Cullen Wade
“Swimming isn’t a sport. Swimming is a way to keep from drowning.”
—George Carlin, Playin’ with Your Head
Springboard
If, as it’s speculated, our prehistoric ancestors learned swimming to escape predators1, I doubt many of the millions of Americans who use swimming pools every year are consciously practicing how to avoid being ripped apart by beasts. But as hundreds of horror films suggest—including the 100 or so I dissect in my forthcoming book S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema—part of us remembers. Unlike wild-water swimming, the artificial pool is supposed to be safe, a water experience mediated by concrete and chemicals. But even the tamest water is inhospitable to surface-dwellers, and the horror movie swimming pool often functions as what theorist Barbara Creed calls a “border.” Creed, who builds on Julia Kristeva’s abject and Jacques Lacan’s symbolic order, writes that “the concept of a border is central to the construction of the monstrous in the horror film […] to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.” She points out the importance of “a border between what Kristeva refers to as ‘the clean and proper body’ and the abject body.”2
But borders—like the dollar store swim goggles that barely keep the pool water out of my eyes—are leaky. At the swimming pool, the natural leaks into the unnatural, public intrudes on private, and the chaste morphs into the erotic. In all these facets (what my book terms sites of secrets, sexuality, and social segregation) the swimming pool has been a battleground, both in the movies and real life, over the “clean and proper body.”
Jeff Wiltse’s indispensable Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America traces the shifting face of the waters since the earliest municipal pools in the 1880s. At that time, pools were more like public baths, intended to improve the underclass’s hygiene (Kristeva’s clean body). After the widespread acceptance of germ theory made communal tanks unfeasible as baths, the focus shifted to athletic facilities for the improvement of physical fitness (Kristeva’s proper body). By the 1920s, officials were policing women’s swimsuits in the name of decency, while the definition of “decency” changed from how much of your figure you showed to what kind of figure you had (another permutation of the proper body). The notion of the proper body took on yet another meaning in the following decade, when pools began the parallel processes of gender integration and racial segregation.3
In the background of all these changes is the swimming pool’s relationship to power. Joan Didion famously observed that the pool doesn’t symbolize wealth so much as “control over the uncontrollable.”4 Victorian-era social reformers who hoped that exposure to the genteel class would soften the boisterous blue-collar swimming culture found that the reverse was happening. During 1960s racial unrest, officials who hoped more inner-city pools would “cool hot tempers” were stymied when the pools they built—substandard and inequitably maintained—stoked even more discontent.5
I’ll assume readers are already familiar with the holy trinity of swimming pool horror from the black and white era: Cat People, Les Diaboliques, and Sunset Boulevard. The same readers will doubtless have also seen later canonical entries like Shivers, Poltergeist, The Faculty, Let the Right One In, Jennifer’s Body, and It Follows. Then of course there’s The Swimmer, adapted from John Cheever’s short story. Despite its only tenuous kinship to the horror genre, The Swimmer’s pools embody as much terror as anything else on the list.
If you’re seeking an entry-level top ten list of swimming pool horror, that should get you started, so feel free to stop here. But if you’re interested in what else lurks in the deep end—and you’ve already applied your sunblock—join me on the pool deck for another ten films that deserve just as much exposure.
Taste of Fear (Seth Holt, 1961)
Hammer’s Taste of Fear and the run of black and white horror-thrillers that followed tend to live in the shadow of the studio’s Technicolor monster movies of the same era. Though you could fairly accuse Taste of Fear (retitled Scream of Fear for U.S. distribution) of being a Les Diaboliques knockoff, it deserves attention as one of the earliest horror films to feature a wheelchair-using protagonist.
A young woman named Penny (Susan Strasberg) arrives at her estranged father’s estate, only to find him mysteriously missing. Penny’s new stepmother Jane (Ann Todd), whom she is meeting for the first time, tells her that her father was called away on business, but Penny begins to suspect that something more sinister is going on, and believes her father’s corpse is hidden at the bottom of the property’s disused swimming pool.
Taste of Fear pushes back against the horror genre’s sad history of equating disability with monstrosity,6 by presenting a wheelchair-using heroine who refuses to be cowed by those who patronize, pity, and underestimate her. The film is bookended by drowning deaths, and dominated by the image of the swimming pool, lurking in the background and becoming symbolic of its various twists, secret reveals and identity slippages. Like the swimming pool, there is more to Penny than is apparent on the surface.
When stepmother Jane suggests hosting a party, saying involvement in village social life would pull Penny out of her funk, she adds, “we might get the pool cleaned out.” To her, a restored pool represents a restored Penny. If the girl cannot be made proper, she can at least be made clean.
Mermaid Legend (Toshiharu Ikeda, 1984)
Mermaid Legend has been getting well-deserved attention lately, as the previously hard-to-find film was recently added to Shudder. Despite being 40 years old and made by men, Mermaid Legend approaches the feel of the #goodforher-era female-directed rape-revenge wave, with its anticapitalist ecological awareness and sex-work positivity. This Japanese tale of a fisherman’s wife named Migiwa (Mari Shirato), who mounts a gruesome one-woman revenge crusade against the evil industrialists who killed her husband to make way for the construction of a nuclear power plant, features a wealthy bad guy spectacularly drowned in his own swimming pool by a wronged woman turned force of nature.
The horror film swimming pool often becomes a border space for women to transform into something else. (See also Cat People & Jennifer’s Body, among others.) In Mermaid Legend, the transformation is metaphorical but is nonetheless mediated by water. Every time Migiwa goes swimming, she emerges changed—from fisherwoman to grieving widow, from sex worker to murderess, from hunted to hunter. When she drowns land developer-cum-crime boss Miyamoto (Kentaro Shimizu) in his own pool, Migiwa’s swim helps her defeat a predator by using his wealth and privilege against him. I argue in the book that, if stabbing can be seen as a masculine, phallic form of murder, then its feminine counterpart would be suffocation. When we witness death by drowning in a swimming pool, we are seeing transgression across the border to the abject, in a heavily gender-coded way.
TerrorVision (Ted Nicolau, 1986)
The swimming pool horror film has a rich history of satirizing suburban alienation (The Swimmer, Poltergeist, The Faculty, It Follows). The border these pools police has as much to do with race as it does with class. The growth of the North American suburbs is inseparable from white flight from cities in response to civil rights inroads—one of which was integrated pools.7 This is by no means a problem of yesteryear: today there are about 300,000 public pools in the nation, compared to more than 10 million private ones.8 To the extent that the privileged have been able, they have always sought, and continue to seek, segregated swimming opportunities.
TerrorVision (the best Paul Bartel film that Paul Bartel had nothing to do with) skewers the vulgar rich while also taking some tongue-in-cheek shots at the moral panic over “trash culture.” On a distant planet, a hungry beast (literally named Hungry Beast) is accidentally beamed by means of a garbage disposal to Earth, where it reassumes physical form through a satellite television antenna at the suburban home of the more-money-than-taste Putterman family. After emerging from a television screen into the garish indoor swimming pool, it lurks in the pool until it’s eaten both parents and their swinging partners.
Reviled as trash even on its home planet, the hungry beast is an all-purpose symbolic other, so it appropriately finds kinship (at least for a while) with the film’s counterculture teens. TerrorVision gives us another swimming pool death that turns privilege on its head, but with added irony: a culture of crass consumption that is itself consumed by the other it casts aside.
Open House (Jag Mundhra, 1987)
Though I make no pretense to having seen every horror movie, Open House is the only one I know of where a serial killer targets real estate agents for inflating the market beyond his means to afford a place to live. In a key scene, the killer decapitates a slimy real estate broker and throws his head in the swimming pool of a house he is trying to sell.
The pool in Open House is the leakiest border we’ve seen yet between the haves and have-nots—and implicitly, between public space and private space. In their introduction to The Cinema of the Swimming Pool, Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch write that “Whether a swimming pool is private or public is a central consideration in virtually every film that features one.” In the same chapter, they discuss how the horror trope of blood in a swimming pool usually represents some kind of intrusion.9 Open House connects these concepts: the blood from the severed head contaminates the pool, just as the killer—an unhoused person forced to live his life in public—“contaminated” the empty house where he was squatting, until a hot housing market drove him to desperate measures.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (Samuel Bayer, 2010)
Small bodies of water that magically transport you to other places appear here and there in the world’s mythologies. In moving pictures, the swimming-pool-as-portal trope goes at least as far back as the final episode of The Twilight Zone, 1964’s “The Bewitchin’ Pool.” An overlooked example of the pool portal appears in 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street remake (a film which, incidentally, few people who are not me seem to enjoy).
The generation gap is a key theme in the entire Elm Street series. The teens in these movies are always trying to dredge up a past that the adults are determined to keep submerged. The reboot’s Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) is a child molester who was burned to death by his victims’ parents, and has returned as a dream demon to murder their children while they sleep. At one point, Freddy attacks Quentin (Kyle Gallner) in a dream during swim practice, pulling him through the bottom of his high school’s pool into an industrial cistern to witness a flashback to Freddy’s death.
In pulling Quentin through space and time via a watery dream passage, Freddy is pulling him across the border from the parents’ denial into awareness of truths the teenagers deserve to know. Indeed, it’s knowledge of Freddy’s backstory that eventually enables the teens to defeat him, and the swimming pool set-piece has appropriately Freudian rebirth resonances. Once again, swim practice becomes a lesson in survival.
Thelma (Joachim Trier, 2017)
The pool becomes a portal again in Thelma, but that’s not the only symbolic work it’s doing. The film tells the story of a college student (Eilie Harboe) who discovers her own psionic powers at the same time as her queerness, after moving away from her parents’ repressive religious household. But is Thelma ready for a relationship, or do her little-understood powers make her a danger to, and unwitting manipulator of, those around her?
The film has three key swimming pool scenes. Thelma has her first interaction with her future girlfriend Anja (Kaya Wilkins) when Anja approaches her poolside. Later, in the same pool, she has one of the seizures that signal her psychic powers, during which she envisions herself pulled into a dark abyss and later imprisoned by a barrier, unable to leave the water. Finally, after embracing both her powers and her sexuality, she swims through the bottom of a lake and emerges magically in the pool again.
On one level, Thelma is about the closet. It explores how, for many queer people, the swimming pool can be a double-edged sword. The pool is practically the only place you can frolic nearly nude with someone of the same gender and not get strange looks. In fact, in the early days of municipal pools, same-sex gatherings were mandatory.10 On the other hand, wearing swimming attire in public can be anxiety-provoking for gender non-conforming people or those experiencing dysphoria11—the “proper body” police at work yet again. Thelma does justice to both of these realities, depicting the pool alternately as a space of liberation, and as a prison the character’s queerness seems to put her in.
The Pool (Ping Lumpraploeng, 2018)
Second only to children drowning, the prospect of wildlife in the pool is one of the more realistic fears swimming pool horror exploits. Removing animals, both dead and living, is a regular chore for pool owners, and if the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and their “Nuisance Alligator Program” are to be believed, crocodilians finding their way into residential pools is not as farfetched an idea as those who live outside of gator country might suppose.12
This brings us to Thailand, where a music video production assistant named Day (Theeradej Wongpuapan) finds himself trapped in an empty swimming pool, too deep to climb out of, with his girlfriend Koi (Ratnamon Ratchiratham) and a hungry crocodile. Many animal attack survival movies depict human protagonists who transgress from civilization to wilderness. The Pool, though, situates itself directly atop that border. The titular pool, eerily empty, is an in-between space where neither humans nor crocodile belong.
Playing out on Creed’s “border between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability,” The Pool is constantly negotiating its characters’ places relative to convention. When the crocodile lays eggs, and it’s revealed that Koi is pregnant, the scenario becomes a battle of mothers. For Creed, motherhood is too messy and corporeal a process to exist within the symbolic order: “Woman’s reproductive functions place her on the side of nature rather than the symbolic order. In this way woman is again linked to the abject through her body.”13 Through this lens, the moment when Koi and the crocodile are revealed as mothers is the moment the gloves come off. The pool has been transformed from wealthy indulgence to primal battlefield.
La Llorona (Jayro Bustamante, 2019)
In Latin American folklore, La Llorona is the ghost of a mother who drowned her children and now haunts watery places, weeping for their loss.14 Bustamante’s film incorporates the bones of the folktale into the story of elderly war criminal Monteverde (Julio Diaz), who evades earthly punishment for genocide against the indigenous people of Guatemala, only to face spectral justice from his victims’ ghosts. The title character manifests as a domestic servant named Alma (Maria Mercedes Coroy), the ghost of a woman who was murdered by the old general, but not before being forced to watch her children drowned. At one point, the ailing Monteverde’s granddaughter Sara (Ayla-Elea Hurtado) steals his oxygen tank and jumps into the pool with it, and the general shoots her, thinking she is Alma.
Three leaky borders intersect at the site of La Llorona’s swimming pool. The first is between the natural and the artificial. Multiple characters see the river where Alma’s children were drowned overlain on the pool. The second is between past and present: Monteverde’s wife (Margarita Kenefic) has visions of herself taking Alma’s place during the genocide 40 years before, and Alma symbolically adopts Sara to help rewrite her children’s fate. The last leaky border is between European and indigenous. Sara has both heritages, as it’s implied that her father was a native Mayan who was “disappeared” by Monteverde’s regime. The pool at the nexus of all these binaries is neither entirely wild nor entirely tamed; the general’s ghostly tormentors are neither fully alive nor wholly dead; and Sara, caught in the middle of the ethnic conflict, might be the one who is able to transcend it. Alma’s stated purpose in taking Sara under her fin is the same as that of any swimming lesson: she wants to teach her “not to drown.”
Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues, 2021)
Sixty years after Taste of Fear, disability narratives remain vital in swimming pool horror. Norman (Stephen Lang), the blind antagonist from the first Don’t Breathe, lives with his adopted daughter Phoenix (Madelyn Grace), until she is kidnapped by her birth parents, including her wheelchair-using mother Josephine (Fiona O’Shaughnessy). The film climaxes in a deadly showdown in a decrepit, empty apartment building swimming pool.
In Don’t Breathe 2, we witness a paternity battle between two people who, to the eugenicists who influenced American thought at the same time the first wave of public swimming pools were being built in the name of “physical culture,” would both have been deemed unfit to have children.15 Neither the blind Norman nor the wheelchair-using Josephine meets the standard of “proper body” necessary to enter Kristeva’s symbolic order. Indeed, Don’t Breathe 2 seems to take place in a world where everyone is struggling or sick. The film’s characters lack access to even basic services, and are forced into desperate black-market measures for their healthcare needs. The hygiene, fitness, and recreational functions of a swimming pool are void. The pool, accordingly, is empty, trash-strewn and graffiti-covered. As we saw in The Pool, it’s no coincidence that a pool without water looks like nothing so much as an open grave, and that’s exactly what Don’t Breathe 2’s becomes—both for obsolete notions of “fitness” and for the characters themselves.
Bring Her Back (Danny and Michael Philippou, 2025)
It’s a shame this film was released too late for inclusion in my book. Similar to Don’t Breathe 2, the film features multiple characters with disabilities, and foregrounds questions about adoption and parenthood. After the death of their father, a blind tween named Piper (Sora Wong) and her 17-year-old brother Andy (Billy Barratt) are sent to live with a foster mother named Laura (Sally Hawkins). Also in the home is another young boy (Jonah Wren Phillips) who does not speak. The children learn of the drowning death of Laura’s daughter, who was also blind, in the backyard swimming pool some time before. As things escalate, Billy begins to suspect that Laura’s motives are darker than she claims, and seem to center on the swimming pool as it slowly fills with rainwater.
As we’ve seen above, the horror film swimming pool is commonly connected to motherhood. Laura is what Creed would call a “mother/witch,” “an abject figure who dwells with abject things.”16 In this story of boy-and-girl orphans who find themselves in the home of a childless mother figure with sinister intentions, it’s impossible not to see “Hansel and Gretel” parallels, especially when another element enters later, which I will leave out lest I spoil this still very new movie. Suffice to say that the film presents characters whose “improper bodies” threaten the symbolic order, while the swimming pool becomes a surrogate womb to interrogate the idea of traumatic birth.
Drying Off
“I want to say that the pool is for anyone; we all share the water,” writes Elizabeth L. Rogers. “And yet, it seems impossible to escape the confines of our bodies, or the histories that they evoke.”17 For nine decades, horror cinema has explored swimming pools as symbolic boundaries between classes, genders, bodies, and sexualities, all while the nature of power and the meaning of “clean and proper” have been negotiated and re-negotiated. We still swim to escape predators—but often we find the predators we’re fleeing are the ones who built the pool in the first place. We also see how attempts to police people’s bodies backfire on the authorities enforcing order: Penny’s stepmother Jane, Freddy Krueger, Thelma’s parents, General Monteverde, and Bring Her Back’s Laura. No body is clean or proper, these films tell us, until all bodies are.
As water becomes an increasingly valuable resource, and each summer is hotter than the last, swimming pools are not going away. Whether they remain a “backyard toy for the affluent,” as Rod Serling says in “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” or “a vital piece of social infrastructure,” to quote Mara Gay from a New York Times op-ed18, is within our power to decide. We just have to learn the lessons of pool horror: as we swim away from imaginary predators, let’s take care that we don’t end up right where the real predators want us.
Notes
- Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim (Algonquin Books, 2020), 6.
- Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Second edition (Routledge, 2024) Part I, chap. 2, Kindle.
- Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
- Joan Didion, “Holy Water,” Esquire, December 1, 1977.
- Wiltse, Contested Waters, 34, 188.
- Angela M. Smith, Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema (Columbia University Press, 2011).
- Wiltse, Contested Waters, 193-4.
- Mara Gay, “When It Comes to Swimming, ‘Why Have Americans Been Left on Their Own?’”, The New York Times, July 27, 2023.
- Christopher Brown and Pam Hirsch, “Introduction: The Cinema of the Swimming Pool,” in The Cinema of the Swimming Pool (International Academic Publishers, 2014).
- Wiltse, Contested Waters, 3.
- Jayne Caudwell, “Queering Indoor Swimming in the UK: Transgender and Non-binary Wellbeing,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 46, no. 4 (August, 2022): 338-62.
- “A Guide to Living with Alligators,” Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, February, 2012, https://myfwc.com/media/1690/alligator-brochure.pdf
- Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Part I, chap. 4.
- Betty Leddey, “La Llorona in Southern Arizona,” Western Folklore 7, no. 3 (July, 1948): 272-7
- Smith, Hideous Progeny, 36-37.
- Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine, Part I, chap. 6.
- Elizabeth L. Rogers, “Public Swim,” Prairie Schooner 91, no. 3 (Fall 2017): 104-120.
- Gay, “When It Comes to Swimming.”
Cullen Wade (he/him) is a writer and high school teacher from Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. He is the author of S(p)lasher Flicks: The Swimming Pool in Horror Cinema, out in 2025 from McFarland Books. His film writing has appeared in Paste Magazine, Night Tide Magazine, HorrorGeekLife, and Deaf Sparrow. Follow him on letterboxd @tobe_whooper and Bluesky @cullenwade.bsky.social. He recently wrote “Brats vs. Splats: Who Really Defined the 1980s Teen Film?” for Horror Homeroom.
