By SHAWN MACOMBER
The origin story of the gonzo nature horror/action flick The Flood—think Assault on Precinct 13 by way of Alligator and you’ll be in the right patch of the cinematic swamp—stretches back further than pre-production.
Much further.
In fact, you can trace this carbuncled hatchling through the decades to very evocative moments in the early eighties…
The first is the backseat of Brandon Slagle’s grandmother’s car, trundling along down the road to church with the future director and his cousin Jesse Nelson—who himself would eventually found the legendary cult/horror film distribution company Diabolik—surreptitiously trading copies of Fangoria and GoreZone back and forth, dreaming of one day getting a shot at creating their own ninety-minute nightmares.
“Really, this stuff is just ingrained in me as far back as I can remember,” Slagle tells Rue Morgue of this oft-repeated scene. “Eighties horror, martial arts movies, weird cinema out of Europe—that’s kind of who I am.”
But there’s another side to The Flood—one that allowed Slagle to channel his experiences living in the South as a child in an even more direct way into the script co-written by his longtime friend Chad Law alongside Josh Ridgeway.
“Well, my dad’s family is all from Northeast Texas,” Slagle explains. “One minute it’ll be raining cats and dogs, and the next day you might as well be walking through the Sahara Desert. When I was four or five, a tornado came through the town and basically decimated a third of it. So, it always stuck with me how quickly nature can show its power and take the entire context of how we live our lives out of our hands.”
That crossing of the streams clearly comes into play in The Flood, a kinetic, gleefully unrelenting film that explores three converging horrors: First, a Katrina-like storm that in the space of hours flips civilized society on its head. Second, a very human-centered danger of a busload of hardened convicts stranded at a small understaffed, and under-armed Louisiana county jail with a cartel-sponsored paramilitary unit lurking to spring an inmate of interest. And, finally, a pod of gargantuan alligators that develop a feral taste for flesh from the first decapitated head.
The resistance to this malicious maelstrom is personified in Sheriff Jo Newman (the iridescent Nicky Whelan; Rob Zombie’s Halloween II), a badass heroine whose steely resolve sparkles with a philosophical patina, and a pathos-ridden prisoner seeking redemption (Casper Van Dien, bringing his trademark churning cauldron of intensity and vulnerability and nuance to full boil).
“I love all the plot elements, but the moral ambiguity of the characters is definitely what really drew me to the story,” Slagle explains. “I like that at points the audience may end up rooting for some of the villains a little more than the heroes, you know? I think it’s good to make people walk that line in their heads a little bit; to recognize that things aren’t always so black and white—especially in the kind of extreme situations we put these poor people through.”
This conviction informed the visuals of the film (shot in Bangkok, despite its Bayou State setting), which nods not only to Mikael Salomon’s 1998 “disaster heist” film Hard Rain—“On a smaller scale, of course,” Slagle laughs, “because we had to shoot it without Morgan Freeman or that old school Christian Slater money”—but also to non-cinematic mediums. “I wanted to make it a little heightened,” he says. “I wanted to give it a little bit of a graphic novel feel in terms of the set design and the look of it. So, it’s not quite the present day and it’s not quite our reality. I’m probably the only person that will go down as consciously appreciating that aspect, but, you know, that was important for me.”
Luckily for Slagle, the cast instinctively got his desire to infuse The Flood with a little extra character-driven heft.
“The cast were all really invested in their roles despite the fact that, on the surface, this is clearly a quote-unquote popcorn movie,” he says. “No one phoned it in. Everyone brought those interesting shades and depth to their characters. It really brought things to another level. We had the concept, but the actors here made the difference.” That mutual trust comes in handy when you’re shooting a scene where they’re reacting to a gator that isn’t there. The actor must trust the set-up and the post-work. And the crew must trust the ability of the performer to sell the moment. “That’s when being able to believe the characters is extremely important for the success of the whole film—it’s a real having each other’s back thing. And on The Flood, we definitely had each other’s backs.”
Van Dien, Slagle says, had a little extra to draw on, re: his motivation. Not long ago, he had moved to Florida to be close to family. One morning shortly before he left to shoot The Flood he was out walking his dog and an alligator crawled up onto the road and strolled right on past him.
The message was as clear as it was useful…
…they’re closer than you think.
