Crawl
Crawl
When a huge hurricane hits her hometown in Florida, Haley ignores evacuation orders to look for her father. After finding him badly wounded, both are trapped by the flood. With virtually no time to escape the storm, they discover that rising water levels are the least of their problems.
Mike Messier reviewedJuly 13, 2025
If you liked this, you'd probably also enjoy another horror movie made by this director called High Tension (2003) or this other natural horror movie called The Shallows (2016).
Crawl (produced by horror legend Sam Raimi) far exceeded my expectations and firmly sits near the top of the list when it comes to "natural horror". What really makes this movie work is the combination of a few things...
1. This movie is advertised as a horror, when secretly it's also a natural disaster thriller (like Twister). The characters refuse to drown trapped in the crawlspace under their Florida home being flooded by a hurricane, therefore they MUST face the threat of alligator attack by traversing through the waters in an attempt to get to higher ground. The audience suffers both fear from the creatures and anxiety from the storm at the same time.
2. The script wastes no time getting down to business. With a runtime of 87 minutes, the protagonist's Dad is declared missing and the hurricane starts 5 minutes in. At 15 minutes in, a tree is hurled through the window of their home and the threat of weather is real. And at 20 minutes in, our two protagonists are pinned down by 2 gators in the flooding crawlspace underneath the house.
3. Almost 60 of the 87 minutes of Crawl takes place in a single location: the crawlspace under the home. This confined space cleverly adds a layer of claustrophobia on top of the fear of drowning and being torn apart by alligators.
4. Most importantly, this creature-horror seems (relatively) realistic, like The Shallows (2016) and is fiercely anchored by strong performances by Kaya Scodelario and Barry Pepper.