‘Night Swim’ movie is born from Tampa Bay childhood fears

Not long after watching “Jaws” for the first time, Bryce McGuire, then 10, was enjoying a night swim at the home of his grandparents in Tampa. Then a younger brother turned off the exterior lights to scare him.

“Rationally, I knew there was no shark,” said McGuire, now 36. “But I do remember being terrified that there was something else in the pool that I couldn’t see.”

He’s transferred that fear onto the big screen through the horror movie “Night Swim,” which McGuire wrote and directed about a pool with a demonic presence.

It premieres in theaters nationwide on Friday

Starring Wyatt Russell and Academy Award-nominated Kerry Condon, the film, according to distributor Universal Pictures, follows “a former major league baseball player, forced into early retirement with a degenerative illness, who moves into a new home ... with a shimmering backyard swimming pool ... But a dark secret in the home’s past will unleash a malevolent force that will drag the family under, into the depths of inescapable terror.”

Its producers are James Wan from the “Saw,” “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” franchises, and Jason Blum of the “Halloween” films, “The Black Phone” and “The Invisible Man.”

“Some of your best memories probably took place around the pool,” said McGuire, who was raised in the St. Petersburg area and now lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “It represents the American dream. It represents status. Everyone wants to be the pool family. That could turn on you. Your defenses go down and it could be hiding something terrible.”

McGuire’s family lived in a home with a pool for a few years. The pool at his grandparents’ home was always a childhood option.

“In Florida, if you don’t have a pool, someone else has got to have a pool,” he said. “You’re constantly in the water. I grew up fishing. I grew up surfing. I grew up swimming. I’ve always had water on the brain.”

Filmmaking has been a passion since his days at Seminole’s Keswick Christian School, where a 10th grade English teacher introduced the class to movies from directors like Wes Anderson and Sophia Coppola.

“Cinephile stuff that I would have never been exposed to if not for him,” McGuire said. “Everyone’s got that person in life to show them the cool music, books and movies.” And when McGuire asked to make a short film rather than write an essay, the teacher said yes. “It lit a fire under me and inspired me to pursue that as a career.”

It was next off to study film, first at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee, and then at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

The concept behind “Night Swim” was born in 2014 through McGuire’s short film of the same name.

The four-minute movie, shot at musician Michelle Branch’s home, is simple. A young woman taking a night swim sees someone looking down on her while she is underwater, but no one is there when she resurfaces. Then, a monstrous looking girl approaches, the lights go out, and something yanks the woman underwater.

“We put it on the internet, and it turns out that we were not alone in our irrational fear,” McGuire said. “Hundreds of thousands of people also were like, ‘Oh my God, that’s my worst nightmare.’”

McGuire got that film into Wan’s hands six years ago, and he too was scared.

“He was swimming in his pool at night, looking over his shoulder ... and felt like he saw a figure kind of standing at the edge of the pool looking down at him,” McGuire said. “When you scared James Wan, you know something has gone right ... We then teamed up and eventually developed the script and that led us to Jason Blum ... and then to Universal Studios.”

Next up for McGuire is another water-centric movie that he wrote and will direct. Titled “Bad Bloom” and starring Vera Farmiga, according to IMDB.com, “the horror fairytale will portray a family living in isolation on a remote island to keep an unknown creature at bay.”

“We’re not sure where that’s going to end up shooting,” McGuire said. “But it’s set in Florida.”

Meanwhile, his two sons, 5 and 8, are growing up in a house without a pool, but the family does rent vacation homes with them.

“The kids won’t see the movie for another five to eight years,” McGuire laughed. “I figure enjoy pools while they can before I ruin it forever.”