Latest Terrifying Night Swim Trailer Channels Stephen King Classics Like IT and Pet Sematary

Horror is full of stories that take everyday objects and morph them into something scary. We see it all the time, from toys that are out to kill you to cars that just might eat your best friend. With Night Swim, Blumhouse and Atomic Monster are looking to do the same for swimming pools, as the latest trailer proves with a jam-packed collection of pool-based terror of all kinds.

The setup for the story is quite simple: Ray (Wyatt Russell) and Eve Walker (Kerry Condon) buy a house for their family, complete with a seemingly abandoned swimming pool in the backyard. The pool hasn't been used in years, but Ray sees it as a fixer-upper opportunity, particularly since he's trying to rehab from an old injury and restart his athletic career. So, despite the strange aura of the pool, the Walker family fixes it up, fills it with water, and promptly begins using it for parties, dates, and everything else a family might use a swimming pool for.

RELATED: Night Swim Director Bryce McGuire on What Makes a Pool So Scary

That's when things start happening well beyond the range of the usual pool mishaps. The film's first trailer, released a few weeks ago, wowed us with a very tense sequence involving a nighttime game of Marco Polo, and while the new trailer features some of those same moments, it's also revealing many additional scares centered on the Walker family pool, and it's clear from these moments that this movie has everything. Hands reaching out of drains in broad daylight? Check. Creepy objects floating in the water? Check. Danger to household pets? Check. The shots are evocative of horror classics we know and love, with plenty of IT and Pet Sematary vibes to go around.

Check out the trailer below and you'll see what we mean:

Produced by the twin horror powerhouses of James Wan and Jason Blum, who recently collaborated on Universal's hit M3GAN, Night Swim is written and directed by Bryce McGuire, who conceived the film as a feature-length adaptation of his short of the same name. At New York Comic Con earlier this year, McGuire described some of his goals for the film, specifically his goals centered on the familiarity we all have with swimming pools as a source of fun and relaxation.

“We all grew up around pools,” McGuire said. “It was just kind of looking at all of the universal memories and things we have ... nostalgia around the pool and being like, 'How do I just f-cking ruin that for each one of those?'” 

Night Swim arrives to ruin pools for you on Jan. 5, 2024 from Universal Pictures.