Today sees the debut of Underwater, the new horror movie which stars Kristen Stewart. Frequently, making horror movies can be as harrowing an experience to make as they are to watch, because actors need to go through all the physical and mental exertion that their characters do. It seems that Underwater was no exception for Stewart and cast, which has resulted in the actress saying she’d never want to make a movie like this again.
Luckily for the audience, that’s a good thing. CinemaBlend’s own Jeff McComb got to sit down with Kristen Stewart and the actress told him that while making Underwater was pretty brutal, that ends up translating into a great horror movie for the rest of us to watch. Check out her comments in the video below.
Kristen Stewart uses words like “excruciating” to describe the experience of filming Underwater, which isn’t usually the sort of description you want from your star, but considering that the emotion you want to get from your audience is one of utterly claustrophobic terror, it means that the cast’s pain was all in service of that goal. When the actors look like they’re having an awful time, that’s because they are. They don’t even need to act.
Underwater sees Kristen Stewart and company as crew members on an underwater oil drilling rig miles beneath sea level. The location itself is made up of tight spaces and narrow corridors. In addition to that, the cast spend large portions of the movie inside bulky diving suits, which means that even when everybody is in the open ocean, things feel tight and confined.
Kristen Stewart says that there was really no preparing for how awful the experience of making Underwater was. It really does sound like it was brutal. It’s unclear how much of the movie actually required the cast to spend time submerged, rather than handling all that stuff digitally, but Stewart has previously said a lot of the movie was done practically.
It’s safe to say that Underwater benefited from all this. The movie wastes zero time jumping right into the action and the terror. There is essentially no set up for the story at all. We go straight from the first scene into characters nearly drowning. Underwater is a movie that grabs hold of you from the first moment and does its best not to let go.
Of course, the terror of the deep is only part of what Underwater brings to the table, it is, in the end, a fairly traditional horror movie with a killer monster lurking out there in the dark. Which of these terrors is worse will likely vary depending on the viewer.
Underwater’s reviews are falling into the “mixed” category, which is to say it has about as many good reviews as bad. That usually means that while the film might not be the best example of its genre, it’s probably worth checking out if you’re a fan of horror movies in general and are looking for something to scratch that particular itch.
