyone else sees. He becomes the boy who cried "shark!" Although it seems impossible for a shark to be in a pool, Kai knows there’s a predator using the deep end as its own hunting grounds. Kai takes it upon himself to end the pool-loving shark, hopefully without getting snacked on like Quint (Robert Shaw) from Jaws.
True crime writer Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke) finds film reels in his new home, a place where a family recently died. Ellison watches the old movies and in doing so, forces the audience to watch the disturbing footage too. “Pool Party ‘66,” like the other films, shows a family enjoying everyday moments before it cuts to a murder. The reel’s title has no subtext. In this particular pool "party," the family members are chained to lawn chairs and pulled into their pool, where they then drown.
And in the corner of the scene, Ellison spots a white face. Maybe a mask. It’s under the water, making the face distorted in the first look at boogeyman Bughuul. Music makes every reel even more unsettling. “Pool Party ‘66” is no exception. The song “Body of Water” by JudgeHydrogen is full of eerie moaning within atmospheric music. It’s downright chilling. Which means it’s perfect to build the dread for this reel and the next.
Community pools can really be full of danger. Bree (Nora-Jane Noone) swims at one while waiting for her sister Jonna (Alexandra Park). When Bree’s ring gets lost at the bottom of the pool, the two try to get it free from a grate. Pool manager McGradey (Tobin Bell) doesn’t see them and begins the pool cover process. The material traps the sisters in, and it won’t break, no matter how hard they pound on it. An extended holiday break ensures McGradey isn’t hurrying back. These sisters, who have never seen eye to eye, now have to work together to figure out how to get out of the pool alive.
A janitor (Diane Farr) arrives and because letting the sisters free would be too easy, she has certain conditions. Seeing how many what-can-go-wrong, will-go-wrong scenarios in the same movie with Tobin Bell almost makes this into a Saw spinoff. But he only has a cameo. This is a three-woman show, each with a past that has made their lives tough. The heater to the pool is turned off. The cleaning system, with all its chemicals, gets put on. It’s all a test of endurance to see if they can survive.
Chris Sasaguay is a Freelance Writer for Collider. At any given moment, his mind wanders from Scream Queens, queer cinema, to maybe 'Bob’s Burgers'. If he isn’t hiking through the woods on his free time, he’s probably making another niche Spotify playlist.
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