After the success of A Quiet Place, Paramount is once again moving into the low-budget horror field, picking up the self-contained thriller Crawl.
Alexandre Aja, the horror filmmaker behind Piranha 3D and the Joe Hill adaptation Horns, is on board to helm the project, which is already in preproduction as the studio is moving fast on this one.
Sam Raimi, the horror maestro behind the Evil Dead and Spider-Man movies, is producing with Craig Flores, whose credits range from the drama Fathers and Daughters to the sword-and-sandals epic 300: Rise of an Empire.
Crawl centers on a young woman who, while struggling to save her father during a Category 5 hurricane, finds herself trapped inside a flooding house and fighting for her life against Florida’s most savage and feared predators.
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Aja wrote the most recent draft of the script, which was initially penned as a spec by Shawn and Michael Rasmussen.
The project was previously in development at Lakeshore and Annapurna.
A Quiet Place was a major success for a studio looking for a turnaround. The movie was made for a modest $17 million and has thus far grossed more than $148.5 million domestically and $87 million overseas, all the while racking up considerable critical acclaim. While Paramount has had success with microbudgeted horror before (such as the found-footage Paranormal Activity franchise), the latest hit points a way for the studio to keep delivering big-screen thrills for modest sums.
Aja is the French director who broke out with the horror pic High Tension (Haute tension), which brought him Stateside, where he has made such movies as 2006’s The Hills Have Eyes, a remake of Wes Craven’s 1977 cult classic. More recently, Aja directed Horns, which starred Daniel Radcliffe, and The 9th Life of Louis Drax, which starred Jamie Dornan.
Aja is repped by WME, Industry Entertainment and Hansen Jacobson. The Rasmussens are repped by UTA, Good Fear and attorney Shelley Surpin.
