‘Night Swim’ Director Bryce McGuire on Bringing His Haunted Swimming Pool to Life [Interview]

This week brings the arrival of Night Swim, a high concept horror feature from writer/director Bryce McGuire that follows a family who awakens a terrifying supernatural presence in the backyard swimming pool of their new home.

Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, the film stars Wyatt Russell (Overlord, “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters”) as Ray Waller, a former major league baseball player forced into early retirement by a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home with his concerned wife Eve (Oscar® nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin), teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead).

Bloody Disgusting spoke with Bryce McGuire ahead of the film’s theatrical release on January 5, 2024. The filmmaker shared how Night Swim evolved from its short film origin and the challenges of featuring a swimming pool as the central villain.

McGuire didn’t initially plan to create a feature-length film from the 2014 short. The director explains how fan prodding and research eventually unlocked a story worth expanding.

He tells us, “We did not have a full mythology or full sense of the story when we did the short. The short was really just Rod Blackhurst and I hanging out in a pool one night and being like, ‘Remember when you were a kid, and you got freaked out because you couldn’t see the bottom anymore?’ And you thought that something was beneath you. It was like, ‘Yeah, I still feel that.’ Then, ‘Let’s see if we can capture that in a short amount of time, in a short format.’

“We found out that we were not alone, that other people still shared that kind of irrational fear of the pool and this contained body of water. Basically, for three years after we made the short, and it came out online, people would keep asking, ‘Is there a feature? Is there a bigger story?’ For a while, I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ It is not that I don’t think there couldn’t be, but you don’t just want to spread that limited idea over 90 minutes because it would get really repetitive and kind of lame.”

McGuire continues, “So, it took a few years to think about. I was researching different worlds, folk horror stuff, like world mythologies of how people would sacrifice things to the water and worship the water. Different cultures had their own connection to different types of bodies of water. Out of that came those big ideas that you see now in the film, which are who this family is, what they want, what they have to gain from the pool, what they have to lose from the pool, the history of the water that goes back beyond the pool. I feel like we really needed those big ideas and those big mechanisms and kind of mythology elements to be excited about making a feature film.”

With the story in place, the next major hurdle to clear was finding the perfect swimming pool to feature as the central force of evil. 

McGuire recounts the challenges, “It’s the main character. We were going to build the pool, and then basically, the weather was so crazy that building something, getting it filled in, and rain washing out the construction side became just a logistical nightmare. We went on the hunt for Southern California; there are a lot of pools. There has to be the right pool out there. We just started virtual scouting and physical scouting, going from house to house to house. I mean, probably looked at hundreds, I mean literally hundreds and hundreds of houses to find this pool because I didn’t want it to be classic Southern California ranch style with palm trees. That was not the vibe. The vibe was more like Midwest, middle America, anywhere America, kind of the big oak trees. That’s what we’re trying to tap into, an environment that more of the country could relate to than if you didn’t happen to live on the coast. There’s something about that that felt like more nostalgic and more universal to me. So that took some real hunting.

“But we found this amazing house in Altadena, and I remember scouting inside the house, walking up to the parents’ bedroom, looking out the window, and seeing the view of the pool. I literally sat down on the bed. It took my breath away because it was so close to what I had imagined in my mind.”

Finding the perfect swimming pool wasn’t just about bringing a main character to life on screen; McGuire intended to capture the horror as practically as possible. The filmmaker shared why that choice was more about worldbuilding and authenticity.

“Once we committed to doing this as practically as we can, to me, I just felt that it would,” McGuire starts to explain. “Okay, so you’re creating an impossible space beyond the pool, around the pool. There’s a space that’s like we’ve never seen before, we’ve never been to before. Because you’re taking the audience somewhere they’ve never been before, it’s working against you in the sense that they’re looking for things to not feel real or be real or be grounded in reality. So, you have to work extra hard to sell that to them. To me, it’s like if the physics of the way the water moves your hair and the way you move through water, all of that stuff has to feel right, even down to the ghosts.

“We did use green screen techniques to integrate them into different parts of the background. We shot ghosts on a green screen, but they are practical cosmetic creatures that we built and shot. And that, to me, was just, philosophically, that’s how you make an impossible world feel possible: by grounding it in tactile reality and tactile physics as much as you can. That dictated everything that we did, all those choices.”

Night Swim splashes into theaters on January 5, 2024.

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