The Terrifying Twist of Night Swim: How a Children's Game Became a Creepy Horror Trend

The Haunted Pool: Night Swim's Creepy Modern Horror Concept

One of the most memorable scenes in Blumhouse's latest horror movie Night Swim continues a clever horror movie trend that has become increasingly popular in the genre over the last few years. The new movie stars Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon, and follows a family that moves into a new house, seeking a fresh start, only to be plagued by an ancient evil that dwells in the backyard pool. Based off a 2014 short film of the same name, Night Swim carries a PG-13 rating mainly due to the scariness of some of its gruesome apparitions.

Amélie Hoeferle takes a dive in the water in Blumhouse's Night Swim

While the concept of a haunted pool could come off as inherently silly, Night Swim plays it fairly straight throughout, and hits on a number of common horror movie tropes, including possession and body horror. However, there is one specific scene that utilizes a trend that has been fairly successful in generating scares in recent years. Night Swim's ending may not be particularly terrifying, but one of the pool-based scenes builds tension fairly well thanks to that modern horror trend.

Night Swim trailer frame

The Twisted Game of Marco Polo: Night Swim's Creepiest Scene

One of the movie's creepiest scenes is a twisted game of Marco Polo. Before the family at the movie's center has fully realized that their new pool is indeed haunted, the daughter Izzy, played by Am\u00e9lie Hoeferle, invites her crush over for some unsupervised swimming. Over the course of their flirtation, they inevitably turn to the pool standard, Marco Polo. Predictably, Izzy is stalked by one of the pool's ghastly ghouls while her eyes are closed before the game ends with one of the movie's better jump scares.

The guests at the dinner table in the movie Would You Rather. 

Turning a typical children's game in Marco Polo into a terrifying game of cat and mouse echoes the recent horror trend of turning children's games scary. Turning something innocent into something intimidating has been a mainstay of horror since the genre's origins, but there is something even more inherently creepy about a children's game. Given that most people have played games like Marco Polo before, it's very easy to identify with the characters on the screen, especially when the game is played at night in a dark pool with decidedly unreliable lighting, as happens in Night Swim.

Daniel Le Domas looking downwards in Ready or Not.

Night Swim may be the latest film to use a children's game for chills, but it is far from the first. Blumhouse has used the concept multiple times in the last decade, to varying degrees of effectiveness. For example, 2018's Truth or Dare was not well-received by critics, but it does a good job of elevating the party game into something more sinister. The Escape Room franchise that originated in 2019 also takes a simple, fun activity for kids and makes it a matter of life and death. Back in 2012, Would You Rather took a simple children's question game and made it a bloody mess based on torture.

Deborah Ann Woll Escape Room

The Evolution of a Popular Horror Trope: Children's Games Turned Scary

One of the most successful examples of the last few years is Ready or Not, a horror comedy masterpiece that takes the basic concept of Hide and Seek and turns it into a bloody battle for survival. There is simply something unsettling about watching something typically played by children perverted into something horrifying. Night Swim is at its best when using Marco Polo as a mechanism for its evil entity to torment its characters.

Truth or Dare Lucy Hale