With ‘The Bay,’ Barry Levinson Makes Eco-Horror

The following is an excerpt from an article in:


The New York Times
Sunday, October 28, 2012

With ‘The Bay,’ Barry Levinson Makes Eco-Horror

By ERIK PIEPENBURG

WHEN the villain of a horror film is an ax-wielding maniac, the doomed victims can at least beg for mercy. Reasoning with Freddy Krueger may not get you very far, but you can pray he has a conscience somewhere. What makes eco-horror films — from the 1954 sci-fi classic “Them!” to Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 thriller “Contagion” — so terrifying is that the enemy is Mother Nature herself, and she is invariably merciless.

Right on time for Halloween comes “The Bay,” a biological thriller by the Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson that played at both the Toronto and New York film festivals this year and opens across the country on Friday. Set in a small Maryland town on Chesapeake Bay, the film, a work of fiction, takes a look at what happened on July 4, 2009, several weeks after toxic materials from a local salination plant were pumped into the drinking water.

The film is narrated by a young, inexperienced journalist (Kether Donohue) who describes what happened during the town’s Fourth of July festivities, when parasitic creatures that had burrowed inside unsuspecting townsfolk suddenly started to get hungry. Her video as well as surveillance and point-and-shoot footage taken by others on the day of the outbreak show a town in chaos as the critters aggressively and gruesomely eat their way through their human hosts. The conceit is that her footage was confiscated by the federal government as part of a cover-up.

The idea behind “The Bay” began after Mr. Levinson was asked to direct a documentary about environmental crises facing Chesapeake Bay. After watching a 2009 “Frontline” broadcast on the topic he opted instead for a graphic fictional treatment. “I don’t know that we pay attention to facts anymore,” he said over lunch in New York recently. That the film takes a horror angle is a surprising departure for Mr. Levinson, who is known for more mainstream films like “Rain Man,”“Good Morning, Vietnam” and “Diner.”

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