Gator Weather

This week (and every week), the world is falling apart (light spoilers  below) . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

◆ Crawl, dir. Alexandre Aja, 2019.

1. Gator weather. Crawl is a popcorn movie and an animal attack movie, but it's also a climate change movie. Kaya Scodelario’s Haley and her father Dave (Barry Pepper) spend the movie escaping from and fighting alligators, but the real menace is extreme weather—and rising water. They’re in Florida during a hurricane, but this is not a standard-issue storm. Levees are breaking. The family home is eventually submerged to the roof. On our oil-drunk planet, the novel dangers Haley and Dave are facing (like an alligator attacking them in the submerged hallway of their home) are only more likely every year. This hurricane is not just a rare “big one,” but a violent, climate-fueled eruption that will only become more routine.
2. Crashing together. Crawl is a natural horror/animal attack movie, but it isn’t set in nature. This isn’t Deep Water or The Grey—where humans are stranded in the wild. It also isn’t Jaws—where humans are at risk right at the civilization-nature border. In Crawl, extreme weather is an occasion for the human world and the natural world to crash together. It’s the chaos and uncertainty of this chaotic overlap that structures the film. It’s one thing to encounter an alligator in the wild, it’s another kind of encounter at the gas station, in the living room, or in rising waters in the crawl space of your home.
3. Far-flung. People are spread out geographically today—especially those fortunate enough to be in the middle or upper strata of the economy. This is a problem for Haley when the hurricane hits. She’s at college in Gainesville, her sister lives in Boston, her mom (divorced from Dave) is in Paris. She doesn’t even know her dad is hanging around the old family house (he didn’t complete the intended sale), dropping by his condo first when she’s trying to locate him. This is how she ends up stranded, with no help, when she finally does track him down. Climate change is going to hit disadvantaged people significantly harder than others—compounding historical injustices—but in this one way, climate change driven disasters are going to punish many of us, across class divides, for our physical distance from one another.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

◆ 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, dir. Nia DaCosta, 2026.

4. His name is Ian. Ralph Fiennes’s Dr. Ian Kelson stands out in 28 Years Later, but he's the central fascination in The Bone Temple. He’s conspicuous in not belonging to the categories that tend to loom large in the zombie apocalypse film: he’s neither a “zombie” (technically an “infected” in the 28 Days universe), nor a fearful survivor, nor a human predator taking advantage of the breakdown of order. Kelson’s aims rise above the basic or the base. He listens to the Duran Duran in his collection of vinyl, runs a promising experiment on the infected, and constructs the titular “bone temple”—an ossuary of bone pillars. He’s a figure that combines the scientific, the cultural, and the holy (broadly construed, that is—he’s an atheist). It’s an amalgamation of social roles—scientist, keeper of culture, priest—in one man that’s atypical for our present moment in the West. He points toward the possibility of new social formations after the worst has happened (or, really, as it continues to happen).

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

◆ The Fairgrounds, from the collection Uncertain Sons and Other Stories, by Thomas Ha, 2025.

5. Us. “Before the holographic, there was cybernetic, before cybernetic, mechanical, before mechanical, there was us.” The Fairgrounds tells a straightforward coming-of-age story and at the same time comes across as a weird horror, sci-fi laboratory—worlds within worlds glimpsed as we track young Henry’s trip to the fairgrounds to buy a gift for his crush. It’s a place of magic and technology and monsters, leaving us in a not-completely-comprehending position—just like Henry. By the end of the night, Henry has taken part in something he doesn’t understand (A liberation? A crime?) and neither do we. Henry begins to reckon with the “strangeness” of the world, something we’ve felt throughout, sometimes with the sense of foreboding we experience when the creature (creatures?) Henry’s met that night watches a family leave the fairgrounds, darkness in her eyes.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday.

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