THE BAY: The Creepy Crawly Disaster Movie

THE BAY (2012)

Starring Kether Donohue, Kristen Connelly, Will Rogers, Stephen Kunken, Frank Deal, Michael Beasley. Directed by Barry Levinson. (85 min)

Essay by D.M. Anderson💀

I’m generally not a fan of found footage films. 

For the sake of clarification, these are films where the actors themselves appear to do most of the work, documenting the story as it’s happening with hand-held video cameras. They are cheap to make and easy to market, as The Blair Witch Project demonstrated back in 1999. Though not the first found footage film - the deplorable Cannibal Holocaust might hold that distinction - it was the first one that became a blockbuster, aided in no-small-part by an ingenious viral marketing campaign that suggested it was a true story (duping legions of Drano-drinking doorknobs).

The film's success obviously convinced scores of other would-be filmmakers to do the same thing and we’ve been inundated by found footage flicks ever since, the most successful being Paranormal Activity, which was cheaper than Blair Witch and made even more money. A few major studios have since jumped on the bandwagon as well. Cloverfield had 60-times the budget of Blair Witch, but was still relatively cheap compared to, say, Transformers.

Movies made in this style are hard for me to view with an open mind, mainly because what was once a fairly novel idea has been run into the ground (especially in the horror genre). Additionally, I automatically assume using found footage is more of an economic decision than a creative one. Most of the time, it’s a lazy and distracting way to get things done cheaply. But there have been some good ones. Cloverfield, As Above So Below, The Borderlands and Apollo 18 immediately come-to-mind (though admittedly, I’m in the minority on that last one). 

There has even been a great one, directed by one of the last people you’d expect to make a horror film, let-alone utilizing found footage. Barry Levinson is best known for such classics as Diner, The Natural, Rain Man and Good Morning Vietnam. But in 2012, he cranked out The Bay, a disturbing, timely and really gruesome ecological disaster film where the use of found footage adds a sense of urgency to its story that would have been missing otherwise.

The least popular item on Long John Silver's menu.

After a brief prologue, most of the film consists of footage assembled by a rookie reporter, Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue), who is at a small town on Chesapeake Bay to cover the 4th of July celebration. Instead, people start vomiting blood and bleeding out before dying horribly. They are obviously infected with something. which turns out to be mutated isopods that have proliferated in the bay and gotten into the town’s water supply, the result of a local processing plant dumping chicken waste into the water. Worse yet, the CDC is at a loss over what to do about it.

The film’s body horror elements are really unnerving because, despite a premise that sounds pretty outrageous on paper, it presents the idea of being eaten alive from the inside out as something plausible. And as vividly depicted here, it’s hard to imagine a nastier way to die. Because it’s presented as a guerrilla documentary, The Bay never feels like a horror story or science fiction, which renders the whole thing more disturbing.

As to be expected, cautionary themes run throughout the film, such as humankind’s shortsightedness and none-too-subtle commentary on authority figures ignoring the problem until it’s too late (the mayor in this film makes Mayor Vaughn in Jaws look like a pillar of intelligence). Not for the squeamish or anyone who gets the heebie-jeebies from creepy-crawlies, The Bay is an excellent horror-disaster film that gets under your skin…and one of the few examples of found footage done right.