Get a First Glimpse at ‘Stranger Things’ Star’s Upcoming Horror ‘The Swallow’

Deadline has our first look at The Swallow, a brand-new monster movie starring Stranger Things‘ Grace Van Dien (who is yes, the daughter of the great Casper Van Dien) and directed by 2019’s Pet Sematary directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer. That’s all well and good, but what makes The Swallow especially notable? Well, per the synopsis, it sounds a heck of a lot like Tremors, except in the woods.

According to Deadline, Van Dien plays a character named Ziggy, “who, along with her four friends, journeys out on a camping trip to a picturesque remote forest. But trespassing into an off-limits area, they awaken an uncanny terror in the woods…and a ravenous hunger from within the Earth. Soon, the ground itself is trying to swallow anything and anyone it touches and now the group have nowhere to run as every step they take could be their last.”

Now, we love movies about subterranean monsters dragging people to their deaths—from Blood Beach, in which a giant crinoid-esque echinoderm snatches sunbathers from the sand, to that one episode of the X-Files about divergently-evolved Spanish conquistadors in the woods of Florida. We especially love the aforementioned Tremors series, which follows the complicated lifecycles of giant precambrian invertebrates in Nevada.

Thus, we can’t help be pulled in by a horror film that may be about an undiscovered arboreal worm monster.  That said, The Swallow seems to be hyping a more “uncanny” entity, hellbent on “trying to swallow anything and anyone it touches.” So while that could mean a massive evil antlion, the description seems to suggest something closer to a supernatural Sarlacc, like the ghostly ground beast in that one Goosebumps book, or even a Blob-like terror. The latter may be the likeliest case, as the production team includes The Blob ’88’s SFX supervisor Tony Gardner, “whose in-camera work will bring the malevolent forces that lurk in the forest to life.” Expect a lot of POV shots from the ground up.

Described as “a lean, mean horror film” that’s “essentially one extended set piece of tension and primal horror that just keeps ratcheting up,” directors Kölsch and Widmyer said that The Swallow “is a tonal throwback to the type of horror that made us excited about this genre in the first place. Something pure, visceral and absolutely harrowing. Our hope is that it will make you never look at the ground the same way again.”

We’ll need to wait and see just what “The Swallow” really is: The film has only just “wrapped principal photography in Oregon, USA,” according to Deadline, so stay tuned.

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