10 CGI Horror Movie Shots You Never Noticed
9. The Storm - Crawl
Directed by Alexandre Aja, the man behind the 2006 Hills Have Eyes remake and the Daniel Radcliffe vehicle Horns, and produced by horror royalty Sam Raimi, Crawl from 2019 pits a father-daughter combination against a horde of alligators after they invade their home during a hurricane.
Think of it as a mixture of Sharknado and Panic Room, only it somehow works.
Rather than use real gators, the team opted for CGI versions of the scaly beasts, which must have really upset the Alligator Acting Union. (You don’t want to get on the wrong side of the AAU.) This is fairly obvious, but what’s more subtle is that the film’s inciting incident is also a work of digital fiction.
All of the rain and wind seen in Crawl were added in after the fact, which is odd considering how easy it is to recreate stormy conditions on a film set. Why Aja opted to take this route is unclear, especially given the modest budget he had to work with, but it came out looking pretty decent, so there are no hard feelings.
(Except with the AAU.)