Chlorinated Slaughter: Predation and Energy in Ten Horror Film Swimming Pools – Horror Film

Cullen Wade

            “Swimming isn’t a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning.”

—George Carlin, Playin’ with Your Head

Springboard

If, because it’s speculated, our prehistoric ancestors realized swimming to flee predators¹, I doubt most of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who use swimming swimming pools yearly are consciously practising easy methods to keep away from being ripped aside by beasts. But as hundreds of horror films recommend—together with the 100 or so I dissect in my forthcoming guide S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema—a part of us remembers. Unlike wild-water swimming, the bogus pool is meant to be protected, a water expertise mediated by concrete and chemical compounds. But even the tamest water is inhospitable to surface-dwellers, and the horror film swimming pool typically features as what theorist Barbara Creed calls a “border.” Creed, who builds on Julia Kristeva’s abject and Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order, writes that “the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film […] to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.” She factors out the significance of “a border between what Kristeva refers to as ‘the clean and proper body’ and the abject body.”²

But borders—just like the greenback retailer swim goggles that hardly preserve the pool water out of my eyes—are leaky. At the swimming pool, the pure leaks into the unnatural, public intrudes on personal, and the chaste morphs into the erotic. In all these sides (what my guide phrases websites of secrets and techniques, sexuality, and social segregation) the swimming pool has been a battleground, each within the motion pictures and actual life, over the “clean and proper body.”

Jeff Wiltse’s indispensable Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America traces the shifting face of the waters because the earliest municipal swimming pools within the Eighties. At that point, swimming pools have been extra like public baths, meant to enhance the underclass’s hygiene (Kristeva’s clear physique). After the widespread acceptance of germ idea made communal tanks unfeasible as baths, the main target shifted to athletic services for the development of bodily health (Kristeva’s correct physique). By the Nineteen Twenties, officers have been policing ladies’s swimsuits within the title of decency, whereas the definition of “decency” modified from how a lot of your determine you confirmed to what sort of determine you had (one other permutation of the correct physique). The notion of the correct physique took on yet one more that means within the following decade, when swimming pools started the parallel processes of gender integration and racial segregation.³

In the background of all these modifications is the swimming pool’s relationship to energy. Joan Didion famously noticed that the pool doesn’t symbolize wealth a lot as “control over the uncontrollable.”⁴ Victorian-era social reformers who hoped that publicity to the genteel class would soften the boisterous blue-collar swimming tradition discovered that the reverse was occurring. During Sixties racial unrest, officers who hoped extra inner-city swimming pools would “cool hot tempers” have been stymied when the swimming pools they constructed—substandard and inequitably maintained—stoked much more discontent.⁵

I’ll assume readers are already aware of the holy trinity of swimming pool horror from the black and white period: Cat People, Les Diaboliques, and Sunset Boulevard. The similar readers will probably have additionally seen later canonical entries like Shivers, Poltergeist, The Faculty, Let the Right One In, Jennifer’s Body, and It Follows. Then in fact there’s The Swimmer, tailored from John Cheever’s quick story. Despite its solely tenuous kinship to the horror style, The Swimmer’s swimming pools embody as a lot terror as the rest on the record.

If you’re looking for an entry-level prime ten record of swimming pool horror, that ought to get you began, so be happy to cease right here. But in the event you’re taken with what else lurks within the deep finish—and also you’ve already utilized your sunblock—be a part of me on the pool deck for an additional ten movies that deserve simply as a lot publicity.

Taste of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961)

Hammer’s Taste of Fear and the run of black and white horror-thrillers that adopted are likely to reside within the shadow of the studio’s Technicolor monster motion pictures of the identical period. Though you possibly can pretty accuse Taste of Fear (retitled Scream of Fear for U.S. distribution) of being a Les Diaboliques knockoff, it deserves consideration as one of many earliest horror movies to characteristic a wheelchair-using protagonist.

A younger lady named Penny (Susan Strasberg) arrives at her estranged father’s property, solely to search out him mysteriously lacking. Penny’s new stepmother Jane (Ann Todd), whom she is assembly for the primary time, tells her that her father was referred to as away on enterprise, however Penny begins to suspect that one thing extra sinister is occurring, and believes her father’s corpse is hidden on the backside of the property’s disused swimming pool.

Taste of Fear pushes again towards the horror style’s unhappy historical past of equating incapacity with monstrosity,⁶ by presenting a wheelchair-using heroine who refuses to be cowed by those that patronize, pity, and underestimate her. The movie is bookended by drowning deaths, and dominated by the picture of the swimming pool, lurking within the background and changing into symbolic of its varied twists, secret reveals and id slippages. Like the swimming pool, there may be extra to Penny than is obvious on the floor.

When stepmother Jane suggests internet hosting a celebration, saying involvement in village social life would pull Penny out of her funk, she provides, “we might get the pool cleaned out.” To her, a restored pool represents a restored Penny. If the woman can’t be made correct, she will be able to a minimum of be made clear.

Mermaid Legend (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)

Mermaid Legend has been getting well-deserved consideration these days, because the beforehand hard-to-find movie was lately added to Shudder. Despite being 40 years outdated and made by males, Mermaid Legend approaches the texture of the #goodforher-era female-directed rape-revenge wave, with its anticapitalist ecological consciousness and sex-work positivity. This Japanese story of a fisherman’s spouse named Migiwa (Mari Shirato), who mounts a ugly one-woman revenge campaign towards the evil industrialists who killed her husband to make approach for the development of a nuclear energy plant, contains a rich dangerous man spectacularly drowned in his personal swimming pool by a wronged lady turned power of nature.

The horror movie swimming pool typically turns into a border house for ladies to rework into one thing else. (See additionally Cat People & Jennifer’s Body, amongst others.) In Mermaid Legend, the transformation is metaphorical however is nonetheless mediated by water. Every time Migiwa goes swimming, she emerges modified—from fisherwoman to grieving widow, from intercourse employee to murderess, from hunted to hunter. When she drowns land developer-cum-crime boss Miyamoto (Kentaro Shimizu) in his personal pool, Migiwa’s swim helps her defeat a predator by utilizing his wealth and privilege towards him. I argue within the guide that, if stabbing will be seen as a masculine, phallic type of homicide, then its female counterpart could be suffocation. When we witness dying by drowning in a swimming pool, we’re seeing transgression throughout the border to the abject, in a closely gender-coded approach.

TerrorVision (Ted Nicolau, 1986)

The swimming pool horror movie has a wealthy historical past of satirizing suburban alienation (The Swimmer, Poltergeist, The Faculty, It Follows). The border these swimming pools police has as a lot to do with race because it does with class. The development of the North American suburbs is inseparable from white flight from cities in response to civil rights inroads—one among which was built-in swimming pools.⁷ This is on no account an issue of yesteryear: right this moment there are about 300,000 public swimming pools within the nation, in comparison with greater than 10 million personal ones.⁸ To the extent that the privileged have been ready, they’ve at all times sought, and proceed to hunt, segregated swimming alternatives.

TerrorVision (one of the best Paul Bartel movie that Paul Bartel had nothing to do with) skewers the vulgar wealthy whereas additionally taking some tongue-in-cheek pictures on the ethical panic over “trash culture.” On a distant planet, a hungry beast (actually named Hungry Beast) is by accident beamed by way of a rubbish disposal to Earth, the place it reassumes bodily kind by a satellite tv for pc tv antenna on the suburban house of the more-money-than-taste Putterman household. After rising from a tv display screen into the garish indoor swimming pool, it lurks within the pool till it’s eaten each mother and father and their swinging companions.

Reviled as trash even on its house planet, the hungry beast is an all-purpose symbolic different, so it appropriately finds kinship (a minimum of for some time) with the movie’s counterculture teenagers. TerrorVision provides us one other swimming pool dying that turns privilege on its head, however with added irony: a tradition of crass consumption that’s itself consumed by the opposite it casts apart.

Open House (Jag Mundhra, 1987)

Though I make no pretense to having seen each horror film, Open House is the one one I do know of the place a serial killer targets actual property brokers for inflating the market past his means to afford a spot to reside. In a key scene, the killer decapitates a slimy actual property dealer and throws his head within the swimming pool of a home he’s making an attempt to promote.

The pool in Open House is the leakiest border we’ve seen but between the haves and have-nots—and implicitly, between public house and personal house. In their introduction to The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch write that “Whether a swimming pool is private or public is a central consideration in virtually every film that features one.” In the identical chapter, they focus on how the horror trope of blood in a swimming pool normally represents some sort of intrusion.⁹ Open House connects these ideas: the blood from the severed head contaminates the pool, simply because the killer—an unhoused particular person pressured to reside his life in public—“contaminated” the empty home the place he was squatting, till a sizzling housing market drove him to determined measures.

A Nightmare on Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010)

Small our bodies of water that magically transport you to different locations seem here and there on the earth’s mythologies. In transferring photos, the swimming-pool-as-portal trope goes a minimum of way back to the ultimate episode of The Twilight Zone, 1964’s “The Bewitchin’ Pool.” An missed instance of the pool portal seems in 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street remake (a movie which, by the way, few people who find themselves not me appear to take pleasure in).

The technology hole is a key theme in the complete Elm Street collection. The teenagers in these motion pictures are at all times making an attempt to dredge up a previous that the adults are decided to maintain submerged. The reboot’s Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) is a baby molester who was burned to dying by his victims’ mother and father, and has returned as a dream demon to homicide their kids whereas they sleep. At one level, Freddy assaults Quentin (Kyle Gallner) in a dream throughout swim apply, pulling him by the underside of his highschool’s pool into an industrial cistern to witness a flashback to Freddy’s dying.

In pulling Quentin by house and time through a watery dream passage, Freddy is pulling him throughout the border from the mother and father’ denial into consciousness of truths the youngsters should know. Indeed, it’s information of Freddy’s backstory that finally permits the kids to defeat him, and the swimming pool set-piece has appropriately Freudian rebirth resonances. Once once more, swim apply turns into a lesson in survival.

Thelma (Joachim Trier, 2017)

The pool turns into a portal once more in Thelma, however that’s not the one symbolic work it’s doing. The movie tells the story of a school pupil (Eilie Harboe) who discovers her personal psionic powers similtaneously her queerness, after transferring away from her mother and father’ repressive spiritual family. But is Thelma prepared for a relationship, or do her little-understood powers make her a hazard to, and unwitting manipulator of, these round her?

The movie has three key swimming pool scenes. Thelma has her first interplay together with her future girlfriend Anja (Kaya Wilkins) when Anja approaches her poolside. Later, in the identical pool, she has one of many seizures that sign her psychic powers, throughout which she envisions herself pulled right into a darkish abyss and later imprisoned by a barrier, unable to go away the water. Finally, after embracing each her powers and her sexuality, she swims by the underside of a lake and emerges magically within the pool once more.

On one degree, Thelma is concerning the closet. It explores how, for a lot of queer individuals, the swimming pool is usually a double-edged sword. The pool is virtually the one place you’ll be able to frolic almost nude with somebody of the identical gender and never get unusual seems. In reality, within the early days of municipal swimming pools, same-sex gatherings have been obligatory.¹⁰ On the opposite hand, sporting swimming apparel in public will be anxiety-provoking for gender non-conforming individuals or these experiencing dysphoria¹¹—the “proper body” police at work but once more. Thelma does justice to each of those realities, depicting the pool alternately as an area of liberation, and as a jail the character’s queerness appears to place her in.

The Pool (Ping Lumpraploeng, 2018)

Second solely to kids drowning, the prospect of wildlife within the pool is among the extra real looking fears swimming pool horror exploits. Removing animals, each useless and dwelling, is an everyday chore for pool homeowners, and if the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and their “Nuisance Alligator Program” are to be believed, crocodilians discovering their approach into residential swimming pools will not be as farfetched an thought as those that reside outdoors of gator nation may suppose.¹²

This brings us to Thailand, the place a music video manufacturing assistant named Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) finds himself trapped in an empty swimming pool, too deep to climb out of, along with his girlfriend Koi (Ratnamon Ratchiratham) and a hungry crocodile. Many animal assault survival motion pictures depict human protagonists who transgress from civilization to wilderness. The Pool, although, situates itself straight atop that border. The titular pool, eerily empty, is an in-between house the place neither people nor crocodile belong.

Playing out on Creed’s “border between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability,” The Pool is continually negotiating its characters’ locations relative to conference. When the crocodile lays eggs, and it’s revealed that Koi is pregnant, the state of affairs turns into a battle of moms. For Creed, motherhood is simply too messy and corporeal a course of to exist inside the symbolic order: “Woman’s reproductive functions place her on the side of nature rather than the symbolic order. In this way woman is again linked to the abject through her body.”¹³ Through this lens, the second when Koi and the crocodile are revealed as moms is the second the gloves come off. The pool has been reworked from rich indulgence to primal battlefield.

La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante, 2019)

In Latin American folklore, La Llorona is the ghost of a mom who drowned her kids and now haunts watery locations, weeping for his or her loss.¹⁴ Bustamante’s movie incorporates the bones of the folktale into the story of aged struggle legal Monteverde (Julio Diaz), who evades earthly punishment for genocide towards the indigenous individuals of Guatemala, solely to face spectral justice from his victims’ ghosts. The title character manifests as a home servant named Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy), the ghost of a lady who was murdered by the outdated common, however not earlier than being pressured to observe her kids drowned. At one level, the ailing Monteverde’s granddaughter Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado) steals his oxygen tank and jumps into the pool with it, and the final shoots her, pondering she is Alma.

Three leaky borders intersect on the website of La Llorona’s swimming pool. The first is between the pure and the bogus. Multiple characters see the river the place Alma’s kids have been drowned overlain on the pool. The second is between previous and current: Monteverde’s spouse (Margarita Kenefic) has visions of herself taking Alma’s place throughout the genocide 40 years earlier than, and Alma symbolically adopts Sara to assist rewrite her kids’s destiny. The final leaky border is between European and indigenous. Sara has each heritages, because it’s implied that her father was a local Mayan who was “disappeared” by Monteverde’s regime. The pool on the nexus of all these binaries is neither totally wild nor totally tamed; the final’s ghostly tormentors are neither totally alive nor wholly useless; and Sara, caught in the midst of the ethnic battle, is perhaps the one who is ready to transcend it. Alma’s acknowledged goal in taking Sara underneath her fin is identical as that of any swimming lesson: she desires to show her “not to drown.”

Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues, 2021)

Sixty years after Taste of Fear, incapacity narratives stay very important in swimming pool horror. Norman (Stephen Lang), the blind antagonist from the primary Don’t Breathe, lives along with his adopted daughter Phoenix (Madelyn Grace), till she is kidnapped by her beginning mother and father, together with her wheelchair-using mom Josephine (Fiona O’Shaughnessy). The movie climaxes in a lethal showdown in a decrepit, empty residence constructing swimming pool.

In Don’t Breathe 2, we witness a paternity battle between two individuals who, to the eugenicists who influenced American thought on the similar time the primary wave of public swimming swimming pools have been being constructed within the title of “physical culture,” would each have been deemed unfit to have kids.¹⁵ Neither the blind Norman nor the wheelchair-using Josephine meets the usual of “proper body” essential to enter Kristeva’s symbolic order. Indeed, Don’t Breathe 2 appears to happen in a world the place everyone seems to be struggling or sick. The movie’s characters lack entry to even fundamental companies, and are pressured into determined black-market measures for his or her healthcare wants. The hygiene, health, and leisure features of a swimming pool are void. The pool, accordingly, is empty, trash-strewn and graffiti-covered. As we noticed in The Pool, it’s no coincidence {that a} pool with out water seems like nothing a lot as an open grave, and that’s precisely what Don’t Breathe 2’s turns into—each for out of date notions of “fitness” and for the characters themselves.

Bring Her Back (Danny and Michael Philippou, 2025)

It’s a disgrace this movie was launched too late for inclusion in my guide. Similar to Don’t Breathe 2, the movie options a number of characters with disabilities, and foregrounds questions on adoption and parenthood. After the dying of their father, a blind tween named Piper (Sora Wong) and her 17-year-old brother Andy (Billy Barratt) are despatched to reside with a foster mom named Laura (Sally Hawkins). Also within the house is one other younger boy (Jonah Wren Phillips) who doesn’t converse. The kids be taught of the drowning dying of Laura’s daughter, who was additionally blind, within the yard swimming pool a while earlier than. As issues escalate, Billy begins to suspect that Laura’s motives are darker than she claims, and appear to middle on the swimming pool because it slowly fills with rainwater.

As we’ve seen above, the horror movie swimming pool is often linked to motherhood. Laura is what Creed would name a “mother/witch,” “an abject figure who dwells with abject things.”¹⁶ In this story of boy-and-girl orphans who discover themselves within the house of a childless mom determine with sinister intentions, it’s not possible to not see “Hansel and Gretel” parallels, particularly when one other ingredient enters later, which I’ll miss lest I spoil this nonetheless very new film. Suffice to say that the movie presents characters whose “improper bodies” threaten the symbolic order, whereas the swimming pool turns into a surrogate womb to interrogate the concept of traumatic beginning.

Drying Off

“I want to say that the pool is for anyone; we all share the water,” writes Elizabeth L. Rogers. “And yet, it seems impossible to escape the confines of our bodies, or the histories that they evoke.”¹⁷ For 9 many years, horror cinema has explored swimming swimming pools as symbolic boundaries between lessons, genders, our bodies, and sexualities, all whereas the character of energy and the that means of “clean and proper” have been negotiated and re-negotiated. We nonetheless swim to flee predators—however typically we discover the predators we’re fleeing are those who constructed the pool within the first place. We additionally see how makes an attempt to police individuals’s our bodies backfire on the authorities implementing order: Penny’s stepmother Jane, Freddy Krueger, Thelma’s mother and father, General Monteverde, and Bring Her Back’s Laura. No physique is clear or correct, these movies inform us, till all our bodies are.

As water turns into an more and more precious useful resource, and every summer season is hotter than the final, swimming swimming pools aren’t going away. Whether they continue to be a “backyard toy for the affluent,” as Rod Serling says in “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” or “a vital piece of social infrastructure,” to cite Mara Gay from a New York Times op-ed¹⁸, is inside our energy to resolve. We simply should be taught the teachings of pool horror: as we swim away from imaginary predators, let’s take care that we don’t find yourself proper the place the actual predators need us.

Notes

1. Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim (Algonquin Books, 2020), 6.
2. Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Second version (Routledge, 2024) Part I, chap. 2, Kindle.
3. Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
4. Joan Didion, “Holy Water,” Esquire, December 1, 1977.
5. Wiltse, Contested Waters, 34, 188.
6. Angela M. Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2011).
7. Wiltse, Contested Waters, 193-4.
8. Mara Gay, “When It Comes to Swimming, ‘Why Have Americans Been Left on Their Own?’”, The New York Times, July 27, 2023.
9. Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch, “Introduction: The Cinema of the Swimming Pool,” in The Cinema of the Swimming Pool (International Academic Publishers, 2014).
10. Wiltse, Contested Waters, 3.
11. Jayne Caudwell, “Queering Indoor Swimming in the UK: Transgender and Non-binary Wellbeing,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 46, no. 4 (August, 2022): 338-62.
12. “A Guide to Living with Alligators,” Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, February, 2012,
13. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Part I, chap. 4.
14. Betty Leddey, “La Llorona in Southern Arizona,” Western Folklore 7, no. 3 (July, 1948): 272-7
15. Smith, Hideous Progeny, 36-37.
16. Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Part I, chap. 6.
17. Elizabeth L. Rogers, “Public Swim,” Prairie Schooner 91, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 104-120.
18. Gay, “When It Comes to Swimming.”

Cullen Wade (he/him) is a author, musician, and highschool trainer from Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. He is the writer of S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema, out in 2025 from McFarland Books. His movie writing has appeared in on-line retailers like HorrorGeekLife and Deaf Sparrow, and he has been a visitor programmer and panelist on the Virginia Film Festival. Follow him on letterboxd @tobe_whooper and Bluesky @cullenwade.bsky.social. He lately wrote “Brats vs. Splats: Who Really Defined the 1980s Teen Film?” for Horror Homeroom.