So, how exactly did we get a found footage monster movie from the director of Rain Man? According to the backstory, Barry Levinson was tasked with directing a documentary about the ecological problems of Chesapeake Bay, but not unlike the creatures at the heart of The Bay, the project mutated into something else entirely. It was 2012, right in the middle of the much-groused-about-at-the-time trend of found footage horror movies mostly instigated by Paranormal Activity (the producer of those movies, Jason Blum, is also a producer on this one), as well as what still felt like the early days of the mass adoption of camera-equipped smartphones—a perfect confluence of trends that inspired the idea of watching a disaster unfold from personal and media video footage, a collage of reactions and non-reactions from normal citizens, experts, and people in places of authority. The verisimilitude offered by this style of film might even bolster the real environmental issues that inspired the far more gory events in the movie! One could hope!
Of course, the other obvious inspiration for this movie comes from a place I’m sure we’ve all been to: finding out some random (maybe true?) fact on the Internet, especially about weird nature stuff. I imagine that most people only recently learned about Cymothoa Exigua, also known as the tongue-eating louse, probably from some listicle containing the same few photos of that oceanic isopod and its peculiar form of parasitism, where it sucks the blood from the tongues of fish until they shrivel up and fall off, and then replaces the tongue in the fish’s mouth. It’s hard to blame some writer for seeing those images and thinking “now, there’s a movie!”
The film is portrayed as a compilation of footage introduced and narrated by Donna, a former intern at the local TV news of the seaside town of Claridge, Maryland (Levinson’s home state), who claims that everything being shown had been confiscated by the government. This ends up including local news reports (including the ones she conducted herself), radio shows, police and security cameras, videos from websites, online conversations between the local hospital and the CDC, as well as phone camera footage from various individuals, running the media gamut we’ve all become familiar with (we even have two teen girls converse using FaceTime.) As with all found footage movies, there can be a disconnect with how authentic the footage seems and the way the actors try to look like they aren’t acting, but the sheer variety of the footage used does alleviate that somewhat. At least you never have a moment where you wonder “why is this person still filming?”
Most of the footage comes from July 4th 2009, although we have some video from before, mostly from a duo of marine biologists examining the condition of the surrounding seaside in the months before. We learn a bit about Claridge from the early footage: they have both a thriving fisheries and poultry industry (who don’t seem to get along), they have recently built a new water filtration plant, and the mayor is currently seeking reelection. Concerns about the waste from the poultry farms getting into the water are written off by the mayor, who of course hems and haws about the economy. As we learn from the marine biologists’ diary videos (a running joke in those is that the American researcher is constantly making fun of the way his French cohort pronounces things, making him look like a massive jackass), their investigation of the area shows that the seas surrounding Claridge are in fact heavily polluted, with red tide algae and deoxygenated dead zones (“40% dead”, he tells us)—but probably the most distressing discovery they make are the number of dead fish whose bodies are swarming with parasite larvae, and eventually they begin to find larger-than-average Cymothoa Exigua isopods well outside their territorial range. Very early in the movie, we see those two biologists’ bodies pulled out of the water with chunks of them missing—and as we are told repeatedly, they reported their findings to the town itself, but they received no reply. Those instances of text, and the dramatic music, accurately replicate the style of a particularly unsubtle documentary.
As you can probably tell, the combination of a weaselly mayor and the Fourth of July means that this movie contains very strong Jaws vibes, maybe even more than some of the straight Jaws knock-offs. The tale is as old as time: the people in charge ignore a problem and keep up appearances for their own benefit until the whole thing boils over. It’s not like that stopped being true thirty-five years after Jaws, or ten years after this movie for that matter (I imagine that CDC conversations and scenes of hospital emergency rooms filling up are even more evocative to people now.) When hell begins to break loose, with random people in the crowded holiday celebrations breaking into rashes and blisters and vomiting while screaming in pain, everything begins to spiral—but the mayor continues to be in denial, doing interviews and trying to play down the nightmarish scenario playing out in the streets, a cartoonish scumbag to the bitter end. The endlessly meandering conversations between the main doctor at Claridge’s hospital and the CDC, trying to figure out what could be causing the symptoms filling up his waiting rooms (they suspect a viral or bacterial infection at first, and you’ll also hear rando callers on the radio show rant about terrorist plots and vaccines) are appropriately frustrating for all involved (at one point, they even take a moment to look up images of the isopod on Google Image Search), and a later talk between the CDC and Homeland Security ends with the latter essentially saying it’s not a priority because it’s just a small town. The message is very clear: the authorities aren’t here to help, and only swoop in at the last minute to try to sweep the whole thing under the rug.
There are a few other “story lines” presented in the footage (including Donna and her cameraman watching things unfold on the boardwalk): we follow two police officers finding dead bodies in the streets and, in probably most effectively creepy of the threads, the videos taken by an out-of-town couple with an infant boating into Claridge only to find a town strewn with bloody corpses and the sound of screaming in the distance. The cops and the couple are the parts that feel the most like a straight horror movie, but while the former focuses on a slowly escalating chaos in what should be a quiet setting, the scenes of the town shown in the latter captures a lingering sense of dread. That is made all the more gut-wrenching because in earlier footage we see the husband fall in the water and saying he thought he felt something get into his mouth, and so there’s a sense of doomed inevitability suffused throughout their scenes.
We are presented with the various symptoms of this condition before the parasites themselves begin to really make their presence known, but once they do, the movie lets loose with a number of professionally-made gore effects. Aside from the blisters, we get to see a lot of things moving beneath people’s skin, and people with missing the bottom half of their face, (strangely, although missing tongues are mentioned, we never get to see an actual shot of a parasite in someone’s mouth, aside from the poster), and finally some truly gruesome shots of the things boring their way out of flesh. I guess Levinson must know the right people for this kind of work, because these are not cheap-looking effects, and even the moments that are probably CGI (like when we look inside the body of a fish and see the larvae and isopods) still look highly believable. There is a bit of the Day After Tomorrow effect here where the disaster seems to happen all at once over one day rather than a more gradually (are you telling me that there have been mutant parasites in their water for all that time and the things only started affecting people then?), and even the explanation that the growth hormones from the chicken waste makes them mature incredibly fast (under eight hours) doesn’t make it seem that much less heightened. Likewise, the aggressiveness of the isopods is a bit over-the-top—aside from just getting inside their victims, they are also shown actively attacking people externally as well, as we see with both the biologists and a teen boy. The horror elements manages to encompass both effective imagery but also a bit of horror silliness at times, creating this weird mix when you consider that some of the things they talk about and show are very real—the image of countless dead fish blanketing the surface of the water is one very familiar to where I live, where industrial run-off causes all sorts of nasty effects to bodies of water.
Even with those exaggerations, I don’t think the going-for-gross parts of the movie nullify the message, unlike other eco-horror movies I’ve watched— looking more towards nature for your horror (rather than looking towards other movies) is still a better way to convey the seriousness of the matter, on top of just being more inspired. In modern times, it feels like we can really go more in-depth with ecological themes, trying to talk about very specific problems rather than the more broad “pollution bad” messages of something like Prophecy (although the message here is still “pollution bad.”) I can’t argue that The Bay isn’t as blunt as some of those hokey seventies movies, and because of its choice of filming style, it could very easily come off as equally dated (although, aside from some pictures of Osama Bin Laden on a news website and the complete absence of social media from the plot, I don’t think it’s quite there yet), but it’s still interesting to see something more recent go for this particular kind of terror. We all need to be reminded not to trust our mayors, especially during holidays.
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