Chaos breaks out in a small Maryland town after an ecological disaster occurs.
The Bay is a 2012 American found footage horror film, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Michael Wallach. It premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival and was released in theaters on November 2, 2012.
This "found-footage" film is set in 2009 in the town of Claridge, Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay. During the town's annual 4th of July Crab Festival, townspeople become sick, exhibiting a variety of symptoms, which leads local news reporters to suspect something has infected the water there. No one is sure what it is or how it's transmitted, but as people start to behave strangely, and others turning up dead, fear spawns into panic. The town is shut down as government authorities confiscate video footage from every media or personal source they find, in an effort to cover-up the incident. But one local reporter who witnessed the epidemic, was able to document, assemble, and hide this film in hopes that one day, the horrible truth would be revealed.
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| Hi there |
The truth is that this is not really a found footage film, but a documentary type of horror. The premise is that some government secreted video footage has leaked to someone who montaged them in order to show "what really happened". And what happened is a biological outbreak. The film is trying to be realistic and it manages to do that, while the slow pace that some accused works perfectly for the film's ultimate and terrifying outcome.
The thing about this is that once we come to understand the origin of this outbreak it sounds like something that really could happen. The chain of events that cascaded into this disaster was surprisingly complex and at the same time very on point with the risks industrialization poses to the environment and to us! I don't think I've seen a threat in a horror movie this well thought out in many years. It all made sense once you understood what was happening but it definitely comes out of a blind spot in the horror realm.
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| Panic feeds on fear. |
Performances are decent enough from the no-name cast, who look more like real people than can be found in more mainstream fare. Location work, camera work, and lighting are all more than adequate. Also, we never see too much of the menace, but get just enough visuals to squirm in our seats.
Good little film with horror elements, and very strong environmental message, give it a try.
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| Our fearless reporter |
Trivia:
Director Barry Levinson was approached to do a documentary about the Chesapeake bay. He watched another documentey about the Chesapeake bay that talked about the pollution and the lack of fish. He said it was a great documentary but nobody will care about it. And so he said he would take all of the facts about the Chesapeake bay and turn it into a theatrical base piece.
The parasitic crustacean depicted in the film is Cymothoa exigua (Schiødte & Meinert, 1884), as known as tongue-eating louse. The female parasites fishes by attaching itself to their tongue where extracts the fish blood causing the tongue to atrophy. The parasite then replaces the fish's tongue and feeds on the host's blood or mucus. That explains why many townspeople are found with their tongues extracted.
