On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, there’s a cozy town called Claridge. A reporter named Donna Thompson, totally fresh in the game, has decided to cover the local’s celebration of 4th July, but amidst all the fun a lot of the citizens start falling ill. And severely so. The hospital gets overwhelmed with patients, and the head doctor calls the CDC who believes it must be some kind of viral outbreak. Things keep getting worse, with people dying showing some really bizarre symptoms, like severe lesions and their tongues missing. What could be the cause of this? Well…some months earlier, two oceanographers discovered that the bay had high toxicity levels, and even encountered multiple fish that had been consumed from the inside out, by some kind of mutated isopod. Hmm…could this have something to do with the chicken farm nearby that have polluted the bay when dumping their chicken excrement and god knows what else into the water? One thing is for certain: everything turns into full chaos mode as people keep dying.
The Bay is a found footage horror movie from 2012, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Michael Wallach. It is based on a story created by the duo. The inspiration for the film came when Levinson was asked to produce a documentary about the problems facing the Chesapeake Bay, a project he chose to abandon when he learned that Frontline was already covering the issue. Deciding to make use of all the research, he produced a horror film instead and promoted it as “80 percent factual information“. The movie was shot on locations in North Caroline and South Carolina.
The Bay is a horror movie that may feel like yet another zombie-outbreak movie at first, but instead its playing around with a concept that sells itself as something that “could have happened“. While that is a bit of a stretch, of course, it’s still a horror movie that can make you quite uncomfortable, especially if you’ve either experienced or are aware of just how much damage bacteria and parasites can do to a human body. I’m still getting chills from remembering some of the episodes of the Monsters Inside Me series that was broadcast on Discovery…bloody nine hells, how disturbing some of that actually was..! And while a horror movie like this is of course exaggerating things, it’s kind of nasty to think of how close it still is to reality. Yes, the parasitic isopod eating tongues is a real thing: it’s called Cymothoa exigua. Not believed to be harmful to humans in real life, though…so, uhm, I guess that’s a relief…
The format, found footage docudrama, works pretty well for a movie like this. It feels a little chaotic at times with all the “footage“ put together in order to form the narrative, but this only adds to the perceived realism as the citizens are literally thrown into a deadly chaos. The extremely fast-acting way the parasitic infections occur in people reminds us a bit of the typical zombie-infestation buildup where things go from zero to a thousand in the blink of an eye. No one knows what’s happening until it’s too late, and then there’s the inevitable societal crumble. In that regard, the realistic approach falters a bit, but strengthens the horror elements.
Overall, The Bay is a nice found footage horror film which makes you more afraid of the tiny things in the water that you can’t see, rather than any big monster. Probably not a good watch for those suffering from Parasite phobia, though…
Director: Barry Levinson
Writers: Michael Wallach, Barry Levinson
Country & year: USA, 2012
Actors: Nansi Aluka, Christopher Denham, Stephen Kunken, Frank Deal, Frank Deal, Kether Donohue, Kristen Connolly, Will Rogers, Kimberly Campbell, Beckett Clayton-Luce
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1713476/
