Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on November 2, 2012, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Witches, radioactive mutants, giant monsters and endless ghosts have had their moments in the found-footage genre, and now it’s eco-terror’s turn. And with The Bay, director Barry Levinson has adopted a somewhat different approach in tune with his hot-button subject matter.
Rather than fix us within the point of view of one cameraperson, The Bay is found-footage horror-drama in its most literal expression. Taking advantage of the omnipresence of video surveillance and personal recording devices, the movie is framed as visual evidence of terrible events that took place in Claridge, Maryland in 2009. Juxtaposing everything from Skype conversations to police dashboard-cams to news footage, it “exposes” what happened when this community on Chesapeake Bay was invaded by a particularly virulent breed of water-borne parasite.
All the clips have been ostensibly gathered and assembled by Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue, no relation to The Blair Witch Project’s Heather), who is also seen in the aforementioned news footage as an enthusiastic student journalist getting her break covering Claridge’s 4th of July celebration. After sufficient images of typical Americana to establish the innocence that will soon be tragically lost, Donna’s camera starts catching evidence that not all is well, and neither are some of the people: They start breaking out in blisters, vomiting and otherwise disrupting the festivities. Among the many other participants in the ensuing drama intercut with Donna’s reportage are a pair of oceanographers who discover evidence of the infection ravaging the bay’s fish population, assorted medical personnel dealing with its spread to humans and a young couple, Alex and Stephanie (Will Rogers and The Cabin in the Woods’ Kristen Connolly), obliviously boating up the coast toward Claridge.
Like George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, perhaps the only other example of a movie of this type made by an established veteran rather than an up-and-coming filmmaker, The Bay has a little too much portentous narration alerting us of the horrors to come, rather than allowing the audience to gradually discover them. Once things start seriously getting out of hand, though, Levinson and screenwriter Michael Wallach let the awfulness speak for itself, and there’s plenty to go around. Claridge at first seems to be afflicted by a pustulent sickness, before an even worse plague is revealed: isopods, icky multilegged critters that feed on other living creatures and do grotesque damage to their hosts. Lest anyone confuse them for science-fictional beings, Levinson takes advantage of the pseudodocumentary form to include plenty of real-life images of these little predators, of the sort that may make you very nervous the next time you go for a dip in the ocean.
That’s part of Levinson’s point, and there is certainly a bit of agitprop going on here. The director was inspired to make this film by the real-life ecological problems in Chesapeake Bay (see interview here), and it indicts both local industries and politicians for their culpability in the disaster. For the most part, though, the focus is on the regular folks affected by the bloody tragedy, from the town doctor and cops who are helpless to stop it to a teenage girl sending increasingly panicked bulletins to a friend via iPhone. By allowing for so many different video points of view, Levinson gets around the why-are-they-still-taping? plausibility issues common to this form, and this particular approach allows him and editor Aaron Yanes to pace the movie like a thriller, augmenting it with occasional music.
While there are plenty of grisly highlights, employing skin-crawling makeup and critter FX, The Bay’s most effective and cinematic device is the intercutting of Alex and Stephanie, their cheerful traveling suspensefully juxtaposed with the grotesque scenario that awaits them. Once they do arrive, the atmosphere becomes that of a zombie/infected apocalypse thriller, while keeping the personal focus that makes the movie work as a whole. The Bay has a much broader scope that sets it apart from most of its vérité ilk, while maintaining the immediacy that allows the audience to share in the fear being experienced by those doing the taping.
