It’s one thing for a horror film to feature supernatural encounters or marauding monsters. It’s quite another when its antagonist is something Out There. Out There is that place where civilization gives way to an environment in which our comfortable status as nature’s apex predators is no longer certain. There’s something about that which assails our subconscious. We are as much outraged as in wonder.

Black Water takes Out There and subjects us to its possibilities. The bulk of this 2007 film is shot within perhaps twenty feet of a low-lying mangrove and a slow-moving section of Australian river. This works, because the Outback is the Australian Out There, and the Aussie wilds are home to a laundry list of the world’s deadliest species of animals. Australia has a transparent jellyfish the size of a fingernail that has been responsible for the deaths of multiple swimmers. It possesses the inland taipan, the world’s most venomous snake. And then there’s the saltwater crocodile. Read the rest of this entry →