A TALE OF ECO-HORROR ON THE HIGH SEAS, NEASA HARDIMAN’S SEA FEVER SUGGESTS THAT HUMANITY’S DISREGARD FOR
NATURE WILL MAKE MONSTERS OF US ALL
BY ANDREA SUBISSATI
W
E’VE ALL HEARD OF CABIN FEVER, THAT TEMPORARY HYSTERIA THAT RESULTS FROM BEING ISOLATED IN A CONFINED SPACE. It’s what the crew aboard a rickety trawler suspects might be happening when faced with a deep-sea mystery they can’t begin to explain in Neasa Hardiman’s aquatic horror, Sea Fever. But their voyage into an exclusion zone holds darker things than claustrophobia, when barnacles suddenly attach themselves to the ship’s hull, eroding its wood and seeping corrosive slime on board. However, sea- faring myths and mysteries are no match for a fearless young scientist named Siobhán (Hermione Corfield: Rust Creek), who stands fast with a cool head and a warm heart – both of which come in handy as the crew contends with a sickening parasitic infection that must never reach shore.
“In a lot of films, especially in this arena, you get a [scientist character] who’s depicted as devoid of emo- tion or lacking ethics, and I really wanted to unearth the roots of that, because this is not truthful,” Hardiman tells Rue Morgue. “Scientists can be anything, a scien- tist can be any way. The value of scientists is that they would stay rational in a crisis.”
That crisis kicks off when paranoia sets in and the crewmembers become more dangerous to one anoth- er than the actual creature, prompting some critics to compare Sea Fever with John Carpenter’s isolationist opus, The Thing. But where the latter involves an alien being splitting flesh and bone in a desperate bid to clone human anatomy, the former takes a more nuanced ap- proach to its scares.
“Do you know how many frames of body horror are
in Sea Fever?” exclaims Hardiman. “Nine. There are nine frames of body horror – about a third of a second. I think Carpenter, as a filmmaker, is really interested in spectacle and he’s really interested in body horror, [but] I really wanted to come away from that, it’s not what I wanted to do at all. This is a story where the creature or the animal is at the centre of the story.
Not to be too airy-fairy about it, but it’s a metaphor for the broader system of nature that we share this planet with.”
Given its thematic aspirations, it only seems logical that Sea Fever’s monster be brought to life with the aid of video effects, but don’t let that throw you; this film has teeth. “[Sea Fever] had a much lower budget than I’m used to working at,” allows Hardiman. “I’ve worked with Marvel and Netflix, and I’ve worked on big-scale productions, so there was a trade-off between the creative free- dom and the economic muscle. I have a lot of experience in really [imag- inative] storytelling and started by doing a lot of experimental work in the early years of CG and CGI, so I’m really comfortable in that world. It meant that I could push that quite far, for quite a small amount of money, because I know what I’m doing.” True to her words, the movie gets great mileage out of brief but harrowing digital sequences that allow the audience to invest in the trawler’s well-drawn and sympathetic crew – before throwing us overboard into visceral gore.
“I love cinema that’s exploring ideas, and I love cine- ma that has rich characters,” says Hardiman. “With the budget that we had, I felt like we had to make really arresting, powerful images only at the moments where we have built up to an emotional response, so the image really hits you hard because you have an emotional en- gagement with it.”
Beyond keeping a cool head, Sea Fever’s heroine stands apart from the guys at Outpost 31 through her commitment to maintaining the balance of nature and preserving creatures we don’t understand, even as they
threaten humanity as a species.
“She’s really ethical,” says Hardiman about her lead character Siobhán. “And representing that to the nth degree, using the scientific method, she lives her life by really pure principle. She doesn’t see herself as superior to anybody or anything, and there’s something kind of lovely about that.”
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