French filmmaker Alexandre Aja doesn’t know what to stop is. Last year it was announced that he was the chosen one to adapt Smart House with James Wan producing, a project that no more news is generating so it is to expect Lionsgate have it on hold. But what is in fact happening is Space Adventure Cobra, the Buichi Terasawa’s manga adaptation that Aja will direct and produce this year, being currently in the state of pre-production. And now it’s been announced that Paramount Pictures, together with Sam Raimi as a producer, will invest on a new horror thriller entitled Crawl, where Alexandre Aja has been chosen to be the director.
Paramount has seen how A Quiet Place (2018), one of their modest productions with a budget of $17 million, is becoming one of the sensations of the year and has grossed almost ten times its initial investment. And the numbers keep raising! So the American company has greenlit the new project, teaming up with Sam Raimi who is an expert in successful low budget horror films being responsible of titles like Drag Me to Hell (2009), The Gift (2000) or the essential original Evil Dead trilogy.
Crawl has been written by Alexandre Aja together with Shawn and Michael Rasmussen, the pair responsible Dark Feed (2013) and The Inhabitants (2015) also authors of the script for John Carpenter’s The Ward (2010). The story of Crawl centers around a young woman who becomes trapped in a flooding house during a category 5 hurricane and must battle against Florida’s most savage and feared predators in order to protect her family.
Alexander Aja has been involved in writing, producing and directing movies, mainly in the terrains of horror, since his debut at the end of the last century with the short film Over the Rainbow (1997). But it was with his second feature film Haute tension (aka High Tension) (2003) when he achieved a big worldwide recognition. That was his platform to Hollywood, where he was behind the cameras in titles like The Hills Have Eyes (2006), Mirrors (2008), Piranha 3D (2010) or Horns (2013). His latest finished work to date is the Virtual Reality short film Campfire Creepers: The Skull of Sam (2017), starring Robert Englund.
