A found-footage creature-feature about mutant parasites might seem like something of a departure for the director of Diner and Good Morning, Vietnam. There must have been something in the water then, to attract Barry Levinson to The Bay, the trailer for which has just arrived.
The set-up, as you'll see, is a small fishing community that starts to suffer from a water-borne plague. Parasites infect first the fish, and then the bay's human inhabitants, who begin to display zombiefied symptoms.
What Levinson appears to have brought to the party on this evidence is scale. With the possible exceptions of Chronicle and Cloverfield, we're struggling to think of another found-footage movie that casts its net this wide.* We've got multiple perspectives, and apparently mutiple genres too, with the trailer alone straddling a Contagion-like pandemic story, X-Files-ish government conspiracy, Cronenbergian body horror, zombie outbreak, and even a bit of Jaws. Which is appropriate for Jaws Week.
Levinson started quietly filming The Bay in South Carolina a couple of years ago, with a cast of then-unknowns. In the meantime however, Cabin In The Woods has come along to make a somewhat bigger name of Kristen Connolly. How long she'll get to survive in this remains to be seen...
**The Bay **comes to us courtesy of Haunted Films, the set-up belonging to the Paranormal Activity team of Oren Peli, Steven Schneider and Jason Blum (also behind James Wan's **Insidious **and Rob Zombie's Lords of Salem). It'll debut at the Toronto International Film Festival shortly, before getting its wider US release on November 2. We don't have a date in the UK so far.
*The upcoming anthology V/H/S covers a lot of ground, but not all in the same story.
